Authors: Scott V. Duff
“I…” he sighed heavily, “assumed you would want a fall guy, someone to pay for all the hell you’ve been put through. My officers and I are prepared to pay for whatever amnesty we can get for our men.”
Jimmy snorted and said, “You saw Seth’s fall guy actually
fall
, dude!” Then he sipped hard at his brandy. I could see the
Sidhe
in him as he swished the liquor around in his mouth and he began to appreciate the undertones on his changed palate.
“How, Major? How does a group that large suddenly decide to ask for asylum from me?” I ask him while he considered the prospects of his own sanction. “And why would they think that I would give it to them? Or even be able to give it to them?”
“Yesterday, while Cpt. Velasquez and I were walking through the barracks before lunch, we were approached by each and every barracks leader and asked if there was some way we could find to stay here permanently. They were careful not to be too specific on numbers, just kept saying an overwhelming number. The reasons were many and ranging.
“First was obvious, everyone knows their careers are shot. Most of us will be sectioned out immediately, if not imprisoned first. Our lives in general were already chaos, or worse, nothing,” he said sadly. I figured this was the state his life was in at the time. “And all we’ve seen out of our government—especially our military—has been heartache and blood and death. My God, man, they tried to kill us! They didn’t just give up on us. They shot at us!” Tears streamed down his face now as the emotions tore through his mind. I doubt he’d let himself feel them before now even though the disillusionment had long since settled.
“You, on the other hand,” he continued more calmly, after setting his glass on the table, “who should have abandoned us at the beginning, did not and even came back to check on our care just because you gave a damn. Something they couldn’t be bothered with. Most of these men have lived through some horror caused by magic that I didn’t even know existed before Pennington took me down the rabbit hole a few weeks ago. The stories I heard from men worn out in the training rooms were outrageous, but I’d just seen you do so much more. Then you took the time to show us why respecting your people was not only important to you but our continued health individually. And you kept giving a damn about us.
“The brownies and sprites talked to us,” he said earnestly. He was going to be an emotional wipeout when he was done talking. Byrnes hadn’t shown this much emotion about anything in his life that I could tell. “They see your people, so willing to do absolutely anything for you and so happy at the same time. It’s a happiness that they are feeling right now, but have never seen on Earth. And frankly, you are an extremely inspiring young man. We would take great pride to stand for you, if you’d let us.”
“Major Byrnes, there are so many problems built into that request that you cannot imagine the difficulty level of what you are asking of me,” I said slowly, just now getting through some of the ramifications myself. “The conditions that I would have to put onto it alone would be… fundamentally inconceivable to you. You would have to accept a geas. Do you even understand what that is? How deeply it would affect your lives? That’s not something you can decide to give up in five years. It’s forever. You pass it to your children and they pass it to their children. And it doesn’t make you like him.” I pointed at Jimmy. “He’s a special case with a very special geas. Some of you might be changed slightly, but nowhere near his level.
“Besides, you heard what I said in there,” I said, hoping to dissuade him further. “I’m not looking to hang a full charge on everybody, least of all you. Why would you want to give up your lives knowing you aren’t necessarily going to lose everything? Most of you will barely get a slap on the wrist, comparatively.”
“The military teaches you complete reliance on it,” Byrnes replied. “From the beginning, a soldier is mentally broken down and taught to rely on his buddy, his neighbor for support, that he is part of a machine that cannot operate correctly unless the pieces all operate correctly. As long as the pieces operate, the machine works. That machine has already abandoned us. Our world no longer wants us.”
“You don’t know that,” I argued and sighed. “What if Harmond and Morelli say no. What then? Do you expect me to force the issue? I’m not exactly on a list of known foreign powers who can grant asylum.” That actually made him hopeful. It made me think the man was insane.
“So you’ll think about it?” he asked. I closed my eyes and sighed slowly at the question.
