The unforgiving grey slate of the weather may do the roads out of Kirkwall no favors, but it is fine air for sailing in so long as one dresses for the cold cut of the wind.
In deference to it, Flint wears both a sturdy pair of gloves and the fur lined collar of his winter-heavy coat turned high as the skiff shears along across dark and weather beaten waters. They are going East. The wind is blowing well for it and even with its heavy metal centerboard the small craft's draw is shallow enough that it will be some time before there is any question of tricky navigation ahead of them. Kirkwall, and the channels which surround it, were made for trapping heavy merchant ships and fighting vessels; not for inconveniencing fishermen and other inconsequential craft like the one in which they ride.
If anything, it is the wind rather than the waterway which is their enemy. It comes in gusts and starts, demanding they sail at broad points rather than close hauled where a change in the weather gauge might knock them flat aback and tumble them over. It's the spirited sort of sailing which demands they both ride the same side of the boat, one foot set against the opposing bench to keep steady against the craft's hard heel.
The tiller is quiet under his hand though, pleasantly true. And there is a rhythm to the working of lines which allows for conversation even despite the gusting--the keen of the wind over the sail and line.
"Would you like to discuss Antiva," he asks her. And, in a different and infinitely more particular staccato: "Take in your portside sheet. Another two inches."
She's done this once before, but only once. Her hand finds the sheet, with a glance back at Flint to confirm, and she pulls the rope in a few inches and recleats it the way she'd been shown.
It isn't a quick, practiced movement on its own, and it's only further hampered by the chill. Madi has taken to over-dressing when in doubt of how best to dress for any given weather, but even in her winter traveling garb she can feel the bite of the cold gusts of wind and the spray from the water makes her squint as much as the sun ever could. She turns the squint back towards Flint, raising her voice just loud enough to be heard — which doesn't take much, they aren't a whole ship's length away or anything.
"It sounds like you would like to," she says, a smile tucked neatly in the corner of her mouth. "I do not have any plans as yet, if that is what concerns you."
Concerned? Him? Please, he hardly knows the word's meaning.
—wordlessly quips the rise and subsequent fall of his eyebrows as his hand, steady on the boat's tiller, makes some minor adjustment in keeping with the sail's setting so that when next the wind flutters about them, gusts first pulling then pushing, they cut a line through it which is more or less direct. Maker, Waking Sea fishermen must be made of stern stuff.
"We might talk about the weather if you'd prefer. There's plenty of it."
Caught in what appears to be a rare moment of Not actively in the middle of something extremely pressing, Flint slouched in one of the chair in front of the fire marks the page of the open book in his lap with a page from a stack of papers.
He does not remove his boot from where it's hooked by the heel on a low footstool.
Note to self: reading breaks behind locked doors or in unsuspecting broom closets exclusively from now on. But sure, Barrow. You have his attention.
Poor thing. Barrow knows that look, and makes a mental note to waste as little of the man's time as possible.
"Just had a thought the other day," he says pleasantly, "as you're the head of Forces and all, might be nice to have a little face time with the recruits, so they know whose orders they're carrying out. You know?"
If once there were orchards which grew towards the walls of Val Chevin, there is little evidence of them now. The land surrounding the city has been victim to industrious clear cutting during the initial occupation and now, in the intervening months since the break of the Tevinter-Anderfels line, allowed to grow over with stumpy grass and wildflowers seeing their first ever bloom here in the first gleamings of Springtime. Fields changed to meadows, a strange strip of youthful green pockmarked with stumps forming the no man's land between patrolled city fortifications and the dug in front line of the Orlesian army.
Anyway, it makes for a fine place to sit in the late afternoon now that they've slipped the leash of the estimable Capitaine Remetter.
The sun is at their backs. Theoretically, makes it difficult for any guardsman along the walls to sight them. Candidly, Flint has his doubts that it really fucking matters. They're beyond the range of crossbows and the city must be used to a certain level of being under observation.
From where he sits on a stump with one leg stretched before him in the grass turned brilliant gold by the late afternoon, Flint studies the city just a moment longer through the lens of a battered old spyglass. At this distance (or because it has been too long and he is no longer familiar with all the colors and heraldry), he can't parse whose banners are flying over the city.
