He finds Fabiola sitting by her pond, picking blades of grass and chewing the roots thoughtfully. It's always been her pond, his sister, ever since she grew large enough to toddle out of their mother's sight. It drove Mother out of her mind at first, but Fabiola never goes far; she just likes her pond, the plants that grow there, the way the birds will land near her if she holds very, very still.

She's growing like spindleweed, Krem thinks, eyeing the mud clinging to her from knee to toe. Fabiola's gone wading through her pond again, probably chasing some poor creature that only stopped for a drink, and it wasn't so long ago that the water would have reached her waist, and he'd have been scrubbing grime out of her dress for hours.

"Hey, little bean," he calls. She starts, then hastily spits out the grass before she turns to look at him. Her entire face lights up like a flashfire when she spots the arm held carefully behind his back.

"Is that a present?" Fabiola brushes her scraggly hair out of her eyes and cranes her head to the side, trying to glimpse what's in Krem's hand. "Did you bring me a present?"

Krem grins and angles his body to face her more squarely, keeping his hand carefully out of view. "I've no idea what you're talking about."

She rolls her eyes and reaches toward him, making expectant grabbing motions with her fingers. Krem laughs and hands it over.

The present is nothing big, really: it's just something he sewed with spare bits of cloth from Mother's basket, a haphazard nug with little plaidweave wings. Its eyes are stitched crookedly and one of its legs is significantly smaller than the others, but Fabiola's grin widens until it looks about to split her face in two. Maker, but he loves her, this spindly little creature who makes his chest twist tight and fond.

"A nug for the nuglet," he tells her. He flops down to sit at her side, then, crossing his legs in a way his mother definitely wouldn't approve of.

Fabiola flings both arms around his waist. Her free hand grips a fistful of his dress and she squeaks, "Thank you, thank you, thank you," somewhere into the vicinity of his left armpit.

He shoves her back gently with a hand on her forehead. "All right, all right," he says, still smiling so she knows he isn't serious, and she tosses the nug up once into the air. "No time for playing with it now," he adds, "Mother sent me to bring you home."

Fabiola sighs dramatically, turning the nug over in her hands, and he thinks he knows how she feels: he'd prefer to stay here, too, in the warm evening air with the birds and the bugs chirping all around.

Instead of voicing this thought, he turns to put his back to Fabiola, getting his feet under him so she can climb up on his back. She flings herself at him and wraps her scrawny legs around his hips, draping her arms over his shoulder and dangling the nug below his chin.

"Oof," he says, pretending to stagger under her weight. She giggles and locks her arms more securely around his neck, and he rises to take her home.

At dinner, their mother looks even more tired than usual. Her face is drawn, her shoulders are slumped, and she eats her stew slowly, like an afterthought to the litany of tasks she's laying out for Krem.

"And I need you to darn those socks tonight," she says.

"Yes, mother."

"No more fooling around making stuffed creatures." At her side, Fabiola murmurs to her nug, unheeding of her mother's displeasure. "That can come after you've done your chores. I can't do everything myself."

Krem winces. "Sorry, mother."

"And do something about your hair, would you? That nice boy at the Donati farm, he might want to speak to you if you didn't look like a drowned fennec."

Krem nods, and he thinks, I could tell her now. The thought startles him, clear and sudden, and he looks at Fabiola and his mother and tries to imagine it. The application for service is under his mattress; he has his father's razor and old armor in a chest. He could, in theory, leave tonight. He would just have to tell them.

"Eat your stew," his mother says. It's not so much an admonishment as a reminder, like he might forget his body needs food. She looks so tired, his mother: sometimes it seems like it takes everything she has to keep going, keep them fed and clothed and warm, now that his father is gone.

Krem eyes the two of them from across the table. Fabiola runs a hand along her nug's back, and their mother rubs absently at her own shoulder, like the muscle is sore. Krem takes a bite of his stew. He has socks to darn; the application will keep for another night.

The boys in his rank complain, but training is the best part of Krem's day. He likes the drills; he likes the order of it, the sense of purpose rising from moving as a unit, even the way his muscles strain under the wooden gear. He also, predictably, likes hitting things.

