Fire Emblem Fan Fiction ❯ Fire Emblem Tellius Saga: Book 1 ❯ CHAPTER 12: SELL-SWORDS ( Chapter 12 )

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]

Greil insisted he train rigorously before participating in a job, and several frustrating weeks crawled by. Soren had mixed feelings about the prospect of fighting, the potential of killing another person again, and of course the possibility of being maimed or killed himself. But he wanted to get it over with. He just wanted to start.  

“It’s not that I don’t trust your skills as a mage,” Greil explained, when Soren asked when he would be assigned his first mission, “But I know you’ve never fought with a team before. You have to know them, and they have to know you.” Soren thought arguing would appear childish, so he merely nodded and returned to the practice grounds.

Each day he sparred with the other mercenaries on a rotational basis, which meant blunting his wind spells so he wouldn’t injure them. In return, they attacked him with wooden poles and bats. Eventually Soren graduated to real weaponry, and he had to avoid the sharp blades and deadly points or he would have more than a bruise to remember the lesson by.

With food, sleep, and a wealth of teachers, Soren steadily grew stronger and improved his ability to evade their attacks. At the same time, he inadvertently learned exactly what Greil wanted him to. He developed a subconscious understanding of each the mercenaries’ physical abilities and unique style. He learned the reach of their arms, the quickness of their steps, and how their eyes moved when they were about to attack or defend.

“Now that you know them as opponents, you can be a better ally,” Greil explained one day, two months after Soren’s arrival. “If you see a vulnerability, you make up for it. You see a gap in their defense, you fill it. You see a blind spot, you watch it. They’ll do the same for you.” 

“Does that mean I am to be their ally now?” he asked pointedly.

“We’ve been offered a job nearby—bandits, the usual. Nothing too complicated. Titania will lead you. I’m assigning this to Oscar and Boyd as well,” he said with finality. “Be ready to head out in a quarter hour.”

Soren set off to prepare, and Ike ran after him. Now that the moment was finally here, he was a little nervous. Ike seemed to pick up on this.

“I heard Father!” he said excitedly. “Your first mission! How do you feel?”

“My feelings are irrelevant.”

“That scared, huh?” Ike teased.

“The commander said it is a simple job,” Soren returned. “You needn’t wring your hands at the window.” Reminding Ike that he was still not allowed on missions was the best insult he could offer.

Ike pouted to play along, but Soren knew he wasn’t actually offended. “Well, save some bandits for me,” he finally said, “when I’m old enough to fight too.”

“They are not disappearing any time soon,” Soren offered in pessimistic comfort. “A mercenary’s work is never finished. There’s always someone to kill—and someone else to pay for it.”

Ike raised a finger pedantically. “I think you mean someone to save.”

“Listen to those whelps pretending they’re philosophers,” Shinon sneered to Gatrie, having overheard the conversation from a bend in the hall.

Ike stopped to glare at him, but Soren kept walking. He and Shinon would butt heads, as usual, and Gatrie would laugh at their antics. But Soren had to pack water, hardtack, and his wind tome before leaving. He felt less nervous now that he’d spoken to Ike, even though he wasn’t quite sure why.

 

A young boy led them to his village, where bandits had been seizing livestock for over a week. Titania and Oscar were both riding, with the boy sitting in front of Titania in the saddle, but Soren and Boyd were forced to walk alongside.

After a couple hours’ march, they finally arrived and Titania met with the village headman. The boy (who happened to be the headman’s son) stayed outside with the rest, and Soren was relieved he only stared at his forehead half as much as he stared at Boyd’s axes and Oscar’s armor.

When Titania emerged, she led Soren, Oscar, and Boyd around town, searching for men and women matching the headman’s description. Eventually they found a burley drunkard snoring in someone’s hay pile. He had designs drawn in pig’s blood on his face and arms, which were apparently symbols of this particular bandit clan. Titania woke him with a broken nose courtesy of the butt of her poleax, and amid his slurry cursing, she dragged him off the pile and cornered him against the barn.

Oscar drew his lance while holding his and Titania’s reigns. Boyd had a hatchet in each hand, and Soren had his wind tome open. He did not think he seemed particularly intimidating, but as a group they clearly dissuaded this man from fighting back.