He lowers the glass from his eye, but neither looks away from Val Chevin or to his companion though he addresses him plainly enough:
There's a fallen log, perhaps from the very severed roots that serve as Flint's seat now, that's been left so long to molder that where the earth ends and the bottom of the wood begins is now lost — or at least buried under a carpet of flowers. Holden sits here, hands briefly pressed against the rough bark.
There's dissonance:
because he's seen war, his share of battles, studied military tactics and strategy, but never on Earth — a blockade of a moon, of a station, interplanetary trade routes held hostage, would feel less jarring to him than watching a captive city from a matter of miles away with flowers and sweet leaves scenting the air, with bees singing,
because he's seen the most of this war in dreams, and no matter what he says of focusing on reality, of moving on, he'd expected the distribution of forces to look different — and hadn't realized the expectation existed until it was disappointed.
The quirk of Flint's brow and the small tilt of his head says, Well or maybe even You're not wrong.
It is messy.
"Like as not, being in the Divine's company was probably serving to rally morale. With the Exalted March pushing on ahead in the north, we might have expected there to be indecision in it's wake."
The spyglass, still extended, is turned in hand and offered across to Holden.
He accepts the spyglass on a sigh, looks through it as if hoping to find answers to the situation here. Or, at least, whatever Flint had been looking at.
(Is in a serious enough mood to not spend much thought on how using a spyglass makes him feel like an actual on-the-ocean sailor, but it tickles at the back of his mind, and he'll probably think about it later.)
"I understand the need to keep civilian casualties low," he says, his tone more allowing a bloodbath would be unforgivable, "but there has to be a better answer than 'fuck around while they're trapped.'" Like he already knows the answer: "What are the odds of Tevinter withdrawing peacefully?"
"I would say that depends entirely on why Tevinter is holding the city in the first place."
Divested of the spyglass, Flint has settled on the stump with one wrist hooked across the pommel of his belt knife and the other over top of it. It's a casual thing--almost comically sedate given their proximity here to the city's walls. War is a strange animal: a beast which bites only when it's been trained to.
"They've been cut off from the main body of the occupation since last summer when Montfort capitulated. Originally, I might have said that they remained in residence in the hope that the invasion force's front line would be able to retake that ground and close the gap again. But with the occupation pushed to Andoral's Reach, any fit Commander General in Val Chevin should at this point expect to remain isolated for at least another year if not longer.
"In which case, that same Commander General ought to be wary of the possibility that someone, somewhere will eventually close his only reliable path of supply by sea. He weathered one hard winter, but that was with an early harvest at his disposal. The next one will be harder. So if he means to get out with his skin and rejoin the effort in the north, he will need to leave before then. And should he leave Val Chevin as a pile of ashes behind him--There are two armies between him and Tevinter by land and it's a long way to the Amaranthine by sea, with plenty of opportunity in either direction for an incensed allied force to get their revenge. Leaving on good terms, overland if he can negotiate it so as to rejoin the war sooner, would theoretically be in his and the Imperium's best interest."
And maybe it is so simple as that. That is almost certainly what Celene and Cuissard and whoever else might be after a quiet reconciliation will be hoping for.
"But I suspect that's not why they're still here."
He nods as he listens; it's sound logic, all of it, information that fills gaps in his knowledge and helps paint a clearer picture of what's happening here. He slots it together with what they've found here, with the details provided by Remetter's frustration. There's a breeze that picks up, briefly, carries the scent of the sea as it ruffles through hair and clothes and grass alike.
"A distraction," he suggests, lowering the spyglass and turning from the city's ramparts to Flint. "Keep eyes on this city, keep the Orlesian generals arguing, while the Imperium gets ready to strike elsewhere. And if that doesn't go as planned, they still have an entire city held hostage."
"With the added bonus of having neatly divided what was once an allied force while they're at it," is a very mild form of assent, whatever force which paints Flint as such a severe figure in Kirkwall having evidently failed to follow them here.
He reaches out to reclaim the spyglass. Once returned to his possession, it's succinctly collapsed back into its more compact shape and tucked into the band of his broad belt.
"It's cleverly done, so long as you don't mind risking the loss of the entire force occupying the city."
The Gallows is a harsh structure, aptly named. Nikolai says as much, despite Zoya's lack of appreciation for the commentary. He has to say it again, in a new, unfamiliar tongue to the pair of Riftwatch scouts ferrying them along, and neither of them offer him anything more than a polite smile and nod.