He's good at it, too, if the way that Caius sidles up to him after inspection is anything to go by. Caius says, "You know that pommel strike you did yesterday, in the training yard?"

Krem knows the one. He'd knocked the head clear off a training dummy. That had been a good moment. "Yes?"

"Do you think you can teach me?"

"You sure you don't want me to teach you how to make a bed first, Caius?" Krem says, raising an eyebrow and nodding at Caius's cot. "Those corners are a disgrace."

Caius smacks him in the back of the head. Krem laughs.

"Just thought maybe we should start with the basics before we get to the complicated stuff."

"What've beds got to do with fighting, jackass?"

"Well—"

"Shut it, both of you," says Junian, standing at the next cot over. He's rubbing his eyes like he's just got a face full of deepstalker spit. "It's too early for this bullshit."

One of the Tituses, the light-haired one, waves from the door, then, and threatens to eat all their pancakes if they don't get their asses to the canteen. The boys shove and jostle and race each other out of the room.

Krem does end up teaching Caius the pommel strike, late that afternoon. Caius isn't bad, truth be told: he hasn't quite got Krem's muscle mass, and his footwork could use some serious improvement, but his stamina is impressive, and more importantly, he wants to learn. Once Krem shows him how to throw his weight behind the hit, Caius is bashing training dummies like a professional. He whoops aloud after one particularly satisfying hit, the crack of wood on wood echoing through the training yard, and Krem finds himself grinning right along with him.

Finally, Caius lowers his sword and wipes the sweat off his brow. "All right, one more of those and my arm is going to pop out of my shoulder." He shades his eyes with his free hand and looks to the sky. It's not late; the sun is dwindling, but still visible, casting an orange glow and long shadows over the yard. Caius says, "Still some free time left today. You up for a swim?"

"Nah," Krem says. "Think I'll just go relax in the barracks."

"You always want to relax in the barracks," Caius protests, swinging an easy arm around Krem's shoulders. "You sure you even know how to swim?"

Krem elbows him in the ribs. "Maybe I just don't want to show you my tan lines."

"Maybe if you ever took that armor off you wouldn't have that problem." Something inside Krem goes cold, then, seeping from his chest to his arms and his legs. Oblivious, Caius continues, "It must reek in there. Make sure you're downwind of me whenever you do decide to take that thing off."

The cold sensation abates. Krem shoves Caius away and he laughs, says, "Last chance," and takes off running for the creek. Krem watches him go, then turns to gather up the weapons they'd been using and put them back in storage. Somebody has to.

"C'mon Krem," Bull thunders, "drink it!" He claps Krem on the back so hard it reverberates in Krem's teeth.

"Yeah," Rocky adds, "we haven't got all day!"

Krem eyes the vial in front of him. "Technically, you do. We have nowhere to be."

"But we don't want to wait all day," Dalish puts in. "We want you to drink the gross dragon blood."

Bull makes a wounded noise. "It's not gross," he says. "It's majestic."

"No, it seems like it'll be pretty gross," Krem says. Across from him, Skinner nods, her eyes wide and shining. He's not even going to ask about that one.

Stitches pats him on the shoulder. He says, "Do you want to be a reaver or don't you?"

He does. Training with Bull and the rest of the team has pushed him past every limit he had thought he'd had, but even that can only get him so far. He needs to specialize in his training, and Bull pulled some strings to find him to finest reaver expert this side of Nevarra. Krem's found the primers, he's dug up the herbs, he's even read Bull's excruciatingly boring manual on reaver methods cover to cover. He cooked the whole concoction up and the guys got some mead in him, and now all that's left is to drink the fucking thing.

Still, he knows for all their teasing, the Chargers wouldn't fault him if he wanted to stop here.

He puts his hand around the vial. "Bottoms up," he says flatly, and tips it back.

It is, in a word, disgusting. Salty and bitter and slimy, somehow, and it burns on the way down; he thinks there must be some sort of poison in this shit. Do dragons just sit around drinking poison for fun? Is that why the chief likes them so much? His eyes water and sting and his throat tries to close up, he sputters around the last dregs, but he manages to choke it down.

