Sweet Romance18 min read
The Little Quail and the General: How I Learned to Keep His Heart
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I was hiding under a wooden table when the camp leader finally stepped into our hut.
"I told you to stop crying," I said to the splintered corner of the table and meant it more than I ever meant anything. My voice came out like a small thing—thin, quick. It was easier to speak to wood than to the strangers who had made themselves my new family.
Footsteps stopped.
"Don't be ridiculous, Arielle." The voice was not kind by habit. It had iron in it. It had a hush that made even the men in the doorway flatten themselves against the threshold as if afraid the floor would give way. "Come out."
I did not move.
"She'll bite," someone muttered.
"She won't," another voice—firm, calm—said. "Arielle."
The name landed on me like a hand. I peered from under the table. Feet. Worn boots. Sun-heavy coat. A man whose shadow ate the bamboo mat.
"Please," I whispered. "Please don't let them take me."
He crouched. For a long second I only saw his hands—callused, careful. Then his face turned closer and I could see him: not a monster, not a king, just a man who had been cut by too many things and come up with a hardness that suited him oddly.
"You're safe here," he said, and the sound of those words was a soft, ridiculous thing in my chest. "Do you understand?"
"I—" I wanted to scoot backward and vanish. "I don't know. I don't know anything."
He smiled—or tried. The corner of his mouth moved, and it was almost a laugh.
"That's because you are a stubborn little quail," he said. "Come."
He reached under the table, lifted me by the waist, and I let myself go limp. His hands were warm. I blinked at him and the tears made small paths down my cheeks.
"Stop sobbing," he scolded, and I realized it was an act of closeness. "You're messy when you cry."
"You're mean," I said. My voice shook. "You are a mean general."
He paused, as if tasting the word. "General," he repeated. "It suits me better than 'mean.'"
"Why are you being so...gentle?" I asked before I could stop myself. "You have a whole camp full of men. You could be terrifying."
He covered my mouth with his fingers and pretended to think it over.
"Because you keep looking like a broken piece of pottery," he answered. "And I don't like broken things. I like things whole."
"Are you saying I'm not whole?" I demanded, and the challenge made my chest prickle.
His eyes went soft and then stern in the space of a blink. "You are inconveniently whole," he said. "Even when you hide, you take up my mind. That's the problem."
"Who are you?"
"Dallas Murray," he said. "Don't tell anyone I told you. It will make them think I kiss children's cheeks."
"You're very old," I said.
"You are fifteen," he returned.
"Do you always argue with children?"
"I argue with honesty." He set me on a wooden stool, and for the first time I saw up close the medals on his coat—careless things, dulled in the sun.
"We secured the road," someone outside announced. "Cooper says we can stay two more days."
"Good." Dallas straightened. He ruffled my hair with a hand that left a warmth in my scalp. "You can come with us."
"Where?" I asked. My mouth had run out of questions, but the next pushed forward anyway.
"With the men. We will teach you how to fetch water, and maybe how to stand when it rains."
"Do you teach kindness?" I asked. "Because I don't know how to be otherwise."
He paused like someone trying to find the right coin. "We will teach you whatever keeps you alive."
Days slipped like small reasons. I learned to carry green-bean soup without spilling a drop. I learned which men snored loudest and which hummed lullabies under their breath. I learned that Dallas could sit for hours with his back to the fire and watch the line where sky broke into trees, as if the world hid secrets there.
"He never speaks like that," Cooper said over the bowls one evening. "You've made him soft."
"Soft?" Dallas asked without looking up.
"Yes. You went under the table and made him watch," I said. People laughed, and I felt small and pleased.
"You're trouble," Dallas said, but later he added, "and humming is not a crime."
"Do you ever smile for anyone else?" I asked him once, daring myself. We sat on the edge of the watch platform and the valley spread below like a folded map.
He didn't answer right away. He turned his face toward mine slowly. The moonlight caught the line of his jaw and made it look less like iron and more like something shaped by wind.
"Sometimes," he said. "But not often."
"Why me?"
He looked at the darkened dish in his hands—the wooden cup had a hairline crack and a faded carving.