“Make certain that your men understand what I said about the geas and about them not changing into a
Sidhe
like Jimmy,” I said, eyes still closed. Then I opened them and nodded. “I will consider it overnight and speak to all of your men after breakfast tomorrow in the gym before we speak to Harmond to give you an idea of how far I am willing to go. Then we will see, Major. But I can’t make any promises. There are too many unknowns. This is why I talk to people much older and wiser than me.”
“Thank you, Lord Daybreak,” Major Byrnes said, again with evident relief. “That you will consider it was more than I actually hoped.” I wanted so badly to reach into his head to see why, but that would be so wrong, though I wasn’t so sure since he was considering undergoing the geas, making it my right and basically automatic. He’d let me if I asked, too.
The three of us sipped brandy in silence for a moment. Byrnes was smiling and all of us were relaxed. Jimmy wasn’t quite as suspicious of Byrnes anymore, which I found curious. There was a knock on the office door.
Opening the door from where I sat, I called out, “Yes, Ellorn? We’re in here…”
“I apologize for the intrusion, Lord Daybreak,” Ellorn said as he entered the alcove.
“No intrusion, Ellorn. We were just finished talking and relaxing,” I said, trying for soothing. “What can I do for you?”
“Your brothers have returned and are wondering if you’re still receiving?” Ellorn asked. “They’ve extended an invitation of nightcaps at Peter’s with the promise to not keep you up too late.”
I laughed lightly, thinking it was already too late. “Thanks, Ellorn. I’ll shift over in a moment, but wait a moment, I’d like to talk to you. Major, I’m afraid I need to thank my brothers for the work they’ve done today, so I’ll need to send you back to the barracks.” We stood and Byrnes started to put his glass on the table. “Oh, no, please, why waste it? Just please tell Laston that you’re back and that we’ll be at breakfast in the morning. He should pass that along, not necessarily see to it personally. The faery are extremely literal.”
I looked into the hallway we’d left and Alsooth’s office, too, to make sure I wasn’t about to cause a collision. “Zero’s in the office now. He’ll know where everyone is.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, Lord Dayb—” Major Byrnes was saying as I shifted him back.
“And what do you think about all of this?” I asked Jimmy, offering Ellorn Byrnes’ vacated chair.
Jimmy shrugged. “At first I thought it was creepy. It felt like he was trying to sell his men out to save his own ass. But once he figured out that
he
stood a pretty good chance of getting in, it wasn’t so bad. For the most part, they’re not such a bad group of guys, really.”
“Well, that, by itself, is going to be a problem,” I groaned, adding another item to the huge ‘con’ list. The look on Jimmy’s face told me he didn’t understand. “’Guys’, Jimmy, there are twenty-eight women among them. What do I do, make them the troop whores? Import prostitutes once a month? What? They’re men. They have testosterone issues. Ellorn, what do you think of this?”
The short brownie looked up from the chair in awe of the question. “I do not know, Lord Daybreak,” he answered slowly. “We have never been asked such a question.”
“Well, you’re being asked now,” I snapped, instantly regretting it. “Look, Ellorn, this is important. You are important to me and I need to understand how you and the other faery will feel about it before I can proceed. The Great Claiming was a deeply personal crafting. I have to believe that you won’t feel… slighted or belittled in any way if I bring someone else into it. Especially humans, my kind. That seems like I could be saying that you aren’t good enough for me, that I had to bring my own into the bindings with us.”
“You are a treasure, Daybreak of Gilán,” Ellorn said with a smile I hadn’t quite seen before. “No, we will not be slighted or belittled by the addition of humans to the geas, Lord.”
My relief was probably as evident as Byrnes’ was, at least physically. “Thank you, Ellorn. That means a lot to me.”
~ ~ ~
“They asked for what, now?” Peter asked again, pouring brandy into glasses for Jimmy and me.
“Political asylum,” Kieran answered for me while I drained the last of Richard’s excellent pale from my current glass. “Is the elven palate really that different that you’re enjoying that so much more?”