“Your camp,” Titania declared with a terrifying grin, “You’re going to show us where it is.”

The booze-addled bandit led them into the woods with his hands bound behind his back and the end of the rope in Titania’s fist. She and Oscar were riding now, and she whispered down from her saddle: “Boyd, Soren, fall back a bit. Keep your eyes and ears out. They’ll have sentries even if this scoundrel doesn’t try to give us away.” She flicked the rope meaningfully, and the man winced.

Before long, their prisoner slowed and started to glance around more feverishly. The forest was oddly quiet, and Soren knew there were people among the trees even if he couldn’t see them.

A twig snapped, and Titania shouted: “They’re here!” Dropping the rope, she kicked her steed into a trot and rounded in a circle. The horse easily wound between the trunks even though Titania was only steering it with her knees. Her hands were occupied by her long poleaxe, which she swept back and forth, cutting down the bandits who’d hardly had a chance to jump from their hiding places.

Oscar had peeled off in an opposite arc and was stabbing his lance into just as many bandits on his side. Soren realized they were working together to protect their two less-experienced comrades from the ambush. 

Boyd stomped up to the first bandit Oscar left for him and lost no time trading blows with the man. He was laughing, and his voice was cracking as he egged them on. The strength of his arms matched his confidence, and he had no problem striking—and killing—his opponents, despite his age. 

Soren didn’t want to be useless, so he fixed his eyes on another bandit behind Boyd and began incanting: “*Spirits of wind, slash the flesh before me.*”

The bandit was a woman—middle-aged, worn with scars, wrinkles, and saggy flesh that might have once been well-fed but now looked gray under the pig’s-blood swirls. She stood tall while raising and aiming her bow at Boyd. For a split second, Soren wondered what had led her to this life.

But he didn’t really care about the answer, and he unleashed the spell before she could release the string. The winds whipped toward her, sharpened, and sliced through her forearm and wrist. The force wrenched her entire arm to the side, making her shoot the ground and drop the bow. She yelped in pain and surprise, and her confusion left her open. Oscar spun his lance while he cantered by, cutting her across the face and breaking her neck.

Over the next few minutes, Soren delivered five more spells into the bodies of his opponents. None of the attacks produced fatal wounds, but Boyd finished off two of them, Oscar another, and the third gave up and ran away. By this time, the battle had spilled into the nearby clearing where the bandits had made their camp.

Most had been eliminated by now, and those who survived were fleeing. The greedier ones tried to grab items from the campsite before they ran, and this cost them their lives.

“Let the rest go,” Titania ordered, when she deemed the job was done. She dismounted to inspect the general disarray of the camp. Finding a single live chicken clucking anxiously amid the carnage, she tucked it under her arm. “Let’s report back to the village.”

With that, Soren realized he’d survived his first job as a mercenary. The only injuries he could possibly complain about were a bruise on his arm and a slight ache in his ankle from when he’d rolled it stepping over a large root. The entire fight had passed much more quickly than expected, and during the battle itself, he’d not had the time or presence of mind to contemplate his actions. He had merely acted. He hadn’t killed anyone like he had Gorgov, but then again, Gorgov hadn’t been wearing leather armor.

“You good?” Boyd asked, clasping Soren’s shoulder.

The familiar gesture was like an electric shock, and Soren immediately pulled away. “Perfect,” he answered icily. He fell in line behind Oscar’s horse while the four picked their way through the trees, around the bodies, and back to the village. Soren glanced down at the faces of the corpses and found that dead bodies didn’t bother him anymore. That was probably a good thing, if he was going to be a mercenary.

 

“So then what happened?” Ike asked eagerly.

“We met with the headman,” Soren answered, “who paid less than half the company’s going price and promised to make up the difference at the end of the harvest.” Thinking a moment, he added, “And Titania was allowed to keep the hen she saved.”

Ike laughed as if that were a joke. “Oh, I can’t wait until I can go on missions!”

“Has the Commander given any indication of when that will be?” Soren asked, although he wasn’t sure he wanted his friend to join him on the battlefield.

