Chapter 322: Captain Orders.

Chapter 322: Chapter 322: Captain Orders.

At this rate, Montrel is gonna be grey before he’s thirty.

​When he’d heard that there was some sort of commotion deeper within the castle, he’d been expecting to find a couple of drunk soldiers, or maybe a pissing contest between a few nobles. It happened; tensions always ran high in winter.

​What he had not been expecting was this fucking mess .

​Montrel has no words. Neither do any of the other soldiers, for that matter, because it’s not every day (at least not recently) that it looks like someone’s let a herd of wild beasts run rampant through the halls, shattering anything that can be shattered and overturning anything that isn’t fixed to the ground –and are those crossbow bolts sticking out of the wall ??

​The place isn’t just a wreck; it’s a fucking bloodbath .

​Yet when he sees who’s trying to sneak away from the scene of the crime, just as battered and as bloody as the bodies scattered haphazardly around the courtyard but decidedly more conscious, he’s somehow not surprised.

​Fuck, Gandy’s gonna be the worst .

​("Five gold says it’s Khobi," Gandy had prophesied, when Bongo had sent a handful of them off to investigate, "It’s always Khobi.")

​"...Do I even want to know?" Montrel sighs dramatically, shoulders sagging in resignation.

Servants are already on the scene, picking their way through the rubble and motionless bodies to get to work on the mess.

​Gods, would it kill these guys to look even a little bit guilty?

​"...It’s not what it looks like?" Khobi offers weakly, and Montrel hardly finds that reassuring.

​Ah, so he does know what it looks like, then.

​"I hope not," Montrel grumbles, running a hand down his face as he starts picking his way around the motionless men to inspect the damage.

It is...considerable. Dimly, he wonders if he should be slapping the three of them in chains.

The thought makes his stomach turn.

"...Because it looks pretty fucking bad." He sincerely hopes there’s a good explanation for this.

Otherwise things are going to get really bad, really fast.

​(Gandy sticks a hand out, and Montrel gruffly fishes out some gold and hands it to him.)

​"They started it," Rogard supplies helpfully, which isn’t a great explanation, but it’s a start.

​"Aren’t these your old man’s guards?"

Montrel points out dryly, gesturing at one of the unconscious men in the distinct blue Lord Rogard loved to parade them around in.

And he’s really, really hoping that that isn’t who he thinks it is lying on the ground over there.

"Rogard," he pleads, one hand on his hip and the other pressed into his brow. "Please don’t tell me that’s who I think it is --" Rogard makes absolutely no effort to humour him.

​"Do you think it’s my father?" he inquires lightly, and Montrel can only groan. This is not going to be good.

Sure, he doesn’t pay much attention to the goings-on of the castle nobility but even he knows that it’s a bad idea getting mixed up with.

Rogard’s father being one of them.

The only saving grace is that it looks like he’s starting to regain consciousness. Thank the gods he’s still alive –regardless of the situation and who landed the final blow, if Khobi got tangled up in killing a fucking noble the castle would be calling for a whole lot more than just his imprisonment.

Shit, they might even try it anyways.

​But wait. Something draws Montrel’s attention back to Lord Rogard’s stirring form.

​What’s he doing?

​What’s he reaching for?

​It happens all at once.

A flash of icy amber, brimming with wrath, a sudden, deep seated, all-consuming sense of dread, and a knife.

​A knife that’s coming straight for him.

​Montrel knows his own limits.

He knows that while he’s a good soldier, and might even be a great one, someday, he’ll never be the kind of legendary that he knows men like Loac and Khobi are capable of becoming.

Some men are good, but others are gifted ; that’s just the way it is, and he knows which of the two he is.

They have some sort of wildfire burning in their blood that he’s just not been touched with, and while he doesn’t necessarily like it, he accepts it.

​He’s proud of what he is, and what he can do, but for as fast, and as strong, and as highly trained as he is, he doesn’t have the same kind of supernatural reflexes afforded to those gifted few.

So when he sees that knife coming towards him, he knows that it’s going to hit him.

​Ah shit , he finds himself thinking, dimly, as his arms move –too slow –to put some sort of wall between his throat and that blade. We never got to go for that ride.

​But the knife doesn’t land.

​Because while Montrel isn’t gifted with instincts as sharp or reflexes as deft, the man next to him is.

​In the span of a single, racing heartbeat, Loac wrenches Montrel’s own sword straight from it’s sheath and with one fell sweep, smacks the incoming blade straight out of the air.

For something so ominous, and thrown with such ferocity, it makes a surprisingly gentle clink as the blades meet, and just like that the knife goes spinning uncontrollably in the opposite direction to skitter harmlessly across the stone.

​Montrel lets out a breath.

He didn’t realise he was holding it in.

​His heart has never pounded in his ears quite so loud.

​"...Did he just..." He can hardly believe it.

​"Yeah," Loac growls flatly, expression grim as they watch the fallen Lord Rogard scrabble across the ground away as if trying to escape their gaze.

And maybe Montrel had always been inclined to believe Rogard’s explanation, but now he has no reason not to.

"He did." Montrel just swallows, running a hand across his face, and then across his torso to make sure he’s not dreaming.

​Fuck, he’s never taking his armour off again.

​"Thanks," he croaks, and weakly accepts his sword back.

​"Xena would probably be sad if anything happened to you," Loac supplies flatly, and gives one of the unconscious guards a nudge with his foot, "Now get these guys out of here."

​For the first time in his life, Montrel obeys him without hesitation.