This is a piece I wrote years ago and just kind of left alone. I do plan to polish it up and (hopefully) submit it somewhere, but please tell me what you think of it as it is.

Untitled Story
They would arrive, alone or in pairs, groups of young men who have yet to shed the remnants of boyish looks and innocence. Their bright questioning eyes always held the same light, the same desire to become men to prove themselves worthy of their father name. The few girls that would drift in from time to time bore a grim determination to succeed, to right some wrong that had once befallen them. This is not to say that they are better; rather they are more difficult to with, more stubborn, more reckless. But boy or girl, they lose their innocence alll too fast.

One day I was teaching them archery. As always, the girls tend to have a better eye than the boys. They were used to the hard pace by now but they were still unblooded. As I gave them the commands they joked around with one another, not knowing what it was they were learning. Soon archery lessons would be replaced by quarterstaff, then sword work. One by one they would be taught the skills they needed to survive out there with heart and mind intact. But they do not, and will no fail where their peers succeed. If only humility were as easily learned as pride.

The girls learned the quarterstaff moves easily enough, added a grace to the deadly weapon. But it was the boys who have the strength to back it up. In the girls eyes you could see the knowledge of their past and their desperate, ravaging need to master this weapon. The boys all show the same cocky determination to be the absolute best. In those young, untested eyes, I can see that there is truly no going back for any of them now. Nothing short of death could rob them of this and their ultimate desire.

We are well into fencing when they start to develop their styles. Most of the boys favor hacking and beating their opponent, feeling more pride in that show of strength. The girls and some of the smaller boys, however, opt for a style that leaves them out of range while slowly whittling their opponent away. Brute strength against skill and cunning; if only one were truly better than the other.

Once the training was over with the girls took off before sunrise, off to become mercenaries or assassins and thieves. That was what they always did, rarely staying and joining the army or trying to find a more...respectable job with their newfound skills. One or two of the boys joined their girls in their quest for glory elsewhere, but most of them stayed. Part of me wished they wouldn't, that they would seek life elsewhere, but it didn't usually work out that way.

That winter had been a hard one. The wolves, desperate for food, began sneaking into homes and would also take livestock. The raids were just as bad as well. Luckily, my company had not been sent out except for wolf hunts, which we always turned up empty handed from, but that luck would not hold. These boys wanted to see combat, and we were stretched so thin.

We were finally sent out one night, a few hours away from dawn, to take care of some raiders that were at a local village. I shoved down the knot of thread that rose inside me like a voracious beast and took my men out. Half of them still shouldn't be called that, but I couldn't order them to stay. It wasn't in my power. All I could do was pray to a god I didn't believe in that the seasoned soldiers and I could keep them safe. It was the only power I had.

The raiders were gone, but they had been spotted holed up in a cave a mile or two away. So it was with grim thoughts and a heavy heart that I led them there.

There were a lot of raiders and they fought viciously. I did not think about my men, the untried boys, and simply focused on keeping myself alive. I did not try to see if they were playing the hero or if they had turned tail and run. It would have done me no good to divert my attention from my sword. Soon enough the fight was over, the raiders either dead or had run away, so I turned my attention to them. They all bore signs of the battle, some more than others. Shirts were torn, bloody, smeared with dirt. Quite a few held bloody limbs or pressed a hand to the worst wounds. My eyes quickly found the unlucky one, though. I waded through the sea of flesh and dazed expressions and knelt by the fallen one. He had taken a blow to one lung; I could hear a mix of air and blood bubbling in the gash. One of my hands pressed down on the wound as my other caught and held his hand. His eyes were wide and terrified, full of the knowledge that hindsight so often grants. There was nothing else I could do.