“No,” Ike pouted, crossing his arms. “But Boyd was my age when he started!”

“I do not suggest you follow in Boyd’s footsteps,” Soren advised, recalling the story of how the preteen had run away from the fort in order to follow his brother on a job, leaping into battle although it had been forbidden. “I am sure Greil would not humor such antics a second time.”

Ike sighed resignedly. “Yeah, he’d never let me get away with that.” 

“Your time will come,” Soren offered, although he didn’t know why he was consoling him.

Ike flashed a grin. “Until then, you have to tell me everything about your missions, alright?”

“I suppose I could do that,” Soren agreed.

 

The day after next, Greil assigned Soren another job, and work was fairly steady after that. Some contracts could be resolved in a day, others required more extensive travel, and still others involved several days or even weeks of work. Occasionally Greil would accept large jobs that required everyone to participate—except Ike, Mist, and Rolf, who were left at the base alone, sometimes for days at a time.

But more often than not, the jobs were small and local. Greil divided their fighting force and only sent who he deemed necessarily. Sometimes he and Titania took well-paying jobs by themselves, or sometimes he would lead Shinon and Gatrie on one mission while Titania, Soren, Rhys, Oscar, and Boyd tackled a separate one at the same time. Most of their clients were poor, but Greil allowed them to pay with whatever they could afford to give and accepted every copper piece as if it were a precious jewel.

 

Soren slowly adjusted to life with the mercenaries. He used his wages to buy new clothes and shoes and took care to present himself as an adult mercenary rather than a homeless child.

That being said, his memories of living like a wild creature would never leave him. Somedays a smell or sound would trigger them: a perfume worn by someone who’d hit him, the medicinal scent of someone’s home he stolen from, the bay of a hunter’s dog on the trail of a deer, the clatter of a horse’s hooves suddenly quickening on the road behind him.

Each time this happened, Soren would make an excuse to distance himself from the others until he could calm down. He didn’t want anyone to realize his weakness, and he made the conscious effort to integrate the desperate vagrant he’d been with the professional mercenary he was now. As time went by, this became easier.

 

When not assigned to a particular job, Soren kept himself busy. He trained alongside the others and continued to develop his skill and power as a wind mage. He experimented with new techniques in hand-to-hand combat and simulated different types of traps and ambushes. He brainstormed ways to locate and infiltrate bandit camps and devised other strategies he thought could be useful. On the rare occasions that one of these plans became relevant to a mission, he shared his ideas with Greil and Titania. He was nervous at first, well aware that these experienced warriors may consider his thoughts trivial. But to Soren’s surprise, they always listened and were often willing to employ his strategies, sometimes adding alterations based on their own wealth of experience. 

When Greil discovered Soren was giving Ike objective, detailed accounts after every battle, he asked him to begin writing the official reports. Rhys showed Soren where in the library the documents were kept, and he skimmed through a year’s worth of Greil and Titania’s scrawl. Greil’s reports were often incomplete, as if he’d become distracted halfway through (or sometimes after only writing the date and first couple words), and Titania’s were overly emotional and written in flowery language, as if reliving the battle in her mind had possessed her to write with the tongue of a bard.

Soren applied himself to this new task with zeal, composing complete, factual accounts of each mission and the battle or battles contained therein. As an added measure, he began recording the costs associated with each mission compared to what was earned. When Greil noticed this, he began enlisting his help with managing the company’s finances, and Soren made sure the company did not go too long without paying their outstanding bills in Arbor, where they purchased much of their supplies on credit.

In exchange for these managerial tasks, Soren received an alteration to his contract and an increase of his wage to two and a half shares. Greil paid the mercenaries within a week or two of each job, and Soren took comfort in the regular payments. He saved his coins diligently, never going into town to indulge in frivolous expenses like the others. When he had finally saved enough, he purchased a new spell book. It was a large, beautifully bound volume with crisp pages and leather-bound covers. The leather had been died the color of moss, and the word “Wind” was engraved in the ancient language on the front.

The vast majority of the spells were basic Wind incantations—the ones most often used in combat and the ones he was most accustomed to. But there was also a section of more advanced Elwind spells he could practice with, and there were even a few Fire and Thunder spells tucked in the back.