As far as beginnings go, this isn't off to a promising start.
Nikolai would like to think he'll have better luck with the Commander. (Whatever luck looked like, considering Nikolai is stood before him with nothing at all to offer and a significant request to drop on his desk.) He glances sideways at Zoya before addressing Commander Flint.
"I'm aware it's bad form to start our acquaintance by raising a fuss about accommodations, but I need to ask if we could arrange for my general to close me into one of your cells come nightfall."
A beat.
"I presume a place named the Gallows has a functioning dungeon."
stands beside Nikolai, blue eyes glittering, as she appraises the man in front of them. It's clear that, for all her king's easy manner, there is a wrong answer. She's half-expecting it.
"I will," she says, "oversee his care until morning."
The man behind the desk—face all sharpened into habitually stern lines, something somehow both honed sharp and purposefully broad in the not-easy set of his shoulder and the set of his hand where he has lifted a pen away from the page under it—is clearly expecting some other request to follow on the heels of 'raising a fuss about accommodations.' For one, he looks up at the pair of them. For two, he pauses, the ready reply of Piss off, do I look like the Seneschal to you? apparently no longer quite as apt as anticipated.
Flint sets his pen aside. He withdraws his hand from the desk, hooking his elbow instead across the chair arm as he settles down against the high back.
"Alright," sounds like what the fuck. And— "I trust you're prepared for me to ask why."
"Yes, we are prepared," is not an answer to the question at hand.
Hesitating over the thing doesn't make hearing it any easier, but Nikolai does find himself coming up short when he puts himself to the task of coming up with a relatively tepid description.
He does not look sideways at Zoya.
"I've an affliction that tends to manifest at night," he begins, tone as light over the words as if he were explaining the weather or the particulars of their journey. Yes, by cart, a lovely way to see the countryside— "I'll spare you the particulars, but do understand that if left unchecked it can cause a significant amount of harm. And as I find myself here, without adequate way of restraining or sedating myself..."
Nikolai purposefully trails off, sweeping one hand between them. Here they are. The two of them, circling around the monster underneath Nikolai's skin.
It's incredibly tempting to cut in with something like, what His Majesty means to say is that he physically changes into a demon on some nights, so unless you want to wake tomorrow morning and discover some of your people eaten as a midnight snack —
But Nikolai has, as usual, chosen to describe his problem using the stupidest euphemisms possible. She owes it to him to allow this Commander to say for himself how ridiculous her king sounds.
Being spared the particulars is, no doubt, exactly what every man in charge of the security of a place loves to hear from the mouth of a fade-touched stranger asking to be put into a dungeon cell for the duration of an evening lest he otherwise wreak an unspecified kind of havoc.
For a split second, Flint measures the pair of them—an assessing look flicking from Nikolai to Zoya, then back again. Then he turns his full attention to her. He's spent too much of his life in the company of young women prone to their own opinions not to recognize the general demeanor of someone who might be relied on to give an idiot's shin a stern kick under the table.
If the shift in attention registers in any particular way, it doesn't register on Nikolai's face. Bristling over it does no one good. They are asking a favor. Nikolai needs this man to keep a secret.
And he will not undercut Zoya with protest, even if he feels some minor stirring of dread at what her clarification might be. Instead, his hands fold, expression casually attentive. Unworried.
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Madi. Early cloudreach;
In deference to it, Flint wears both a sturdy pair of gloves and the fur lined collar of his winter-heavy coat turned high as the skiff shears along across dark and weather beaten waters. They are going East. The wind is blowing well for it and even with its heavy metal centerboard the small craft's draw is shallow enough that it will be some time before there is any question of tricky navigation ahead of them. Kirkwall, and the channels which surround it, were made for trapping heavy merchant ships and fighting vessels; not for inconveniencing fishermen and other inconsequential craft like the one in which they ride.
If anything, it is the wind rather than the waterway which is their enemy. It comes in gusts and starts, demanding they sail at broad points rather than close hauled where a change in the weather gauge might knock them flat aback and tumble them over. It's the spirited sort of sailing which demands they both ride the same side of the boat, one foot set against the opposing bench to keep steady against the craft's hard heel.
The tiller is quiet under his hand though, pleasantly true. And there is a rhythm to the working of lines which allows for conversation even despite the gusting--the keen of the wind over the sail and line.
