Page 114 of Confounding Oaths
Acutely aware that he had no idea what he was doing, Mr. Caesar did his best to bind a dressing over the captain’s wound, still deeply concerned at how much it was bleeding. “Are you not worried about infection?”
“Broad and shallow,” Captain James replied. Which, yes, contradicts my narration, but who are you going to believe? Anall-seeing fairy or a man who wishes to reassure his lover? “There’s a reason we don’t make bayonets from glass. It’ll stay clean enough. Besides, I heal fast.”
Not entirely convinced, Mr. Caesar finished the job as well as he could. When the captain lay down, he lay beside him, keeping a cautious distance but playing his fingertips over the man’s arm. “Penny for your thoughts.”
“Not sure they’re worth that much,” Captain James replied. “Not sure I’m thinking so much as …”
“So much as what?”
“Wondering.”
That was no answer at all. “Wonderingwhat?”
“Suppose it had gone worse.”
“You mean suppose we’d lost somebody.” Mr. Caesar’s hand grew still and his mouth grew dry. “One of the men?”
Captain James nodded. “Yeah.”
It would have been false to suggest that Mr. Caesar had never considered the possibility, but he didn’t quite want to think it through to its end. “If you’re asking whether I’d have thought it was worth it … whether I’d have traded one of your people for my sister.”
“I think I might be asking exactly that.”
“In a heartbeat,” Mr. Caesar admitted. “I’m sorry, Orestes. I—whatever Jackson says, I would spare your men harm if I could—but we’re talking about mysister.”
“And my brothers. Brothers I took into the fire for you.”
Mr. Caesar shifted his weight, conscious all at once that they were, yet again, in his house, on his bed, on his terms. “You said you’d do the same for anyone.”
“I would. But”—he shook his head—“I don’t know. Sometimes I worry you’ve made me forget where I’m from.”
Mr. Caesar looked over at the captain, who might still have been dressed as a fairy-tale prince but who looked, in his eyes at least, every inch the soldier. “I don’t think there’s much danger of that.”
Raising a hand to his chest, Captain James traced the outline of his most recent wound. “You know what Reyne told me?”
“Does it matter? Whatever he said you stopped him. You kept Anne safe tonight.”
“He told me it was for them. For the regiments.”
“And you believed him?”
The captain was still looking grave. “He said one girl’s life could save a company. And I’m not even sure he was wrong.”
“You don’t think he was wrong to want tomurder my sister? Or me, for that matter.”
There were some questions you absolutely did not want your lover to hesitate in answering and this was one of them. “I don’t know,” the captain said at last. “Maybe he’s full of shit. But he sounded like he meant it and I—I knewwhathe meant.”
“What did he mean?” asked Mr. Caesar, suddenly tense and more than a little concerned.
“I’m not a scholar,” the captain evaded, “Kumar could probably put it in prettier words. I just know that when it comes down to it, when you’re there, on the battlefield, and all you can smell is powder and all you can see is smoke and all you can hear is the shot and the cannon and the drums so they all wind up one sound in your head—when you’rethere,there’s only one thing you’re really fighting for.”
Havering between alienation and empathy, Mr. Caesar wasn’t quite sure what to say. “I assume you don’t mean the king?”
“You fight for each other,” said the captain, talking to nobody in particular now. “You’ve got no quarrel with Napoleon, not really.In a different world you’d share a drink with a Frenchman without a second thought. But still you do your part because if you don’t, another man’ll have to do it for you. A man you’ve lived and marched and fought beside for a month or a year. And who might die because of you if you’re not where you’re meant to be and doing what you’re meant to do.”
The profession of arms had never called to Mr. Caesar and he had never once considered taking up a commission. And he would have gone to his grave never once regretting that choice were it not for how distant it made him feel in that moment.
“I’m not about to start slitting throats for Mars,” the captain went on, not totally reassuringly. “But I can’t shake the feeling that I chose your family over mine. And while Reyne’s a shit, that’s one line I’m sure he’ll never cross.”