On the day he purchased the tome, Soren tried the Fire and Thunder incantations with very little success. He could hardly make a spark with either of them. Ike laughed when he saw the little puff of smoke or the tiny blue zap each attempt produced, and Soren grew frustrated. Even as a child, he’d been able to conduct a simple Wind spell after only a couple tries, but it appeared his natural talent only applied to the air element.

“You’ll get it,” Ike consoled when he noticed Soren didn’t consider his failure nearly as humorous. “It will just take practice. In the meantime you always have your wind spells, right?”

Soren gave a resigned nod. “It can take decades of diligent training to master all three elements and become a sage.”

 Ike cocked his head and grinned. “So you’ll probably do it in, what, a couple years?”

Soren was flattered by the compliment, but he didn’t want Ike to see the pleasure such an inane comment gave him. “Time will tell,” he said coolly.

 

Months slipped by, and before Soren knew it, he’d spent two and a half years with the mercenaries—the longest he’d stayed in the same place or with the same people since his apprenticeship to Sileas.

The longest night of the year had passed exactly one week ago, and most of the mercenaries had gone into town to take part in solstice activities. But the holiday had meant nothing to Soren, to whom today was far more important. Long ago, shivering in Galina’s attic, looking at the stars through a hole in the roof, Soren had decided to declare himself four years old. He’d considered this day his birthday every year since, as a measure against the passage of time.

Now he was sixteen years old, but he didn’t share this fact with his comrades. If he did, perhaps Oscar would bake him a cake or Mist knit him a scarf. But Soren did not want such gifts, and neither did he want anyone to think too hard about his age.

The problem was he didn’t look sixteen. Sitting in up in bed, Soren crossed his arms over his knees and stared at the scratches on the opposite wall. He’d been carving his height into the stones behind the door every month since coming here. What had begun as slow yet steady progress had stagnated for over twelve months. He’d always been short; he wasn’t embarrassed by that fact. He could accept that some people simply were.

But watching Ike and Boyd mature, something felt wrong. Tearing his eyes away from the wall, he touched his throat. His voice hadn’t deepened as much as the other boys’, and his larynx wasn’t as pronounced. He didn’t own a razor, and he was far from needing one. Even his skin was clearer, and he didn’t think it was entirely due to his superior hygiene. Soren imagined puberty had come only to abandon him before completing the job. He was no child, but he looked like no man—not even a budding one like Ike.

Soren’s had never cared about appearing particularly masculine; neither did he aspire to virility. He didn’t care what women thought of him (and perhaps that was a separate cause for alarm). He hated being treated like a child, but that wasn’t the problem either. What bothered him most about his current condition was his fear that it made him appear less human, or even worse, that it might indicate he truly was less than human.

He only entertained such a possibility in his darkest moments, and at times like these, he recalled a book he’d found back in Temple Asic’s library. It had been a catalogue of curses and cursed creatures, those acknowledged by the theocracy and those relegated to folklore. Inside he’d found an entry for ‘Branded’.

It meant just what Greil had claimed—the spawn of human and subhuman—and evidently, one of the defining characteristics was infantilism. According to the book, these creatures could take on the visage of children for a decade or more, using their innocent appearances to trick devout people into nurturing evil. By using a child’s face, the demon could worm its way into the heart of civilization and unleash calamity—for a Branded always brought death and destruction in its wake. At the time, Soren hadn’t taken the book seriously (especially considering that it had included entries for all manner of fairytale creatures he knew to be fictitious.) But he never could forget it either.

Since he’d become a mercenary, no one called him a Branded anymore. No one called him cursed, demon, or monster. No one turned him away from their businesses or chased him off their property. No one tried to steal from him, arrest him, use him, abuse him, or humiliate him. People saw him as a mercenary and recognized him as a mage. He’d finally carved out an existence in this world.

And yet the word Branded echoed in his mind without anyone having said it. It was the question he couldn’t help but ask himself when alone in the dark: Branded? Could I be… Could I really be…Branded? He knew he wasn’t a Spirit Charmer, so what did that leave him?  