“I dunno,” I muttered, shrugging and looking longingly at the empty glass. “It’s not the alcohol and getting tipsy, though. Not enough of a draw. Too easy to shake off now, but it tastes wonderful.”
“What do you think of the idea, anyway?” Kieran asked.
“I don’t like it,” I said immediately. “I don’t like the idea of anybody going under a geas. With the faery, I understand their need for it, but taking a man’s free will away just seems wrong to me.”
“I seem to recall having this conversation before, at least a similar one,” Ethan said from his place on the back of Peter’s couch. How he got comfortable perched on the corner, I’ll never know.
“Free will is a bit overrated,” Mike offered, sitting with Steven and David at the table across from us. “Freedom always has limits and they usually butt right up against the next stronger guy next to ya.”
“Starts with your parents,” Steven said, peeling the label off his beer bottle slowly. “Moves to your older siblings and the world in general as you learn to walk and move around. Learn hot, cold, up, down, that sort of thing. How to play and interact with others.”
“Then there’s school, the playground, all sorts of rules there,” David added thoughtfully. “That’s when you find out your family is weird. They don’t have the same customs, follow the same patterns, celebrate the same holidays and festivals that everybody else’s families do or maybe it’s just in a different way.”
“You guys have thought about this?” Peter asked as he handed Jimmy and me our glasses.
“Yeah, actually,” Mike said softly, sipping his beer before continuing. “We sat up for an hour or two a few nights ago talking about geas and compulsions and how we’d be affected by it, and all.”
“It’s really not as bad as it seems, depending on the who and the what,” David said. “I mean, I wouldn’t
want
one but it would depend on the circumstances if I would willingly accept one. If I was in their shoes? It wouldn’t seem to even make a thin dime’s worth of difference to have it and live here.”
“I don’t know,” Jimmy said. “Seth brought up a really good point earlier, and with all due deference to my Lord’s brother, I’m not sure I could go the rest of my life without…” He made not-so-vague pelvic thrusts in his seat, making his drink slosh dramatically in the glass.
“Boinking?” Peter asked, grinning as he sat beside me. “And Seth thought of that?” I waited until he was drinking before I shot my hand into his gut. He bent back enough to make it painless though.
“Why is everybody so worried about my virginity?” I muttered.
“We’re not worried about it, Seth,” Kieran said grinning and pushing Ethan off the back of the couch. “We’re just picking on you about it. Big difference.”
“Valid point, though,” Mike said, wide-eyed. “Really, what do you do about that? Open a doorway into the red-light district in Singapore with ten grand and a weekend pass and say, ‘don’t bring anything nasty and drippy back home’? Ick.”
“Do any of them have wives or girlfriends now?” Peter asked. “The files I read through didn’t indicate any but I wasn’t looking that hard or that specifically, either.”
“No, not really,” Jimmy answered. “Not to hear any of them talk, anyway. I overheard one or two of them griping about their kids’ stepdads’ being jerks and not letting ‘em see ‘em enough, but they could be among the smaller numbers of those wantin’ to go back.”
“Or believing they’re not good enough and giving up on their kids,” I said, probably not as stoically as I thought from the looks I got from Steven and David.
“Jimmy said you talked to Ellorn?” David asked. “What did he say?”
“He said that the faery wouldn’t have a problem with it,” I said.
“He called Seth ‘a treasure’,” Jimmy said with a gleam in his eye, chuckling. “Bet it’s all over Gilán by morning!”
“It was a valid question!” I objected, noticing that everybody but Ethan was suddenly drinking behind pursed lips and bright auras. Ethan, on the other hand, laughed outright. Kieran and Peter choked on theirs a little then. Served ‘em right, I thought.
“Who are you kidding? You might as well admit it,” Ethan said, hanging over the back of the couch near Kieran. “You’re going to do it sooner or later for someone, it may as well be them so you can see how it’s going to work out now. Tell them all the pitfalls as you see them and let them decide. Let them exercise their free will and if it’s for the last time, it’ll be their decision, won’t it?”