Love and War: Prologue

They were seven years old when they first met.

The boy was squatting in the dirt and watching a beetle as it flailed on the ground, stuck on its back.  He prodded it gently, turning it over onto its feet as the girl came up behind him.

"Whatcha looking at?" she asked.  The beetle flicked its wings indignantly, and sunlight flashed off the iridescent green.  "Ooh, that's a pretty bug."

She reached down to scoop it up, but he grabbed her wrist.  "Don't touch it!"  Sensing the danger, the beetle began to crawl away.

"Hey!" the girl exclaimed.  "Let go of me!"  She yanked her arm free and shoved him backward.

Startled, he landed on his bottom and stared up at her.  "That's not very nice," he informed her.  "Girls shouldn't push."

"Oh yeah?  Well, boys shouldn't grab.  It's your own fault you were beat by a girl."

Now the boy was glowering.  "I could beat you any day.  You just pushed me when I wasn't expecting it."  He stood up and brushed off his pants.

"You wish!" she retorted, fists on hips in a challenging stance.

"I'd prove it, but you're probably too scared."

In reply, the girl lunged at him and knocked him back to the ground.  Before he knew what was happening, she was on top of him raining down punches.

He recovered quickly, however, and began to hit back.  They fought together by the road, becoming a fierce, many-limbed cloud of dust.  After a few minutes of tussling, the boy managed to force his way to the top.  He sat over her with his knees on her arms, pinning her down.

"Give up?" he grinned.

"Fine!  For now.  Just get off of me, you oaf!" she snarled.

He quickly obliged, and the two of them lay side-by-side as they tried to recover their breath.  He could feel a lump swelling above his ear, and she had a nasty scrape along her left forearm.

"This isn't the end of it, you know," she threatened.  "I'm going to get you one of these days, and you won't even know what hit you."

"You wish," he answered.

When they stood up, however, the girl's eyes opened wide in horror.  "Mommy's going to kill me!" she wailed as she looked down at her filthy dress.

"I think I'm dead, too," he groaned as he brushed a clod of dirt out of his hair.  "Just this morning Mum warned me not to play in the mud again."

Enmity forgotten in the face of a common foe, the two children rushed away from the road and into the forest, where they jumped into a stream to rinse the dirt from their clothing.  Even returning home sopping wet was preferable to a coat of dust, and they dried off some while they walked together in the sunlight.  By the time they had to go home for lunch, they were almost completely dry.

Later in the afternoon, they met up again at the same spot on the road.  They each grinned to see the other had survived the parental encounter, and then they ran off to play in the woods.

After that, the two would play together every day.  Before long they had become best friends.

~ ~ ~

He first realized that he loved her when they were ten years old.

It was the last day of school, and everyone had been forced into fancy outfits for the graduation ceremony.  It was one of the rare occasions when the girl was clean, hair pulled back and neatly curled.  As she squirmed in her itchy and suffocating dress, the boy noticed how the red fabric made her dark eyes stand out rather strikingly.  He pondered this for a while during the schoolmaster's speech, and soon he came to the conclusion that she was really very pretty.  He wondered why he had never noticed before.

This epiphany remained with him the next day, even when she was covered in grass stains and smudges of dirt and wearing her boyish breeches.  She observed that he was more pensive than usual but attributed his quietness to worry about the coming school year.

After a week, though, the girl grew annoyed and slightly uncomfortable about the amount of time he spent silently staring at her.  However, it still came as a surprise when she met him one day and he handed her a bouquet of wild flowers.

"I like you, and I think you're beautiful," he told her in uncharacteristic shyness.

At first the girl just looked at him in numb shock, but then anger bubbled up.  "Stop it!" she demanded, stomping her foot for emphasis.  "You're my best friend!  You can't think about me like that!"

She immediately felt guilty as his face fell in disappointment.  Her vexation faded, and she began to plead instead.  "Can we just go back to the way it was before and pretend this never happened?  Please don't be sad.  I like you because you're my friend, and I don't want to lose you.  Please?"

