Page 99 of Confounding Oaths
“No, no, I am quite aware of the dissimilarities between us. I am from the country, you are from the streets. I paid for my place, you won yours. You are a captain, I am a lieutenant. And your skin, of course, is darker than mine.” His tone was conversational, almost breezy. “Still, I am more of your sort, I think, than the major’s.”
“How’d you figure that?”
The lieutenant’s smile grew cold. “Because neither of us are fools.”
Another lull, time enough for me to check on the hall (still nothing, the fairy dance still playing; it would be last dance of the first set, just in time for the queen to make her entrance).
“What do you want with Anne?” asked Captain James, forcefully changing the subject.
“You know what I want with her.”
“I might, but I don’t think I’ll believe it unless I hear you say it aloud.”
The lieutenant let that hang awhile, then leaned forwards, almost conspiratorial. “I want her blood. She’s the highest-born virgin that the fewest people will miss.”
At this, Captain James nodded thoughtfully. “You’re right,” he said. “You’re not a fool. You’re just a murdering bastard.”
“We’re both murdering bastards, Orestes. May I call you Orestes?”
The captain sneered. “Fuck off.”
“I’ll take that as a yes. But you and I both know that war is a murdering business.”
Another silence. Back in the hall, a clock was close to chiming midnight.
“Not like this,” the captain replied.
“Exactlylike this. Are you aware of the name of my order?”
From the way he shrugged, Captain James could not conceivably have cared less. “Cult of Something? Servants of Somebody?”
“We call ourselves the Iphigenians.”
The captain looked blank.
And the lieutenant laughed. “Sorry, it never occurred to me that a man named Orestes wouldn’tknow.”
“Know what?”
“Just as the Greeks were making war on Troy, it so happened that Agamemnon slew a deer in a grove sacred to Artemis. In punishment, she stilled the winds so their fleets could not sail.”
“Sounds like Artemis could have saved a whole lot of pointless death.”
That earned half a nod from the lieutenant. “It seems the godsratherlikepointless death. To return the winds, Artemis demanded that Agamemnon sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. Sources are rather varied on whether she went to her death willingly, but it is a lesson that my order learned well.”
“We don’t sacrifice people in this country. Haven’t for centuries.”
“Quite right.” Lieutenant Reyne nodded. “To sacrifice a human being to a god is accounted a terrible crime by all the laws of England. But Orestes, what do we do in war that wouldnotbe accounted a terrible crime, were it to happen in peacetime?”
Captain James thought about that. “The waiting,” he said, “and the digging. And the walking. Which makes up most of it in my experience.”
“And the killing?”
“Some of that as well. I’m not saying all of it’s right, but there’s times when it’s needed. There’s rules and you stand by them. Soldiering is soldiering and murdering is murdering. I’ll not pretend they’re the same just to sound clever.”
A melancholy chuckle escaped the lieutenant’s throat. “How little you must think of me.”
“Telling a man you want to cut an innocent girl’s throat will do that.”