"Would you like to discuss Antiva," he asks her. And, in a different and infinitely more particular staccato: "Take in your portside sheet. Another two inches."
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It isn't a quick, practiced movement on its own, and it's only further hampered by the chill. Madi has taken to over-dressing when in doubt of how best to dress for any given weather, but even in her winter traveling garb she can feel the bite of the cold gusts of wind and the spray from the water makes her squint as much as the sun ever could. She turns the squint back towards Flint, raising her voice just loud enough to be heard — which doesn't take much, they aren't a whole ship's length away or anything.
"It sounds like you would like to," she says, a smile tucked neatly in the corner of her mouth. "I do not have any plans as yet, if that is what concerns you."
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—wordlessly quips the rise and subsequent fall of his eyebrows as his hand, steady on the boat's tiller, makes some minor adjustment in keeping with the sail's setting so that when next the wind flutters about them, gusts first pulling then pushing, they cut a line through it which is more or less direct. Maker, Waking Sea fishermen must be made of stern stuff.
"We might talk about the weather if you'd prefer. There's plenty of it."
busts in
"Afternoon, Commander."
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He does not remove his boot from where it's hooked by the heel on a low footstool.
Note to self: reading breaks behind locked doors or in unsuspecting broom closets exclusively from now on. But sure, Barrow. You have his attention.
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"Just had a thought the other day," he says pleasantly, "as you're the head of Forces and all, might be nice to have a little face time with the recruits, so they know whose orders they're carrying out. You know?"
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"And?"
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"Perhaps you could come and meet with them, one of these mornings. During arms training."
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"All right."
He cracks the book.
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"Tomorrow morning, then?"
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"First thing," he says without looking up.
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Holden, late Cloudreach;
Anyway, it makes for a fine place to sit in the late afternoon now that they've slipped the leash of the estimable Capitaine Remetter.
The sun is at their backs. Theoretically, makes it difficult for any guardsman along the walls to sight them. Candidly, Flint has his doubts that it really fucking matters. They're beyond the range of crossbows and the city must be used to a certain level of being under observation.
From where he sits on a stump with one leg stretched before him in the grass turned brilliant gold by the late afternoon, Flint studies the city just a moment longer through the lens of a battered old spyglass. At this distance (or because it has been too long and he is no longer familiar with all the colors and heraldry), he can't parse whose banners are flying over the city.
He lowers the glass from his eye, but neither looks away from Val Chevin or to his companion though he addresses him plainly enough:
"Is it everything you were expecting?"
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There's a fallen log, perhaps from the very severed roots that serve as Flint's seat now, that's been left so long to molder that where the earth ends and the bottom of the wood begins is now lost — or at least buried under a carpet of flowers. Holden sits here, hands briefly pressed against the rough bark.
There's dissonance:
because he's seen war, his share of battles, studied military tactics and strategy, but never on Earth — a blockade of a moon, of a station, interplanetary trade routes held hostage, would feel less jarring to him than watching a captive city from a matter of miles away with flowers and sweet leaves scenting the air, with bees singing,
because he's seen the most of this war in dreams, and no matter what he says of focusing on reality, of moving on, he'd expected the distribution of forces to look different — and hadn't realized the expectation existed until it was disappointed.
"What a fucking mess."
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It is messy.
"Like as not, being in the Divine's company was probably serving to rally morale. With the Exalted March pushing on ahead in the north, we might have expected there to be indecision in it's wake."
The spyglass, still extended, is turned in hand and offered across to Holden.
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(Is in a serious enough mood to not spend much thought on how using a spyglass makes him feel like an actual on-the-ocean sailor, but it tickles at the back of his mind, and he'll probably think about it later.)
"I understand the need to keep civilian casualties low," he says, his tone more allowing a bloodbath would be unforgivable, "but there has to be a better answer than 'fuck around while they're trapped.'" Like he already knows the answer: "What are the odds of Tevinter withdrawing peacefully?"
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Divested of the spyglass, Flint has settled on the stump with one wrist hooked across the pommel of his belt knife and the other over top of it. It's a casual thing--almost comically sedate given their proximity here to the city's walls. War is a strange animal: a beast which bites only when it's been trained to.