He would take what he could get.  "Of course," he sighed.  He followed her into the forest to where they were building a fort, leaving the flowers forgotten on the ground.

For a while the two of them felt a degree of awkwardness when they were together, but by the end of the summer it had worn off completely.  The boy was careful to keep his thoughts to himself, and everything was back to normal the way she wanted.  Neither of them would allow something so trifling to come between them for long.

~ ~ ~

When they were fifteen, she finally realized that she loved him back.

In her opinion, the boy was far too kind and generous for his own good.  A new girl had moved to their town, the daughter of a cobbler, a flaxen-haired beauty with a soft laugh like the tinkling of bells.  Nearly every young male in the town immediately fell in love with her.  They showed off for her in the most ridiculous ways possible, but she was too shy to offer much encouragement or maintain their interest for long.  It was also difficult for her to find friends among the female population, for no one was willing to come near her out of their fear of comparison.  Only the one boy was able to engage her in conversation and make her feel truly welcome, and before long he had become her unofficial guide and only friend.

The old girl, as she began to think of herself, decided that they spent entirely too much time together.  Sometimes she would join them, but she would usually stay away as long as she could stand to be out of the boy's company.  The two girls were very civil to one another, and their strained politeness was able to keep the boy in blissful ignorance of their mutual dislike.

However, he did notice that as the cobbler's daughter opened up and became more talkative, the old girl grew increasingly silent and brooding.  He was worried about her and wanted to know what was wrong, but he had a difficult time finding her alone without the new girl hovering nearby.

He finally got his chance on a rainy spring morning when it was too soggy and cold for anyone else to stay outdoors for long.  He eagerly went to her house, but he was surprised by her hostility when he arrived.  After opening the door to permit his entry, she ignored his feeble attempts at small talk and refused to initiate any kind of conversation.

They quickly lapsed into an uncomfortable silence, his stomach growing queasy in nervousness and despair.  He was trying in vain to think of a way to get rid of the breach between them when she asked in irritation, "Why are you here?"

Startled and hurt, he searched for a reply.  "Because I miss you," he said eventually.

Her eyes drilled into his.  "You miss me?" she repeated skeptically.  "Why?"

He shrugged, uncomfortable but determined to explain.  "You've been distant recently.  It seems like... something is upsetting you."

"And what might that be, do you think?"  Her voice was dangerously calm.

He frowned, frustrated.  "I was hoping you would tell me."

She watched him for a moment before speaking.  "Maybe I just can't stand it when my best friend is trailing after some blonde beauty like a lovesick calf.  Maybe I'm not the one who's been distant at all, maybe you're the one who's been spending all your time with her instead of with the girl you've known for years."  The fury abruptly faded from her expression, and she turned away to stare blankly out the window.

He blinked in confusion, momentarily baffled.  "Is this all about her, then?  Are you... jealous?"

She did not answer or shift her gaze, but her cheeks reddened self-consciously.  This surprised him even further.  He had never seen her blush before.

Then his bemusement faded into relief, and he took her hands in his.  "She's not my type, you know," he told her.  "Too docile and dependent.  Besides, I much prefer dark hair."

She looked up at him.  "Oh."  She paused.  "Really?"

He nodded solemnly.  "Really."

"Well, in that case....  It was really good of you to help her settle in and find her way around.  But... I don't think she'll need you so much any more."

He smiled.  "I think you're right, she's much more comfortable here now."

Unexpectedly, she wrapped her arms around him and hugged him tightly.  "I've missed you too," she whispered.

They stood there for a moment before he pulled back.  "Let's go riding."

"It's raining," she pointed out.

"So?"  He raised his eyebrows in a playful challenge.  "What's wrong with a little rain?"

"Nothing at all," she retorted.  "Race you to the stable!"

They were friends again, and the boy was careful to avoid spending too much time with the cobbler's daughter for the duration of her residence in their town.  By the next month, the cobbler had provided the entire population with new footwear, so he and his family moved on to a new village.

~ ~ ~

They kissed for the first time the next spring.