"Because you're loud even when you don't speak," he said. "You scrape at my thoughts like a child's fingernail across glass. It's an odd sound."
I tried to be insulted and failed.
One afternoon he sent Cooper down the mountain with a small band to fetch news and supplies. Cooper was careful but cheerful in a way that made him a good complement to Dallas's severity.
"Watch her," Dallas told Cooper. "Don't let her run off."
"I won't," Cooper promised, though he kept giving me looks like a man who wanted to steal my cakes.
When the men returned, Cooper was not alone. He brought a man with him who wore a soldier's pride like a second skin—muscle and sharp eyes. His name was Elroy Torres. He nodded at me but did not smile.
"Cooper said you'd be fine," Elroy said. His voice was clean-voiced and quiet.
"Are you his cousin?" I asked.
"No," Elroy said. "But we fight with the same songs. Would you like a song?"
"No," I said. I wanted to be polite, but my hands were full of dough figures I had been shaping all afternoon. Dallas had shown me how to roll the wet dough into little animals and bake them over the coals until they hardened into toys.
"You make faces for them," Elroy said with a hint of surprise. "They look happy."
"They are not supposed to be particularly valuable," Dallas said, catching my eye. "They're for laughter, not for showing."
"Good," Elroy said. "The men need laughter."
The camp settled into a rhythm. I went from corner to corner, speech to speech, attaching myself to rituals: the morning water, the midday watch, the way Dallas sharpened his blade while humming something none of us could name. He began to notice small things—if I had cut my hair banged a little too short, if my hands smelled of flour instead of river; he would frown and then do something about it without announcing why.
"You fed all the men today," I said once, a little proud.
"They fed themselves," he corrected.
"I mean you served them," I insisted.
He squinted. "You are easily proud."
"You served them," I said.
He reached and picked up my wrist, looking at the salt-and-ash in the palm. "You like serving," he said.
"I like making things," I said stubbornly. "Like the little dough quails."
"Ah." He smiled, a real one that made the corners of his mouth creak. "Then keep making them."
We had the kind of softness that is stitched with small acts. He would take off his cloak on cold nights and drape it over my shoulders. That made my heart thump like wood in a press.
"Stop taking my cloak," he told me once, but his hand lingered at my shoulder. "I'll freeze."
"You freeze when you speak of mountains," I teased.
"It's not polite to talk about mountains," he said. "They're menaces."
"Menaces with prettier hair," I offered.
He barked a laugh that surprised us both. It sounded like the camp kitchen tossed the right spice in.
One night, when the wind had come in a thin knife and the men were quiet in their bunks, I woke with a dreamless fear. The memory of mountains—sharp teeth and crowds of men—had crawled into my throat. I pulled my cloak tight and slithered out.
"Dallas?" I whispered into the darkness.
He was up on the watch platform, leaning against the rail, looking like he belonged there more than anywhere else.
"Do you ever get tired of worrying?" I asked. I hated the way my voice caught.
He didn't answer at once. The silence felt like a held breath.
"When I am with you, I worry less and more at the same time," he said finally. "It's strange."
"Then don't you think that's dangerous?" I asked.
He tilted his head. "Dangerous things are often the most honest," he said.
"That sounds like a lie," I insisted.
"It sounds like a promise," he corrected.
He had always been a kind of enemy to my expectations—so steady and yet capable of breaking into easy, gleaming jokes.
Once, when the men had laughed themselves into a stupor after a successful raid, Dallas sat at the edge of the fire and watched me. I was tired from running about, my hands dusted with flour. He took one of the dough quails and rolled it between his fingers.
"How many did you make?" he asked.
"Too many," I said. "But they keep asking for them."
He put the little quail in my palm and rubbed his thumb across the small crack.
"Keep one," he said. "Keep them all. I don't know."
"Why do you care?" I demanded, suddenly furious and afraid, the old instinct to run rising like a tide.
"Because when you are happy, that means we have done right," he said simply. "Because when you are small and safe, that is a debt I like to keep."
"Debt?" I repeated.
He nodded once. "Yes. Debts. We are all in debt to the ones who keep us from falling."
I didn't know what to say to that.
