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| Details |
| Author: | inkie |
| Summary: | On the morning of the King's summit in Stormwind to discuss Gilneas and war with the Horde, Siamus Fallon is distracted from his troubles by a new friend. |
| Rating: | T for Teen |
Only weeks ago, Stormwind Harbor would have been a steady wash of activity even at this barely dawn hour: longshoremen and sailors in silhouette swarms along the docks and decks of the ships still shadows against the slow-brightening sky; sleep-baffled passengers embarking with the early tides; weary fishermen unloading their slopping cargoes.
This morning the waterfront seemed abandoned. Two ships stood at anchor out in the harbor’s open water; there was no mooring for them at the incomplete skeletons of the former southern docks. One of the northern docks was occupied by an icebreaker undergoing repairs, and the rest were reserved for naval use for the Gilnean and Tol Barad campaigns.
Which meant that at present they stood empty.
At the churned, once-grassy grounds north of the waterfront, some fellow early riser threw a stick over and over again for a dog, who bounded after it each time with heedless, idiot joy, as though the task were novel. Siamus went in the opposite direction from the pair.
His footfalls on the pier seemed overloud on the boards in the absence of other sound. That is, there were other sounds – the slap of the water against the pilings, a distant buoy-bell, the dog’s frenetic yips. But like his own steps, these minor noises stood out starkly against the void of greater silence.
The water was only a noise. The sound of the waves was more familiar to him than any human voice, but now it was also meaningless. He might as well be the dog, attending to his master’s words while understanding none.
He put his hands in his pockets and kept his gaze forward; he would not look up at the collapsed wall at the edge of the Park District where once a row of townhouses had stood. He was having a brooding, bloody-minded morning after a sleepless night, and neither Ta nor Shine was around to kick his arse about it. Lelah wasn’t yet awake, and even had she been, he wasn’t willing to infect her with his dire mood. Between Gilneas and Tol Barad, everyone’s day was bound to blacken once the summit began this afternoon. She certainly didn’t need her guest storming around her house meantime like a…
He considered. A stormcloud?
Storming around like a stormcloud.
“Never be a bloody poet, Fallon,” he said aloud.
Which, naturally, put him in mind of Tyrrell: formula for more fool melancholy.
Neither Tyrrell nor Ta had been at liberty to say where they were deploying when they left, but with all that Stormwind had learned in recent days, Siamus could guess it well enough now. It didn’t set him at ease.
And there’d been not a word from either of them, though in Ta’s case he couldn’t be surprised – if she hadn’t written to young Falrevere, she certainly wasn’t going to write to her brother.
He’d been of half a mind lately to ride out to Drakewatch and see what Tyrrell’s little bride had heard, if anything, but the odds were the girl didn’t know any more than he did and the conversation might be awkward for her.
“Vice Admiral,” said a voice from his left, and Siamus near started out of his skin.
Brophy, chief of one of the dock crews, was seated at the pier’s edge on a crate amid a stack of crates, a shadow among shadows. He had a foot drawn up on the crate’s edge, and was holding an open flask of something that steamed in the morning air.
“Tides a’mighty, Brophy, will ye stop a man’s heart?”
The longshoreman laughed and heaved himself to his feet. He ambled over, offering out the flask. “Coffee?”
Siamus raised a hand to ward him off. “Keep your evil, man.”
Brophy laughed again and stopped a companionable pace away. “Ye come up from Elwynn at this unholy hour?”
Siamus shook his head. “I rode up yesterday for a House session, and today’s the King’s summit. Jes-Tereth kindly lent me a room at hers.”
Brophy gave him a speaking look.
“She lent me a room,” Siamus told him firmly.
The corner of Brophy’s mouth twisted upward, but he made no further comment. Instead, he gestured around them with his coffee flask. “What brings ye down to us, then? We’ve none of your ladies moored.”
I didn’t sleep. The Horde’s at Tol Barad and the Forsaken are overrunning Lordaeron and Gilneas. We’re facing a naval war without a ready navy and not enough budget for bootlaces, and one of us will have to explain that to the King. I can’t hear the sea.
“Came to see the state of the place and the repairs,” Siamus said.
Brophy gave him a grim, knowing smile. “About the wood, is it?”
“The wood?”