News had come that the girl's older brother, who had joined an anarchist group in the city, had been killed in a skirmish.

She locked herself in her bedroom and refused to come out for any reason, not for meals and not for the memorial service at the church.  Her family heard enough noise from her room to know she was alive, but never heard a single sob or wail.

After three days, the boy knew he had to do something to end her insalubrious lamentation.  When she failed to respond to his knocking and calling at the door, he climbed a trellis and forced his way through the window.

Her face, so pale and gaunt and blank, terrified him more than her silence.  She did not seem to notice his presence until he lifted her thin form into his arms and carried her down the stairs.  She struggled a bit as he walked out of the house, but she was too weak with hunger to stop him.

He brought her to their fort in the woods, where he had left a picnic basket for her revival.  "Eat," he ordered.

She ate.

That day, he did everything he could think of to bring her back.  He showed her his banjo, which he secretly had been teaching himself to play for the past two months.  He strummed a few verses of "The Dancing Lass" and butchered it so thoroughly that she laughed out loud.  He swore to himself that he would never play the song again, for it could never sound so miraculous as it did then.

He walked with her along the river.  When they came to their favorite waterhole, he drew her into a hug.  "You stink," he told her, then pushed her backward into the frigid water.  He tossed her a block of soap from his pocket and turned his back so she could wash.  A moment later, her heavy and soaking dress came flying into his back, nearly knocking him over.  He grinned and laid it across a wide rock to dry in the sun.

She climbed out of the water a while later, dripping wet and sulking.  He very studiously ignored the thin, damp fabric of her petticoat.  This gave her the opportunity to complete her revenge by shoving him unexpectedly into the river, boots and all.  She jumped back into the water after him, and they began a splashing war as they had so often done as children.

While they warmed up back in the fort, the boy gently brushed out three days' worth of knots from the girl's long and still-dripping hair.  She was staring out the glassless round window, watching the slanted yellow sunlight dance across the forest floor as the trees swayed in a small breeze.

"He told me he would come back soon," she said suddenly.  "He told me he would be fine, that he wouldn't get hurt.  It's the only lie he ever told me."

He set down the brush behind him on the wooden bench he was straddling.  Slowly, he pulled her back into his chest and rested his chin upon her nearly dry head.

She jerked away with a shaky gulp of air and turned around on the bench so she was facing him.  "Don't," she pleaded.  "Stop being so nice, it's going to make me cry, and I can't cry, I promised myself."

"It's okay to cry," he said softly.

"No!" she shouted with growing hysteria.  "No, it's not okay!  He never cried.  He told me to be brave."  Her eyes were stretched wide as she held back the tears.  "He never cried," she repeated in a whisper.

"Do you remember when you broke your arm falling out of a tree?" the boy asked quietly.  "He cried then, to see you hurting."

Those huge brown eyes met his blue gaze.  "Really?  He… he did?"

He nodded.  "He loved you."

Her eyes dropped back down to her hands.  "I loved him too," she breathed.  "So much."

He could see that she was about to lose control, so he wrapped his arms around her and drew her close.  After a moment of stiff resistance, she collapsed against him, clung to him tightly, and sobbed for all she was worth.  He rocked her back and forth and stroked her hair, ignoring the tears that rolled down his own cheeks.

Neither of them knew how long they sat there grieving together.  When their faces had finally dried, the sky outside was turning pink and yellow.  Without speaking, they ran to their favorite tree and climbed up to watch the falling dusk.

They were fifty feet above the pinecone-littered forest floor and surrounded by the watercolors of sunset when the girl leaned over to the boy and touched his lips with hers.  "You're the best friend anyone could have," she told him.  "Thank you."

"You're worth it," he whispered back, and as the sun disappeared behind the distant hills, he pulled her into another kiss.

Her hair was almost entirely dry by the time he walked her home.

~ ~ ~

They were 18 when they finally used the words "I love you."

The girl wasn't sure why it was so difficult to say.  She knew she did love him and wanted him to know it too, but somehow she could never manage the loaded phrase.  It was serious, it was scary, and it was too true.

