Oops, I Tamed the Commander Everyone Dreaded novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Stockade

In a cold cell Lyra feels the Commander take a blow, storms the practice yard, and he lowers his sword when she orders it.

The stockade at Fort Karsk was a stone box with a bucket in the corner and a window the size of a loaf.

They locked me in at noon. By dusk Finola had talked a guard into passing me a blanket and half a loaf.

"Two nights," the guard said. "The Marshal's orders. Then the magistrate in Harrowgate decides."

"For a knife in a man who didn't even bleed loud?" Finola said through the bars.

"He bled plenty."

"He didn't complain, though."

The guard didn't answer that. Nobody in this fort ever answered anything about the Commander.

When he finally left, Finola pressed her face to the bars.

"Lyra, what did you do to him in that tent? Orrin came out looking like he'd seen a ghost."

"I pricked my thumb."

"You what?"

"I'll explain when I understand it. Go feed Biscuit. She'll bite someone if she's hungry."

Finola went. I sat on the cold floor with the blanket around my shoulders and watched the window go from blue to black.

I was almost asleep when the first blow landed.

It hit me in the ribs, a short, hard crack.

I doubled over and the breath went out of me in a gasp.

The second blow caught my shoulder. The third drove into my stomach, and I was on my hands and knees on the stone, wheezing.

Nobody was in the cell. Nobody had touched me.

There was a fourth, across the back of my thigh, and I swore so loud the guard banged on the door.

"Quiet in there!"

"Somebody's hitting me!" I shouted.

"Nobody is hitting you."

He was right. There was nothing on my skin, no mark, no bruise. Just the ache, the awful, honest ache of every hit.

And I understood.

The pain wasn't mine. It was his.

I put my forehead against the cold wall and breathed.

Then I got up, and I kicked the cell door until the guard opened it.

"Where is he?" I asked.

"Who?"

"The Commander. Where is he right now?"

The guard looked at my face and made the worst decision of his life.

"The practice yard," he said. "He drills at night."

I went past him. He grabbed at my sleeve and I shook him off.

He let me, because I think he was afraid to touch me.

The practice yard lay behind the barracks, lit by torches in iron cages.

A hundred soldiers stood around the edge in silence.

In the middle, Commander Aldric Eisenhart faced a man with a wooden sword twice the size of my arm.

Both were stripped to the waist.

The Commander had a scar across his ribs and another across his shoulder, and older ones I could not count.

The other man swung. The wooden blade slammed into the Commander's side.

The Commander did not blink. He did not even turn his head.

I felt that blow crack across my own ribs, and I yelled so loud everyone turned.

"STOP!"

The wooden sword froze in midair.

The Commander's head came around. His grey eyes found me across the yard, and I saw him understand.

I walked into the circle, past a hundred soldiers who parted like water, and stopped three feet from him.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"What are you doing?" I said. "You're letting a man hit you with a plank!"

"It is drill."

"Since when do you drill by getting hit?"

"Since nine years ago."

"I felt every one of those. Ribs, shoulder, stomach, thigh, and now my ribs again."

"I felt the first four in the stockade."

He went very still.

"You felt them," he said.

"All of them. It's your pain, Commander. It's not mine. And I'd really rather you didn't do this."

Nobody breathed. I could hear the torches hiss.

"If I take a blow," he said slowly, "you feel it."

"Yes."

"And if you are struck, I feel it."

"Yes."

"I see."

He looked at the man with the wooden sword, a heavy sergeant who had turned a bad shade of grey.

"Sergeant. Put it down."

The sergeant put it down.

"Yard dismissed," the Commander said, and the soldiers broke away so fast they nearly tripped on each other.

We stood in the torchlight alone.

"I am supposed to be in the stockade," I said.

"You are," he agreed. "And I am supposed to be unhurt."

His voice was quieter. He bent his head a little.

"Are you in pain now?" he asked.

"A little. My ribs."

"I apologize."

"Don't apologize. Stop getting hit."

"I do not know how to avoid it."

"What do you mean you don't know how?"

"I mean I never learned to care."

The words sat between us.

I opened my mouth, and a sound came from the gate.

A woman's voice, light and clear and sweet as sugar.

"Aldric, darling. Uncle says you've been busy."

A slim woman in dove-grey silk walked into the torchlight with a small, tight smile.

"I'm Sabine Crane," she said, looking at me. "His betrothed."

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