Brophy’s expression went sour. “Ah. Did no one tell ye, then? They said they’d report it.” A whistle sounded from up the pier and Brophy looked in that direction. “That’s me,” he said. “Shift’s starting. But go and see it for yourself.” He gestured with his flask.
Siamus followed the gesture with his gaze and nodded. “Thank ye, I will.”
“Vice Admiral,” the longshoreman said with a nod, and turned away.
Near the bones of the southern docks, the stacks of new lumber for the rebuilding waited; the green, astringent scent of pine was sharp above the sea-salt air.
It was the wrong scent.
Siamus leaned closer to examine the color of the wood in the low light. He touched fingertips to the coarse grain of it.
It wasn’t cedar. He’d lay money it was white pine.
He swore under his breath and straightened. After a moment, he swore again, louder this time, and hit the plank with the side of his fist, which did nothing either to address the situation or to improve his mood.
Stranglethorn hardwood was asking too much with the present state of… everything, but bloody white pine? Avrenne had provided them with numbers on the cedar, he was certain – just as certain as he was that the House hadn’t approved a requisition for white pine. Another cock-up, another delay, and if money had been spent – clearly money had been spent – then there was even less to use in redress.
If it could be redressed. If cedar had been a strain on the budget before, it would be impossible now that they’d paid whatever they’d paid for this shite.
He had no doubt it was deliberate: someone’s asinine, short-sighted ‘cost-cutting’ measure. “Tides preserve us from fools and mainlanders,” he muttered.
A discordant note sounded in the water behind him, near one of the new pilings: a wave, a soft splash out of rhythm with the rest. He almost didn’t hear it above his own irritation over white pine. When it registered belatedly, he turned.
Something sleek and dark moved in the water beside the skeletal dock. But Stormwind didn’t have sea lions. A druid, then? Siamus stepped away from the lumber and toward the water, scanning the place where the creature had disappeared beneath the surface.
A moment later, the swimmer surfaced again at the pier’s edge. He was a swimmer after all: man, not beast. Some trick of the predawn light, no doubt.
Then the man reached up to plant his hands and hoist himself onto the pier, and Siamus felt his mood improve markedly.
Whoever the fellow was, he’d been swimming in his linen drawers, now soaked through and plastered to him. Even had Siamus not been possessed of an extremely vivid imagination, very little would have been left to it. The man was perhaps a decade – perhaps more – older than Siamus himself, but still cut entirely from hard-planed muscle, and Siamus watched the shift of those muscles with a connoisseur’s appreciation as the man lifted a hand to sweep wet hair back from a craggy profile and look around.
A neat pile of folded clothing lay nearby at the pier’s edge, a pair of boots standing beside it, and the man went in that direction and stooped to the pile. Siamus put his hands in his pockets and rocked a little on his heels, admiring the view that stoop afforded him.
“Are they synonymous, then?” the stranger asked without looking around, and it took Siamus a startled moment to realize he was being addressed.
“Are what synonymous?” Hands still in pockets, Siamus ambled a couple of steps closer.
The stranger looked over his shoulder now as he straightened, and swept Siamus with an opaque up-and-down look. “Fools and mainlanders.”
The man must have the hearing of a bloody hound. Siamus never dropped his smile. “Context matters, naturally,” he allowed. “But on the whole, aye.”
The man turned to face him, making a narrow-eyed survey as he toweled himself off roughly with his shirt. “I confess I expected you to deny it, for courtesy’s sake.” His accent nagged familiarly: not quite Lordaeron but something close, touched with Tirasian salt.
“The allowance for context was courtesy,” Siamus told him. “And honesty’s a courtesy as well. I’m a gentleman, not a diplomat.”
There was a further sharp, silent scrutiny, and then the man smiled, a wolfish gleam in the fading darkness. “Ye say those like they’re mutually exclusive. Gentlemen and diplomats.”
Siamus inclined his head sardonically. “If I deny it, I fear ye might mistake me for a diplomat.”
The man gave a short, strange bark of laughter; the sound was rusty, as though he were out of practice. He pulled his shirt on over his head – to Siamus’s partial disappointment, though more saliently he hadn’t yet put on his trousers – and then stepped forward to offer out a hand. “Lukas. Rhenardt.”