The boy was always on the verge of saying it, but he held back in fear of her response.  How could he be sure that she felt as strongly for him as he did for her?  Would she grow angry, as she had when they were young?

Instead they expressed themselves through small gifts, kisses, and the multitude of hours spent with each other.  Their parents rolled their eyes as the two young adults became more and more inseparable.  They bickered constantly, argued heatedly, and debated nearly every topic imaginable.  Somehow, though, their fighting only strengthened their relationship.

The boy's family owned several horses, which the girl adored.  When the girl's favorite mare went into labor for the first time, the boy fetched her immediately.  They camped out in the stable together, talking softly to each other and to the mare when she became distressed.  When it grew dark, they brought out a lantern.  The contractions began soon after.

The two humans fell into a tense silence as the horse's pained bellows grew louder.  They grasped each other's hands for assurance.  The boy had witnessed several foalings before, but this first-time mother was having a particularly difficult time.  By the time the full moon had reached its zenith above the stable, they knew something had gone wrong.

The mare lay on her side, kicking occasionally and gasping for breath.  She was dull-eyed and thoroughly worn out, pushing with little energy or heart.  It was time to intervene.

The boy washed his hands with a bar of soap in a bucket of well-water.  Then, gritting his teeth, he reached inside the mare to assess the situation.  "The foal isn't sitting right," he grunted.  "The neck is twisted backward."

The girl gripped her skirt, staring at the mare as if she could will away the pain.  She longed to comfort the horse, but she knew to keep her distance for both their sakes.

"Is he alive?" she asked, voice thick with concern.

"Can't tell."  The boy worked slowly, carefully.  The mare did not react.  "There," he said abruptly, withdrawing his arm.  "The head is facing the front now.  C'mon girl, just a little more now."

The boy and the girl encouraged the mare, and suddenly, after a few more struggling heaves — something large and slimy slipped into the straw.

The girl rushed over to the limp form, located the foal's head, and began to scrub roughly at the nose with her sleeve.  After a few seconds, the head twitched away from her hands and they heard a sharp intake of breath.

"He's okay," the girl exclaimed with a giddy sense triumph.  The mare lifted her head and nickered in the way of mothers, then pulled herself to her feet with renewed enthusiasm.  She began to lick her foal with a vehement passion, chortling with pleasure all the while.

"We did it!" the boy affirmed.  Though they were both covered with blood and sticky birthing fluid, he threw his arms around the girl almost violently.

"I love you," she giggled into his shoulder, relief thick in her voice.

He hadn't known it was possible for his grin to grow any wider.  "I love you too.  Will you marry me?"

The girl looked up at him.  "You're such an idiot.  Of course I will."

They were still kissing when the colt took his first steps on his gangly knock-kneed legs.

~ ~ ~

Just a month later, they saw each other for the last time.

They were caught in the woods just before dusk when it started to rain.  As they rushed to their fort for shelter, the rain grew into a downpour.

They stumbled into the small structure holding hands, dripping wet and laughing.

"I told you the spring still had a storm left in her," the girl giggled as she wrung out her braid.

"Isn't that what I said?  And then you disagreed, you claimed it would stay dry until autumn."

"Don't be ridiculous," she admonished him with playful exasperation.  "You should know by now that I'm always the one who was right."

"Ah, yes, silly me," he laughed, humoring her.  "Of course you are, love."

He lit a fire beneath the newly installed stone chimney, and they settled together on the bare floor in front of the warming flames.  The rain pounded loudly on the roof, but the boy had finally tracked down and plugged all of the leaks.  This fort, which had begun as a fragile shanty so many years ago, was now surprisingly sturdy, comfortable, and functional.

The girl leaned back against the boy's chest.  "I love it here," she smiled lazily.  "It's so far away from the rest of the world, and it's filled with so many memories."  She picked up one of his hands and examined it in the firelight.  "We could live here, you know," she continued.  "When we're married.  We could add a few more rooms and buy some furniture.  This is so much nicer than some boring old townhouse or ranch.  Don't you think?"