When the orders came down to move—an imperial command—Dallas wrote a message and tied it to his belt. He left the camp polished and grim. "I'll be back soon," he told me.
"Will you?" I asked. I was loud and foolish with fear.
He took my small hands and held them like two small birds. "Yes," he promised. "Unless a mountain eats me."
"You better not let that happen," I said. It sounded like a child's treaty, but it had the weight of a vow.
He left for the front. The line between our lives thinned to letters and the way the men brought back news with ragged breath.
Weeks passed with the steady, dull pain of distance. Then the horizon burned. Reports came in: the enemy had gathered like a storm and the battle had been harsh. Dallas was one of the last standing. He was wounded—an arrow through the chest—and yet still he fought.
I learned to sleep on a half-shred of courage and wake with a bigger fear.
"He's gone after the bandits," Cooper told me quietly. "We don't know when he'll be back."
"Did he send a messenger?" I demanded, forcing my voice into armor.
Cooper shifted his weight. "He sent a note. Said don't worry."
"Who writes so little when the world is on fire?"
"I suppose he thought words were too small," Cooper said.
When the news came that the camp had burned, I ran like a thing with no history to collect. The fires were a map of panic. I could smell smoke on the men who came back—on their scarves, on their shirts. The hills were a bruise of ash.
"Dallas?" I called until my voice tore.
"He'll be back," Elroy said, grabbing my sleeve. "He will find you."
"But the camp—" My hands wanted to shake the sky and ask for an explanation.
Elroy's thumb was rough at my wrist. "We will rebuild," he said.
The days made a hard, crystalline loop after that. I slept fitfully. Every shout made me drop to my knees. Every man with a scar made me search the crowd. I tied a token into my hair—a little dough quail Dallas had touched by mistake—and kept it there like a charm.
Then one day a man staggered in, eyes rolling, blood on his hands.
"There's a fire in the east," he gasped. "They moved like locusts. We held for three days."
"Where is he?" I demanded. The word was a hammer.
They pointed, and I ran until my lungs burned and my knees thought of surrender. A broken trail led like a wound into the trees. I ran, and the trees swallowed me.
I found a pit—someone's misstep, a trap of nature—and my heart clenched. "Arielle!" a voice called from the dark.
"Dallas!" I screamed, and then body memory took over. I scrambled and tore through thorns and branches until I found him half-buried and pale.
His chest was a place of blood and fabric, the arrow's shaft still trembling. He was alive. He blinked at me like someone waking from a heavy sleep.
"You came," he said. His voice was thin.
"I thought you were gone," I cried. I climbed into the pit and pressed my palm to him. "I thought I would never see you again."
He tried to sit and failed. "Do not be dramatic," he managed. "It hurts my eyes."
I found a strip of cloth and tied it around his chest. He let me. He closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them again to stare at me like someone who had found a small, ridiculous treasure.
"Why didn't you leave the mountain?" he murmured.
I laughed without humor. "I couldn't. Who would eat the cold if I left?"
He coughed. Blood came. I did not flinch. I had watched men die in hard, slow ways and learned that hands matter more than prayers.
They carried him back on a litter made from poles and men who thundered down the trail. I walked alongside. We were the patchwork of what remained of our people.
When Dallas woke, he found the camp rebuilt in a new place, smaller perhaps, but alive. He found that I'd slept on his boot the whole night, wakefulness stitched into my bones.
"You are stubborn," he said when he saw me blink awake from a small, uncomfortable doze.
"I am trying to be useful," I replied.
"You are already useful," he said. "You keep everyone softer."
We settled, for a while, into the cozy rhythms that had always disguised a certain truth: I belonged to him now not because of a decree but because my days had been traded for hours of his attention. He taught me how to carry firewood without getting burned. I showed him how to make small dough animals that did not look like mistakes.
There came a day when news traveled too fast. A bandit leader named Gerardo Fischer—cruel, loud, and efficient—had preyed on the valley and taken what could not run away. There were rumors that he had a string of women under his lanterns, treated like coin. The men in our camp remembered this man. They did not forget names like he was a toothache.
Dallas said nothing at first. He read the names and then folded the paper with the same care he used for his own breath. "We will not bow," he said. "We do not sell our people."