"They've been cut off from the main body of the occupation since last summer when Montfort capitulated. Originally, I might have said that they remained in residence in the hope that the invasion force's front line would be able to retake that ground and close the gap again. But with the occupation pushed to Andoral's Reach, any fit Commander General in Val Chevin should at this point expect to remain isolated for at least another year if not longer.
"In which case, that same Commander General ought to be wary of the possibility that someone, somewhere will eventually close his only reliable path of supply by sea. He weathered one hard winter, but that was with an early harvest at his disposal. The next one will be harder. So if he means to get out with his skin and rejoin the effort in the north, he will need to leave before then. And should he leave Val Chevin as a pile of ashes behind him--There are two armies between him and Tevinter by land and it's a long way to the Amaranthine by sea, with plenty of opportunity in either direction for an incensed allied force to get their revenge. Leaving on good terms, overland if he can negotiate it so as to rejoin the war sooner, would theoretically be in his and the Imperium's best interest."
And maybe it is so simple as that. That is almost certainly what Celene and Cuissard and whoever else might be after a quiet reconciliation will be hoping for.
"But I suspect that's not why they're still here."
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"A distraction," he suggests, lowering the spyglass and turning from the city's ramparts to Flint. "Keep eyes on this city, keep the Orlesian generals arguing, while the Imperium gets ready to strike elsewhere. And if that doesn't go as planned, they still have an entire city held hostage."
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He reaches out to reclaim the spyglass. Once returned to his possession, it's succinctly collapsed back into its more compact shape and tucked into the band of his broad belt.
"It's cleverly done, so long as you don't mind risking the loss of the entire force occupying the city."
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slaps a bow on this
welcome to squabbling ravkans.
As far as beginnings go, this isn't off to a promising start.
Nikolai would like to think he'll have better luck with the Commander. (Whatever luck looked like, considering Nikolai is stood before him with nothing at all to offer and a significant request to drop on his desk.) He glances sideways at Zoya before addressing Commander Flint.
"I'm aware it's bad form to start our acquaintance by raising a fuss about accommodations, but I need to ask if we could arrange for my general to close me into one of your cells come nightfall."
A beat.
"I presume a place named the Gallows has a functioning dungeon."
Ha, ha.
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stands beside Nikolai, blue eyes glittering, as she appraises the man in front of them. It's clear that, for all her king's easy manner, there is a wrong answer. She's half-expecting it.
"I will," she says, "oversee his care until morning."
His care, she can be funny too.
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Flint sets his pen aside. He withdraws his hand from the desk, hooking his elbow instead across the chair arm as he settles down against the high back.
"Alright," sounds like what the fuck. And— "I trust you're prepared for me to ask why."
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Hesitating over the thing doesn't make hearing it any easier, but Nikolai does find himself coming up short when he puts himself to the task of coming up with a relatively tepid description.
He does not look sideways at Zoya.
"I've an affliction that tends to manifest at night," he begins, tone as light over the words as if he were explaining the weather or the particulars of their journey. Yes, by cart, a lovely way to see the countryside— "I'll spare you the particulars, but do understand that if left unchecked it can cause a significant amount of harm. And as I find myself here, without adequate way of restraining or sedating myself..."
Nikolai purposefully trails off, sweeping one hand between them. Here they are. The two of them, circling around the monster underneath Nikolai's skin.
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It's incredibly tempting to cut in with something like, what His Majesty means to say is that he physically changes into a demon on some nights, so unless you want to wake tomorrow morning and discover some of your people eaten as a midnight snack —
But Nikolai has, as usual, chosen to describe his problem using the stupidest euphemisms possible. She owes it to him to allow this Commander to say for himself how ridiculous her king sounds.
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For a split second, Flint measures the pair of them—an assessing look flicking from Nikolai to Zoya, then back again. Then he turns his full attention to her. He's spent too much of his life in the company of young women prone to their own opinions not to recognize the general demeanor of someone who might be relied on to give an idiot's shin a stern kick under the table.
"Would you care to clarify any of that?"
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If the shift in attention registers in any particular way, it doesn't register on Nikolai's face. Bristling over it does no one good. They are asking a favor. Nikolai needs this man to keep a secret.
And he will not undercut Zoya with protest, even if he feels some minor stirring of dread at what her clarification might be. Instead, his hands fold, expression casually attentive. Unworried.
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