It takes him a moment, but eventually the fire spreading through his chest and stomach settles into a warm, pleasant sort of glow, and he can sit upright again. Either the dragon blood is working its magic, or he's drunker than he thought.

The Chargers are all staring at him, wide-eyed and expectant. Stitches says, "Well?"

Krem shrugs one shoulder and wipes his mouth. "Not bad."

They cheer. Bull smacks him on the back again and shouts, "That's my boy!" He looks around, grinning like he's the one who just coated his insides with dragon blood. "Where's that damn barkeep? Next round's on me!"

The Chargers excel at many things, most of them bloody, but their specialty could easily be a good old-fashioned celebration. They drink; they play games and sing songs and place bets on whether Rocky is going to get that serving girl to give him a second glance. Stitches announces to the room at least four times that they've got their very own brand new baby reaver, and Dalish keeps draping her arms over Krem's shoulders and telling him she's so proud of him.

At one point, she says, "Oh, you should tell us a secret!" Apparently decided, she turns to wave everyone over from their talking and flirting and games of Wicked Grace. "Krem's going to tell us a secret!"

"What?" Krem says, frowning, over the ensuing din. "Why am I telling you a secret?"

She beams. "We're going to start a new tradition!"

"Yes," Stitches says, approaching their table and slinging an arm around Krem's shoulders. "New rule: you drink dragon blood, you spill your guts." Behind him, Grim grunts.

Krem cranes his neck to look at Stitches. "Why, you planning to join me in this club?"

Stitches makes a face. "Hell no."

"Stop stalling and tell the secret!" Rocky cuts in.

Krem tries to protest, but Bull starts up a chant of Se-cret! Se-cret! Se-cret! and the rest of the Chargers join in. He sighs and puts his mug down on the table.

"Fine," he says, and they all go quiet and lean in. "My secret is…"

He pauses. Skinner flicks him in the ear.

"My secret is," he repeats, glaring at Skinner and rubbing at his ear, "that I never sort my socks. In fact, I'm wearing mismatched socks right now."

The Chargers all start talking at once. "Cop out!" Bull cries, even as Rocky says, "Come on," and Dalish starts to laugh her inelegant, snorting laugh. He's assaulted a few more times, and they disperse.

The night goes on. Grim buys another round of drinks. Eventually, somehow, Krem ends up on the floor, draped across Bull's lap.

He watches Bull for a while, his loose posture and that crooked smile he gets whenever he watches the Chargers mess around. This thought, this persistent, aggravating, ill-timed thought, it keeps pushing its way into Krem's brain.

Not right now, some part of him thinks, it can wait, but he finds his mouth opening anyway. Will be damned, Krem says, "Not sure I ever thanked you, for saving me the way you did."

Bull looks down at him and grins, not comprehending. "Which time was that? I save your ass on a daily basis."

"When you lost your eye. No, listen," he adds, when Bull opens his mouth, "not for that part. I'm not sure who I'd be, what I'd be doing, if it hadn't been you who found me that night. If you hadn't offered me the job. Not sure I'd still be here. I'm glad it was you."

The words seem to ring between them. It seems such a small thing, now that he's said it aloud, but Krem's heart, that mutinous fuck, is trying to pound its way clear out of his chest.

If Bull notices, he mercifully doesn't comment. His eyes are kind; they show no pity, and he simply tips his head and kisses Krem sloppily on the cheek. The kiss gets Krem's ear, mostly, the smack of Bull's lips magnified like an echo in a cave, and Krem makes a show of rubbing it off before he disentangles his legs from Bull's moves to join Rocky and Skinner at their game.

He falls asleep that night with his head nestled on Grim's shoulder and Dalish's legs thrown across his lap. He wakes in the morning to an unholy crick in his neck, a hangover the size of Antiva, and a room full of his favourite assholes, each of them snoring or grumbling or drinking their morning ale. Krem should be getting up too, he thinks, but there's an arm around his shoulders — he can't quite work out whose — and a presence warm and solid at his back. He doesn't move. He's doing okay right here.