"We should take him alive," Cooper argued. "For the sake of justice, if nothing else."
Dallas's mouth tightened. "Justice is a word for those who have time to think. I prefer results. But Cooper is right. Take him alive if you can."
The raid was planned with the soft cruelty of necessity. We moved like a tide across the hills. I was told to stay behind with the women and children.
"I will not be left," I said stubbornly.
"You will stay where you can be safe," Dallas said. "If you come, you'll be a danger."
"I will be nothing but trouble," I promised.
He looked at me for a long time as if measuring the weight of my words. Then he brought me a cloak, a small bow he had tightened for me, and tied the quail charm to my collar.
"If you must come," he said, "sit behind the ridge and stay very still."
I did as I was told. I sat on a bale of hay and watched as men became a line of shadows and moved into the enemy's roof like a storm. The sun sank low, and the day became a smear of orange.
We surprised them at dusk. Screams tore the air. Spears sang. Men fell and the smell of wet earth and sweat and iron rose and mingled with the smoke of torches. I had never seen war so close. It was too immediate, too much like a cut.
I kept to the ridge as commanded. But somewhere in the crush of bodies, I saw Gerardo Fischer—broad, cruel, his laughter a thing I wanted to pluck out. He was a man used to buying silence.
The men moved him like a caught animal. There was a moment when his face was split open with disbelief.
"We have him!" someone shouted.
I felt the blood in my ears like a second heartbeat. Men dragged Gerardo to the center of our newly cleared field. The camp gathered without plan, like water collecting in a hollow.
Dallas stepped forward with his cloak dragging at his heels. He looked like a general should—calm, the kind of calm that tightens like a noose.
"Gerardo Fischer," he said. He did not raise his voice. "You have a long list of things you've done to people's lives."
Gerardo spat. "You are only a mountain chief playing at law."
"A mistake," Dallas answered. "We are people who have had enough."
Cooper Crane stood beside Dallas. Elroy Torres stood farther back, fists clenched. The circle of men was dense. Children were pushed back, eyes wide as moons. I gripped the quail in my hand and felt its little body shake.
"You're not a man," Gerardo sneered. "You're a puppet with men who answer when the wind tells them to."
A voice from the crowd called, "Beat him!" and others murmured violent agreement. Dallas raised a hand.
"Listen," he said. "We could make this quiet. We could bargain, exchange, sell him for coin. But we are not that kind of camp. We are a people who watch and will not forget."
Gerardo laughed again, but it trembled. "You think you can punish me?"
Dallas took one step close enough that his shadow fell over Gerardo's face.
"Look at the people he's hurt," a woman cried from the crowd. "Look at the children he tore away. Look at their mothers."
The first hand to reach Gerardo did not touch him to strike; it touched him to take. A girl I knew—thin and silent—walked forward with a jar. "He sold my sister," she said. "She was gone and I found her this morning chained."
The words were a stone. Gerardo's lips curled. Sweat stood on his brow.
"You think you can stand here with your lies?" he spat.
Dallas's voice changed. It was not the hush anymore; it was clear and sharp and untempered. "You stood on other people's lives like they were stepping-stones. We will unmake the road."
"What do you mean?" Gerardo demanded. He still held the same insolence, but it faltered.
"Public truth," Dallas said. "You will confess what you've done. The people will know. You will stand and we will tell you what each life costs."
The men did not move. A dozen faces in the circle looked like knives. The wind carried the scent of pine and sweat. Gerardo's lips trembled.
"You can't—" he started.
"Watch," Dallas said.
They put a low raised platform in the center of the clearing. We made space for all who had been taken in the past months—women who had been returned, old men whose property had been plundered, children who had lost games because their fathers never came home. The entire camp gathered in a ring, thicker than before.
"Speak," Dallas commanded. "Name what he took."
A woman with fingers like bird bones stepped forward. "He took my husband," she said. "He took him when the moon was new. He sold him to a trader. I saw his face in a market, tied to a cart. I counted the days."
"Then say it," Dallas told her.
She choked out a name. The first name. The air took it and held it. Others followed like beads on a string. One by one they named the husbands and sons and daughters and neighbors—a list of wrongs that stretched long enough to make the spine of the world ache.