Siamus returned the handshake. The hand in question was strong and callused like a working man’s, but Rhenardt himself had the bearing of… a soldier? Too self-sure for an enlisted, and the accent too posh; an officer, perhaps. Army, then, because nothing about him said sailor. “Siamus Fallon,” he answered.
“Ah,” said Rhenardt, and stepped back to collect his trousers, more’s the pity. Though it did require him to bend again. “Fallon. The House of Nobles. And the navy.”
Siamus raised his eyebrows. “That’s right. Ye have me at a disadvantage, I fear.”
Rhenardt straightened to pull on his trousers and glanced at Siamus again. “I’ve been studying,” he said. “There’s a good deal riding on the summit, for us. And I’m not by nature a diplomat either.”
Several things clicked into place. “Ye’re Gilnean.”
“Aye.” Rhenardt watched him like he was waiting for the rest of the reaction.
Siamus didn’t give it. He considered the dark shape he’d seen in the water. “Ye’re one of the wolf-men?”
“Aye.” Rhenardt didn’t move. There was an uncanny degree of control in his stillness, the way he held his ground patient and unmoving, watchful. “Is that a problem?”
Siamus stood his own ground and kept his smile. “For me? No. I expect it’s occasionally awkward for you.”
There was that sharp, rusty laugh again, and then Rhenardt stepped back and sat down comfortably on the pier to put his boots on. “And you’re Kul Tiran. Fallon. I remember your father’s name, from the war.” He glanced up inscrutably. “Your Lord Admiral Proudmoore had some thoughts, I recall, about Gilnean independence.”
“Aye, he did.”
“Perhaps it’s Kul Tirans in general, then, who aren’t diplomats.”
“Nor does it seem a Gilnean strength,” Siamus observed.
Rhenardt smiled a hard smile and turned his attention to lacing his second boot. “And what would your Lord Admiral say now of Kul Tiras’s position?”
Siamus watched him steadily, still smiling: Always stay smiling. “Proudmoore loved the Alliance and believed in it. The fact it was his own murder that caused the break is doubly criminal. The man was betrayed by his daughter, and then betrayed a second time by his nation.”
“Betrayed? I’m given to understand they acted from loyalty to him.”
“Ye can’t claim loyalty to a man and turn your back on his principles,” Siamus said.
“Principle,” said Rhenardt, and got to his feet. He scrubbed a hand through his wet hair, which the dawning light now showed to be a grizzled blond. His eyes were a very dark blue. “And how well has principle served you? Your nation has turned its back on the Alliance, too. You remained. Has the Alliance loved you for it? Do ye find your loyalty rewarded?” His tone was one of mild curiosity; his sharp, intent gaze was not.
“A man’s principles aren’t meant to serve him. He serves them. I didn’t stay wi’ the Alliance in expectation of reward; I stayed because it was right.”
Rhenardt gave him a sour smile. “The answer is no, then. The Alliance regards your country’s position as a black mark on you, for all your principle.”
“Is Gilneas offering for the Alliance now on principle, because they see the worth in it and want to add their strength to the union? Or do they come hats in hand because they find themselves needing help from the people they offered none?”
Rhenardt raised his eyebrows. After a moment he said dryly, “Context matters, naturally.” He glanced east toward the city walls, the sky staining red with sunrise behind them. “Greymane believes in the union; he believes Gilneas has learned a significant lesson.”
“And yourself?”
Rhenardt turned his opaque gaze back. “I believe in Greymane.”
“The man, or his principles?” Siamus canted his head.
Rhenardt regarded him in steady silence for a time. “I’ve heard it said,” he said at last, “that ye can’t claim loyalty to a man and turn your back on his principles.”
“Very wise,” Siamus agreed.
The corner of Rhenardt’s mouth hinted at a smile. “I don’t expect we’ll have an easy welcome. Your King Varian’s made that clear enough already.”
“Ye don’t seem like a man who needs things easy,” Siamus observed. “I expect ye’ll bear it somehow.”
Rhenardt stood and studied him again. “How pleasant,” he said at last, “to meet a fellow non-diplomat.”
“Oh,” said Siamus. “I promise ye, the pleasure is entirely mine. Why don’t ye let me buy ye a breakfast, and we’ll find what else we have in common?”