Page 17 of Wings of War

The nurse eyed him with utter boredom. “By order of all three kings of the Alliance, all soldiers, warriors, and civilian contractors stationed on base are to receive vaccinations so that in the case of war the elven healers can focus on healing wounds rather than staving off disease. You are not exempt even as an elf.”

Fieran could only imagine the resistance there must have been among the elven warriors for this particular vaccine, if it involved getting the shot in the rear end rather than the arm. “I know, and I’m only—”

“The vaccines have been tested and certified by a team of elven healers.” The nurse spoke as if she’d said the same speech multiple times.

This was what he’d signed up for. All bodily autonomy went out the window the moment he signed that enlistment paper. The army owned him—body and vaccines and all—until his enlistment was up.

One of the drill sergeants was headed in their direction. Fieran hurriedly turned his back to the nurse, dropped his shorts, and presented his rear end to her.

A moment later, the needle the size of a sword stabbed into his butt cheek with such force it seemed the nurse was trying to jab all the way to his hip bone. The viscous substance hurt as it pushed into him, and Fieran gritted his teeth against the pain.

Finally, the nurse withdrew the needle. Fieran yanked up his shorts, telling himself that he was not going to rub his butt no matter how much his stab wound hurt.

The nurse initialed the clipboard, then handed it back to him. “Next.”

Merrik had gone white, though his ears were burning red. He handed over his clipboard, mumbled “Sixty-Seven”, turned around, dropped his shorts, and bent over as if he had to get it over with before he could chicken out.

Fieran didn’t see Merrik actually get jabbed as he stepped into a hallway. He waited in a short line before he was ushered into another room where three chairs stood, barbers with clippers waiting behind each.

He sat in the first chair, and the barber set to work on his red hair. As Fieran already kept his hair short, it wouldn’t take much to get it to regulation buzz cut length.

Merrik stepped into the room, and somehow his face paled further. He straightened his shoulders, marched to the chair next to Fieran’s, and sat down rigidly, his long, elven style hair flowing over his bare shoulders and back.

Fieran tried to tilt his head and catch Merrik’s eye, but the barber grabbed the top of his head and forced him to look forward.

Out of the corner of his eye, Fieran could only watch as Merrik gripped the armrests of the chair with white knuckles, his jaw set, and stared straight ahead as, snip by snip, the barber cut off the warrior-long hair Merrik had worn all his life.

Fieran couldn’t quite swallow back the sour taste rising in his throat. This struck home far harder even than writing that If I Die letter. Flying was his dream, but Merrik was the one sacrificing for it.

It was far too late for Fieran to tell Merrik not to follow him, not this time. It had been selfish of him to leap into this, just expecting Merrik to follow, without even stopping to think of the cost Merrik would pay to do so.

The barber working on Fieran’s hair finished far faster than the one hacking away at Merrik’s hair, so Fieran was rousted from his chair, told to brush off, then sent on to the next room long before Merrik was finished.

In the next room, Fieran joined a cluster of some of the other recruits. There, he was issued his uniforms and could finally dress. He was given two sets of uniform fatigues, matching drab green undershirts and undershorts, socks, and two pairs of boots.

The sergeant had him unlace one pair of boots, put a knot in the middle of the laces, then re-lace so that the knot was visible. Fieran was to wear the Knot Boots and the Not-Knot Boots every other day so that the other pair would have a chance to dry out. The sergeant would be checking that they wore the correct pair of boots on the right day.

Fieran packed his rucksack with the gear he’d been issued, following the barked instructions.

No sooner had he finished packing than the drill sergeant grabbed the rucksack and dumped it out, yelling out orders to repack the rucksack in between profanities that Fieran would have been squirming to hear, if he hadn’t been so busy scrambling to repack the bag.

Fieran stumbled as the man next to him bumped him in his scramble to stuff his items back into his bag. Dodging the others, Fieran repacked his rucksack, only to have the drill sergeant dump it all out again amid yelled curses and insults.

Merrik joined him, and soon the two of them were packing and re-packing their rucksacks until the drill sergeant was finally satisfied.

Sweating and prickling with pieces of hair still stuck to him, Fieran lugged his rucksack down the hall, Merrik just behind him.

At the end of the hall, a sergeant barked orders, directing everyone without magic to the left and those with magic to the right. A recruit who must have been half-troll entered the room, followed by one human who must be some kind of magician.

Inside the room, part of the room was walled off by protective glass. Inside the protective bubble sat a complicated apparatus of wires and machinery. In front of the bubble, a technician stood before an array of dials, buttons, levers, and flashing lights.

Fieran grimaced, recognizing the device. Uncle Lance developed it as a way to measure a person’s magic level. Uncle Lance had been obsessed with coming up with a way to quantify Dacha’s otherwise unquantifiable magic, and he’d finally figured out a magical scale that was exponential rather than linear. That scale—the Marion Scale—became the universal way to judge magical power levels in the three Alliance Kingdoms.

The problem was that the device before him wasn’t designed to test magic as powerful as Fieran’s.

It wouldn’t have to be, normally. Most human magicians rated only a 1 to 5 at the highest. Even less powerful elves or trolls were 6 to 10. The more powerful elves and trolls were often up to 13. Only trolls or elves like Fieran’s uncles Rharreth and Weylind could get up to a 15. Anything beyond that was a range only shared by Fieran, his dacha, and his siblings. Oh, and one of his cousins.

The half-troll stepped into the protective bubble. When the technician nodded, the half-troll called up his white ice magic that swirled around his hands before spreading along the wires. Some of the lights flashed, beeps sounded, and something whirred. The technician made a few notes before he gestured to the half-troll and shut down the magical sensor.

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