Gerardo stood mute for a time, then angry, then nervy again. He denied this, then denied that. He changed colors like a sick bird. Around him the crowd grew louder.
"Is this all a lie?" Gerardo shouted, voice cracking. "You brave men. You are cowards who steal cattle and call it justice!"
A child pointed and shouted, "That's my father! That's my father!"
Faces in the crowd shifted. Some raised fists. Some covered mouths. A few men took out knives and paced. The mood turned like a door being swung open.
Dallas raised his palm and the noise fell as if the world had a hand on its mouth.
"Sit," he said. "Listen to what you have done."
Then the truth was spread raw. The women walked forward and stood before him. They told their stories. They told where he'd taken them, what he'd traded them for, the names he used to hide behind. Each story was a stone. Each story hit him and broke a piece off.
Gerardo's face went through stages as the crowd recited a litany of his crimes: first it was a sneer. Then disbelief. Then furious denial. Then a fragile, panicked pleading. "I didn't—" he attempted.
"Shut up," a mother said. "You have taken enough mouths."
He tried to laugh. The laugh turned into a croak. The men closed like a ring tightening.
"You will stand here," Dallas said. "You will name what you did and how you did it. You will say the names of those you sold. You will tell us where they are now. We will listen, and the record will be in the mouths of the people."
Gerardo's eyes darted, searching for exit. His nostrils flared. "You cannot make me—"
"We can," Dallas said quietly. "We can make you remember everything you wanted to forget."
The first time his voice went from loud to small was when he heard a woman's voice say, "This is the man who took my sister and sold her with three other women. She is in the east market. They took their names upon the ledger. You counted them like goats."
Gerardo stepped forward as if to strike, then stopped when Elroy took his hand.
"Don't," Elroy said.
Gerardo's bravado cracked. "You think this will change anything?" he said. "You think the world will care about this valley?"
Before Dallas could answer, the man who'd been taken—thin, ragged—staggered up and spat in Gerardo's face. The crowd roared. The taste of bile was a sound. Gerardo began to panic.
"I didn't—" he repeated, and that was when the full scope of people's hate turned to action. It wasn't a single person. It was a chorus.
They dismantled the stage of lies: they stripped Gerardo of the ostentation—his belt, his weapons, his cloak. The soldiers took off his boots. The children shouted things he could not buy back.
He fell first to anger, then to argument, then to the hollow place where a man looks at his reflection and sees a stranger.
I stood close enough to see him crumple, to watch the shock rewrite his face. He tried to bargain—money, men, favors. The camp simply spoke his ledger aloud with new precision.
"You sold them for fifty coins," someone declared. "You sold my brother for thirty."
"You're a liar," Gerardo cried again and again. He began to beg for desertion, to offer names and houses and to promise things we all knew he wouldn't keep.
"Who will take him?" someone asked.
"Let him be shown," Dallas said. "Not punished in the way of knives, but punished in the way the world sees him."
Gerardo's pleas became frantic. He reached for anyone with a familiar face. No one reached back.
The crowd did something peculiar. They did not strike him down; instead, they took from him the thing he had always relied on: secrecy. They took his stories and names and gave them new mouths. The people lined up and told of the nights and the numbers, the routes and the bargains. What he thought were invisible coins of evil were set in the light.
When he finally understood that his empire was a house of cards and the wind had been set against him, he flailed. "You're lying!" he sobbed. "You lie like other men lie."
"Then tell us where the others are," a woman said softly.
He could not. The map in his head was gone. There were too many names now spoken. The strings he had pulled had been cut.
The worst part of his punishment was not a lash. It was to hear the names of those he'd hurt recited directly into the ears of his neighbors, people who had once taken his money, people who had once pretended to be friends. It was a purge of memory.
I watched his face as the crowd turned. His expressions changed with speed and cruelty: first pride, then bewilderment, then denial, then a fragile plea. I watched the men and women who had been wronged step forward to show the scars and to name the lost. Their faces were lit by firelight and the truth.
"Look," Dallas said quietly beside me. "This is the shame you will sleep with for the rest of your life."