"That's an excellent idea," he agreed.  "I wonder who owns this land, though?"

"Oh," she frowned.  "I hadn't thought of that.  It would be horribly expensive to buy a plot here in the forest, wouldn't it."

"I don't think that will be much of a problem," he replied airily.

The girl recognized a hint of smugness in his voice.  She pulled away and turned to face him.  "What aren't you telling me?" she demanded.

"Well… I was hoping to keep it a surprise for a little longer, but I suppose now is as good a time as any.  Since it came up."

"Yes?" she prodded, leaning forward in her impatience.

The boy grinned.  "I was just offered a rather high-paying position in the military."  He saw her expression darken and hastened to reassure her.  "I'll have to go to the capitol for a while, but no more than a year.  Then, if I'm impressive enough, I can take my work back here.  We can get married when I return, and we'll have enough money to buy any house or plot of land you want.  Or, if you like, we can marry right away and you can come with me.  I'm sure there would be plenty for you to do in the city."

The girl did not look any less upset.  She sat back on her heels and stared at the expanse of floor between herself and the boy.

Outside there was a flash of lightning.  The boy counted the seconds until the corresponding peal of thunder before he continued his attempts at consolation.

"I won't be fighting, if that's what you're worried about," he explained.  "I'll be doing a lot of planning and organizing, strategizing and recruiting.  So I'm not in any danger."  He reached for her hand, but she leapt to her feet and took several long strides to the window.

"Why you?" she asked in a low voice he could not decipher.  A second flash of lightning momentarily illuminated her stony face.  The thunder rolled.

The boy watched her carefully as he rose to his feet.  "Apparently the mayor recommended me," he answered slowly.  "The state has been looking for intelligent, dependable young men to help stamp out the rebellion.  It's growing stronger, you know.  If we don't quash it right away, the country is going to turn into a mess – economy, social order, everything torn to pieces."

"But what if they're right?"  She was still dangerously quiet and tense.

"Who?"  He frowned.  He was growing more and more perplexed by her reaction.  Honestly, he had expected her to be pleased by his news.  Not… angry?  Disturbed?  Whatever she was.

"The rebels," she spat, finally turning to face him.  "What makes you think that the government is always right?  What makes them so noble and just?  Maybe you should be helping the rebels instead.  Did you ever consider that?"

The boy felt an icy shiver in his heart as he understood.  He tried to speak with confidence.  "The government is what protects us from external and internal threats.  It provides a system of justice.  It gives structure to society.  If the rebels get their way, everything will erupt into chaos and lawlessness.  They believe in violence and anarchy for the sake of excitement.  We owe our loyalty to our government — to our country, for our country's sake."

"Is that what you think?" the girl demanded, her voice rising.  "You believe my brother wasted his life for some worthless cause, that he was just throwing an ungrateful, unfounded tantrum for the fun of it?"  Painful emotions bled through her voice.

The boy was sorely regretting the conversation.  "Now, love, I didn't mean it like that."  He reached forward to catch her hand, but she twisted away from him.

"Don't patronize me!" she screamed over the roaring rain and growling thunder.  "Just tell me, is that your opinion of him?  Do you think he was some idiot shouting for disorder just so he could get a thrill?  Do you believe he was that stupid and self-centered?"

His patience snapped, and he shouted back at her.  "I think he was a misguided teenager — yes, an idiot who spent too much time with the wrong people and was stupid enough to get himself killed!"

Lightning flared, and he saw her face clearly.  Her eyes were brimming with anger, pain, sorrow, betrayal.  "Damn you," she whispered.

The girl whirled around and threw open the door.  The boy turned his face away from the fierce wind and pelting droplets that rushed into the room.  When he looked again, the door had closed and the girl was gone.

A thin silver band rolled across the floor, glinting in the firelight until it came to a stop in front of him.  Three small opals glared up at him accusingly.  In a state of frozen horror, he stared back at the promise ring.

The boy was alone.  But he was no longer a boy; the weight in his chest made him feel like an old man.

The lightning flashed.