Ethen Gearhart's Arc

Chapter 8 of 9

Ethen ran a hand along the cheetah's grinding joint and stood. The field lay quiet. His knights cleaned their guns and counted the wreckage. The fight was won. But as the cold settled in, a worse thought reached him. He had no proof. No count of kills the commander would trust. No record to send back showing the crown's coin had bought a victory. Without that, his command was just a story, and stories could be doubted. "They'll say we ran," a knight muttered nearby. "Or that there were never any beasts." The others went silent. Ethen heard the doubt in it. A victory nobody could verify was no victory at all. The princess had staked her name on him. A rumor could undo that in a day. A weight dropped onto his shoulder. Waffles, his orange cat, climbed up and perched there. Brass goggles sat pushed back on the cat's head. Those goggles had scouted the horizon before the fight and named the enemy. Now the cat tapped a paw against the lens and chirped at Ethen, then at the field of broken machines. Ethen understood. "You saw the whole thing. Through those." He lifted Waffles down and turned the goggles over in his hands. A small spool of film sat behind the glass, wound tight. The cat had recorded it all. The charge. The boiler. The beasts torn apart in the blast. "That's the report," Ethen said. He raised his voice so the squad could hear. "We have the proof. Every shot. Every kill, logged in glass." The knights crowded close. One pointed at the row of shattered brass carcasses. "We mark the field too," Ethen said. "Count the hulls. Sketch the positions. The film and the wreckage together. No one disputes that." The work went fast. Two knights counted the broken machines and called out numbers. Another copied the tally. Ethen set Waffles on a tall relic to film the full field, then the ruined boiler, then the cheetah's scorched plates. He wound the spool and sealed it in a brass case. He wrote the report in his own hand and pressed it shut. He gave it to his fastest rider. "To the commander. His eyes only." The rider saluted and rode. Ethen watched until the horse shrank to a dot on the ice. The doubt was answered before it could spread. Waffles climbed back to his shoulder and settled. The squad looked at Ethen now without a flicker of the old question. The report would reach the commander. The same man who had laughed at his application two years ago would read this one to the end. Then a second rider appeared on the far ridge, coming fast, carrying a sealed order of his own. He was not from the squad. He wore the commander's own colors. Ethen's hand went to his gun. The report had not even arrived yet.