Gerardo's shoulders hunched as if someone had tied heavy anchors to them. His arrogance dissolved into something smaller—shame that crawled down his bones.
He begged for mercy. The crowd's answer was not violent, not a spectacle of blood; it was an unglamorous, relentless unveiling. They told the details of his deals and where the women had been carried. Traders were named. Places were given. The names of the sold were repeated aloud until each one lay heavy over his chest.
"You will be shunned," Cooper said later, when the men had dispersed enough to speak. "A man like that cannot come back to the valley."
"He will be watched," Elroy added. "There will be no coin for him. No bed that doesn't creak with memory."
"And the markets?" someone asked. "If he goes to trade somewhere else, how will they know?"
"People tell stories," a woman replied. "We will tell them. We will show their faces."
Gerardo's final ruin was quieter than the rage he'd once promised. He tried to walk from the ring and found men looking at him as if he were a beast to be kept on a leash. Children pointed. A few, braver, spat. His name no longer bought him shelter. It bought him a place in the story people told about greed.
He begged and promised and finally slumped in defeat. "Please," he whispered. "I will leave. I will never return."
"Make sure you don't," Dallas said. He didn't sound triumphant. He sounded tired in that way men do when they have had to carry guilt for an entire village.
We did not watch him hung or lashed. We watched him unmade by the truth. For a long time after, at night by the fire, people would say, "Remember Gerardo," and the name became a lesson.
The crowd's reaction was varied. Some wept. Some nodded and tapped fists into hands. Men who had been silent found mouths to speak. People took out small trinkets they'd thought meaningless and gave them to those who had lost everything. Mothers hugged sons they had feared to show emotion to. Children learned to name injustice.
Gerardo's face shrank under the weight of their attention. He had wanted power; he found instead the coldness of being known.
Afterward, when the camp quieted, Dallas came to me and took my hand with no pretense.
"You did well," he said.
"I just listened," I said.
"You were brave," he corrected. "You sat there when you could have fled. Bravery isn't big actions alone. Sometimes it's being small and steady." He smiled in a way that warmed me.
I kept my little dough quail and I kept it close. The camp rebuilt itself slowly. The men learned to tell a different story: one not of plunder but of guarding the small and making it safe. That was the punishment. That was what we wanted—public truth and the slow, certain ruin of a man who had thought himself untouchable.
Time stitched us back into something like peace. Dallas recovered his strength in a way that made men nod and say that no general had such stubbornness as he did. He refused to wear his medals for a while. He said they were heavy and did not deserve to be shown when our people were still raw.
Months later, there was a quiet afternoon when the world felt like it could be held in one cupped palm. I sat with a bowl of green-bean soup and watched the men laugh—real laughter that folded and came back. Dallas walked up and sat beside me. The light caught his face and softened it.
"You were right," he said.
"About what?"
"That being with you is both less and more than I can bear."
I laughed lightly and offered him my cup of soup.
He sipped and made a face. "I thought I'd hate it," he admitted. "But your soup has two kinds of sugar."
"I learned from you," I said. "You always say things are best when they are practical."
"And you," he said, "sneak sweetness into war."
We looked at each other and then at the little dough quail in my lap. It was cracked, imperfect, and bright.
"You are not the broken piece I thought," he said suddenly. "You're the one that made me notice small things."
"Don't say that like it's a confession," I warned.
He smiled. "It's a confession of repairs," he said. "You made me notice what matters."
I reached up and tugged his sleeve. For a long time there were no big promises. No golden rings offered on a hill. There were only small agreements—the placement of a cloak, the sharing of soup, the way his hand found mine on the hardest nights.
I slept better. I learned to stand when it rained. The men learned to tell their stories, and, for those who had been wronged, the telling was a kind of medicine.
Once, when the valley had quieted and the sun sat low like a coin on the horizon, Dallas and I walked the ridge together. He took my hand and fit it into his like we were two worn tools that finally matched.
"Promise you won't run under the table the next time someone comes in?" he teased.
"I promise nothing except to keep eating your soup," I said.
He squeezed my fingers. "Deal."
We walked on, and there was a small peace, like the soft hollow a quail makes when it settles. It does not sound grand; it is ordinary. It is everything.
The End
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