Chapter 4 Before Dawn

Nobody slept well that night. Not after what they had just seen and heard. The building they were moved into was quiet in a way that felt heavy. Three hundred men and almost no sound. Just cots shifting, someone turning over and the occasional cough. It was surreal.

The confidence that had filled the recruitment yard that morning had disappeared somewhere between Rhett's arrival and the walk to the sleeping quarters. Men who had arrived laughing now lay awake staring into darkness, each alone with whatever picture of tomorrow his imagination had decided to paint. Somewhere near the far wall a recruit whispered a short prayer before falling silent again. Nobody mocked him. Nobody even acknowledged it. Fear had stripped away the need to impress strangers.

Bram eventually had to speak. He couldn't hold it in any longer.

"I once heard soldiers eat better than farmers," he said to the ceiling. "Three meals a day. Hot ones. I've been eating my mother's cooking for twenty two years. Anything is an upgrade on that."

Corin said nothing.

"You're not sleeping," Bram said.

"I know."

"Neither is anyone else."

"I know that too."

A short silence followed before Bram spoke again.

"You scared?"

The silence Corin left seemed to stretch across the room before he finally answered.

"Yes."

"Me too."

For once, Bram left the conversation there. No joke. No attempt to smooth over the truth with humour. Somehow that honesty settled the room more than another laugh ever could have.

Across the building Dane lay on his back and stared into the darkness above him. He wasn't thinking about home. Home would still be there tomorrow, whether he thought about it or not. His thoughts kept returning instead to the man who had walked into the yard.

He had seen officers before. Men who wore their rank loudly and expected everyone around them to feel it. Men who filled silence because they were afraid of it.

Rhett wasn't like that.

He had spoken perhaps forty words and stayed less than two minutes, yet hours later those words still carried weight. Three hundred men who already knew his name had fallen silent the moment he appeared because hearing stories about someone and standing in front of them turned out to be two completely different experiences.

Dane tried to understand why. He couldn't. There had been no speech to remember and no dramatic promise of victory. Just certainty. The sort that couldn't be performed because it either existed or it didn't.

He closed his eyes.

Sleep never came.

The knock came before sunrise. Three sharp, fast strikes. Then a voice that was flat and indifferent.

"On your feet. Ten minutes."

The building came alive all at once. Men rolled from their cots, reached for boots in the darkness and hurried into half-buttoned uniforms. The easy conversations of yesterday had vanished. Nobody needed telling twice.

Bram sat up and looked around.

"Three meals a day," he muttered. "Hot ones. I'm holding onto that."

Outside the cold hit them immediately as they lined up in the yard.

The man standing at the front was not Rhett.

He was older and hard-faced. He looked at the lines of men and said nothing for a long moment. He watched them just long enough for everyone to feel the cold properly and understand that comfort was not part of what was coming.

"My name is Sergeant Aldric," he said. "Rhett commands this unit. I run everything else. Which means right now, I run you."

He walked slowly along the front row.

"You are not soldiers," he said. "Not yet. Right now you are a problem I have been asked to solve."

He stopped and looked at them for a long moment.

"I want you to understand something," he said. "Valorn is not coming to negotiate. They are not coming to make a deal. They are coming to take everything Aldenmoor built with his bare hands and everything Eldara has bled for since before most of you were born."

Nobody moved.

"The men who trained in this yard before you," Aldric continued, "some of them are already dead. Not because they were weak, but because war does not care how hard you trained. It only cares whether you trained hard enough."

His gaze swept across the line.

"I don't care who your father is. I don't care what you did before you came here. By the time we're finished, the only thing that will matter is whether the man standing beside you trusts you when everything starts falling apart."

He let the silence settle.

"I intend to make sure he can."

He looked at them one last time.

"Move."

What followed was not training. Not yet. It was something more basic. A test of how much a person could take before they started making excuses.

They ran until the sun came up and then they ran more. They carried things that were too heavy and covered distances that were too long. They got things wrong and had to run again.

Nobody explained any of it and nobody asked.

An hour in, a recruit from the valley collapsed. Not dramatically. He simply stopped running, took two more steps and sat down on the ground. His face had turned the colour of old ash. A medic appeared from somewhere and crouched beside him.

Nobody said anything, but everybody saw it. The yard, already quiet, became quieter still.

It was the first moment any of them understood what this actually was. Not an inconvenience. Not a difficult week. Something with consequences. Something capable of breaking a man before the enemy had even appeared.

Bram ran beside Corin without saying a word. Corin glanced across at him once, almost checking to make sure he was still there.

Eventually Bram found enough breath to speak.

"I've run more this morning than I have in my entire life. Combined. I want that noted somewhere officially."

Three men near him laughed.

Small.

Tired.

Real.

The yard needed it.

Dane said nothing through all of it.

He ran. Carried. Got things wrong. Ran again.

But during the longest stretch, when the group had thinned to the men who simply refused to stop, he noticed Rhett standing at the edge of the course.

Not leading.

Not shouting.

Watching.

He wasn't watching the group. He was watching individual men. His eyes moved slowly, lingering here, shifting there, never hurried and never distracted. Dane realised he wasn't measuring speed or strength alone. Rhett seemed to be noticing who helped the man beside them, who gave up too early, who recovered quickly after failing, who kept thinking when they were exhausted.

He wasn't just training soldiers.

He was learning them.

Dane kept his head forward, but he felt the exact moment those eyes settled on him. For the briefest second it felt as though Rhett had seen straight through every answer Dane might ever have given and reached whatever lay underneath. Then Rhett looked away and continued watching the rest of the yard, as though nothing at all had happened.