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Caelan didn’t have time to think on how he’d nearly broken Eric’s neck on a rock as he checked over Will and made sure he was okay. Raging, Caelan growled, “The task was to get both people across safe! If you’d have looked a bit harder, you’d have seen a much safer crossing just a little further up!”
Safety was never Eric’s priority, though. Winning was.
His aim was also, as Caelan had started to discover, to grab attention.
Caelan’s attention.
While Caelan shouldered Will to warmth and recovery in one of the tents close by, Eric grumbled, “We were still the first across.”
Caelan bit his tongue, nearly slicing it in two. He gave Eric no credence.
Will was sent to the nearest army barracks to rest and recover. Meanwhile the rest of them stayed behind, shivering around the campfire that night. No change of clothes. No deviation from real-world scenarios where you could end up freezing, wet through… and need to make it through the night. Eric scowled from the other side of the campfire, not shivering at all. He’d stripped himself naked earlier, warmed his clothes by the fire, and had put them back on once they were dry. Hadn’t cared at all that people would see him naked. Well, who was laughing now? His clothes were dry and he was warm despite earlier suffering the chill.
Caelan hated to say it, but the wee fucker reminded him of himself.
An unusual tolerance for pain. Cleverer than was necessary. Rebellious. Physically stronger than many others without even needing to try. And as deceitful and as cunning as they came.
“You, with me, now,” said Caelan, rising abruptly from the log he’d been sitting on, his eyes piercing even across the fire between them.
Eric followed behind Caelan through frost-crunchy ground, leaving behind the frozen soldiers to potentially realise they ought to dry out their clothes properly, too.
Behind the tents, Caelan stood at his full height. In his boots, that was nearly always a foot taller than most other men and women. Eric was wider than him but much shorter, and smarmy, so smarmy.
“My mentor, Logan took us out into the mountains and that’s where he broke me,” said Caelan panting, because he was annoyed he hadn’t yet managed to evoke the same fear and respect from Eric that he had from the others. “You and me, after this. One week. I’ll break ye, all right.”
Eric only looked delighted and that made Caelan even more determined to break the man.
Crossing frozen rivers, scaling ice-slick mountains, surviving off snow and rations—or whatever they could catch—Caelan knew it’d be the starvation that got to Eric first.
Most southern softies had never known proper starvation, not usually.
Again, another instance where Eric surprised Caelan, resorting to eating grass and any other bits from the ground they found which were mildly palatable. Caelan had emergency food in his bag, but he wasn’t going to tell Eric that.
If it wasn’t starvation that’d get him, then it’d certainly be the sleep deprivation as they slept beneath the stars with no tent, no protection except a sleeping bag and their own wits.
Stags, randy cattle, all sorts of creatures might stumble upon them in the night and find their hoof or paw pressing into a soft, human body.
Eric took it all. Blinked open his eyes every morning like it was a summer’s day. Ate grass. Drank the snow. Gritted his teeth and powered through the pain as they prowled the land and were battered by the wind, snow and hail.
On the sixth night before the last day, Eric finally spoke. “What made ya think ya could break me?” The little cockney git spoke like a right scrote.
“Huvna I broken ye yet then, lad?” Caelan smirked, working with his knife on a long, straight tree branch to create a javelin.
He’d catch breakfast for them tomorrow. A treat since they’d made it this far, the two of them, without killing one another.
“I ain’t feeling too broken,” said Eric, in his rough South London accent.
“You need to be educated. You need to speak properly,” said Caelan, adopting his fake English tongue. “You need to be able to play whatever character, whenever, wherever. Do you understand?”
“This mean I’m gonna be your protégé for when you kick the bucket and they need another mug, eh? Cos ain’t that what happened to you?”
Caelan ignored the little scrote’s disrespect. “Utter one more word about my mentor and I’ll gut ye.”
“Well, you ain’t broke me, but he broke you, right? So I’d say that I’m better than you. After all.” Eric waited for Caelan to retaliate, respond, anything—but Caelan said nothing for a long time.
Until his anger had passed.
“I ken ye think yer clever, sonny. And maybe ye are cleverer than me. But what ye’ll never be is as strong.” Caelan scowled at his protégé. “And yer reckless. And carrying a big chip on that shoulder.”
