[ Torvald ]
Day five. Day off. The first genuine, unstructured, no-one-is-telling-me-what-to-do day I'd had since… actually, I wasn't sure I'd ever had one. The garrison had rest days, but rest days at the Shield meant "you don't have to train but you still have duties and the duties are cleaning and the cleaning is sand and the sand is infinite."
Here? Here there was a RIVER.
An actual river. With actual water. Moving water that wasn't in a well or a basin or a cup that was being rationed. Water that went somewhere — downstream, toward the coast, toward an ocean I'd never seen and probably never would but that I liked knowing existed because the existence of oceans meant the world had more to offer than sand.
"We're swimming," I announced.
"We don't have permission to—" Marten started.
"We have a DAY OFF. Day off means OFF. Off means the absence of duty. The absence of duty means the presence of river. This is logic, Marten. I am being logical."
"You're being loud."
"Loudly logical. The best kind."
We found a spot downstream from the docks — a bend in the river where the bank sloped gently and the water was shallow enough near the edge to stand in and deep enough in the middle to actually swim. Local kids were already there — five or six of them, brown and wet and screaming with the specific joy that only children near water could produce.
I took off my boots. My feet — pale, blistered, shaped by eight months of garrison boots — looked like things that had been stored in a basement and forgotten. I wiggled my toes. They seemed surprised to see sunlight.
"In," I said, and went in.
The water was cold. Not desert-well cold — river cold. The kind of cold that was alive, that moved against your skin, that carried temperature from somewhere upstream and delivered it personally to every part of your body simultaneously. I made a sound. The sound was not dignified. The sound was the noise a large boy makes when cold water reaches parts of him that have been warm for eight months.
"TORVALD—" Marten was on the bank, laughing. Actually laughing, with his whole face, the way he did sometimes when something caught him off guard and the seriousness that he carried — the stable boy seriousness, the pending soldier seriousness — cracked open and the twelve-year-old underneath came out.
"Get IN here," I said. "That's an order."
"You can't give orders. You're the same rank as me."
"I'm TALLER. Tall is a rank. Get in."
He got in. Dek followed — cautiously, testing the water with one foot, then the other, then wading in with the careful deliberation of a boy who approached all new experiences as problems to be solved rather than things to be enjoyed. By the time he was waist-deep, he had assessed the current, the depth, the water temperature, and the structural integrity of the riverbed.
"It's fine," he said.
"It's AMAZING," I corrected.
"It's fine."
"Dek. We are standing in a RIVER. We have not stood in water deeper than a basin in EIGHT MONTHS. This is not fine. This is transcendent."
"It's wet. Wet is the baseline requirement for water. I'm not going to congratulate water for being wet."
Kess was on the bank. Sitting. Boots off, feet in the water, but not swimming. Watching us with the expression of a person observing a nature documentary — interested, detached, mildly entertained by the behaviour of the subjects.
"Kess!" I called. "Come in!"
"No."
"The water's perfect!"
"No."
"It's—"
"No."
Three nos. That was final. Kess's nos were not negotiable. They were delivered with the quiet certainty of natural law — gravity said down, Kess said no, and arguing with either was an exercise in humiliation.
The local kids swam around us. One of them — a boy of maybe eight, missing two teeth and approximately forty percent of his fear response — swam up to me and said: "You're big."
"I know."
"Are you a soldier?"
"I'm a recruit."
"What's a recruit?"
"A soldier who hasn't finished yet."
He considered this. "Like a cake that's still baking?"
"…Yes. Exactly like that."
"You look like a big cake."
He swam away. Marten was underwater. Dek was floating on his back, staring at the sky with the specific, peaceful expression of a boy who had found, temporarily, a place where his grandmother's voice was quiet and his own thoughts were enough.
I floated. The current held me. The sun was warm. The sky was blue — not the flat, aggressive, desert blue but a softer version, filtered through actual clouds that existed because the air here had moisture in it and moisture meant weather and weather meant the world was doing something other than being hot.
For an hour — one hour, sixty minutes, the length of time it took the sun to move one fist-width across the sky — I was not a recruit. I was not a tanner's son. I was not the loud one, the big one, the one who talked too much and dreamed about spiders and couldn't keep his boot laces tied.
I was just a boy in a river. And it was enough.