A knock sounded on his door, startling him out of his thoughts. His head had fallen back and he’d staring at the ceiling again, but now it jerked up.

“Hey, Soren, you in there?” called Ike’s voice.

“Come in.” Soren swung his legs over the side of the bed. The door opened to block the scratches on the wall, which was for the best.

Ike stepped inside and leaned against the doorframe. “Gosh, Soren,” he said, glancing around. “You really need to do something with your room. I mean it looks exactly like it did the day you moved in!”

“I am not about my waste my wages on décor, or worse—” Soren sniffed in disgust “— collectables.”

Ike snickered, and Soren wondered why he always seemed to think he was trying to be funny.

“Did you need something? Or did you merely come to critique my skills as a homemaker?”

This also made Ike grin as if having heard a good joke. “Yeah,” he answered, “Titania wants you down in the yard. She’s getting a group together for a tracking job: her, Shinon, and you if you’re up for it.”

Titania and Shinon could be a nasty pairing, and Soren was not looking forward having to listen to them criticize each other nonstop on a lengthy tracking mission. But it couldn’t be helped. “I’m coming,” he replied, promptly retrieving his wind tome from the bedside table.

“She says she’s sorry it’s late. The job just came in, and I guess she wants to get started before the trail gets any colder.”

“I don’t mind,” Soren assured and followed him out. In truth, Ike had brought a welcome distraction. He would much rather spend the final hours of his fake birthday on a mission than lying in bed worrying about his stunted growth.

 

In the following weeks, even when his birthday was long behind him, his fears and questions would not fade away. He didn’t want to leave the Greil Mercenaries, but he found himself wishing he could go somewhere to find answers. He wanted to go to Melior.

He and the capital city hadn’t parted on good terms back when Soren had been rejected by both an esteemed academy and a seedy gang, and yet it was probably the only place in all of Crimea that would have the resources he needed. He’d already read his way through most of the books in Greil’s modest collection, and there was nothing he could buy in Arbor that would give him real information on the Branded. But he wanted to understand them—in order to prove once and for all that he was not one of them—and to do that, he would have to go to the Royal Library of Crimea. The challenge was finding an excuse to get himself there.

This past year, two of the mercenaries had taken a paid leave of absence: Boyd and Rhys. Boyd had trained in the mountains with a self-proclaimed ‘berserker’ known for teaching his style to a select group of students. Rhys had taken a similar furlough to continue his study of stave healing and light magic. He’d attended a temple in a nearby city, and Greil had covered the expense. However, Boyd had ended his apprenticeship after only a couple months upon hearing Rolf was sick with a bad case of the flu. He’d rushed home, and even after Rolf had recovered, he didn’t leave again. Rhys had also given up his studies, after discovering he didn’t have the constitution to remained secluded in the temple compound, unable to visit his family. These sabbaticals may have been largely failures, but they did set a precedent.

Eventually Soren worked up the courage to approach Greil with a proposition of his own: he would study magic and strategy for four months with the Mercenaries of Fayre, a large group stationed just outside Melior. Greil was surprisingly amenable to the proposal and promised to reach out to the commander of the Fayre Mercenaries as soon as possible. Soren didn’t like lying to him, but it was necessary. And if Greil realized Soren had ulterior motives, he didn’t show it.

Now he just had to wait and hope the other company would accept him as a temporary hire. As the weeks ticked by, Soren found he grew increasingly attached to this plan, and he feared the proposal would be rejected.

But finally the return letter arrived, and to his relief, the Fayre commander had agreed. Soren packed a bag and bid farewell to Ike and the others. He felt a twinge of sadness at leaving his friend again, but he promised himself it wouldn’t be forever.

“Train hard. Learn everything you can, and come back to us,” Ike said, firmly clasping his forearm in a way that Soren only allowed him to do.

“I will.” Soren squeezed back. “But you should heed your own advice. Perhaps then Greil would actually let you in the field.”

Ike released his arm and frowned. “I do train hard! And anyway, it’s not a matter of more practice. I’m ready.”

“Hm, just keep telling yourself that,” Soren replied, and without another word of banter, he set his feet on the path leaving the fort. He knew Ike and the others were still waving him off, but he resisted the urge to look back.