Chapter Two
The People You Come From
“Dietrich Heinrich von Graff.”
He heard his name before he heard the door, which was the usual order of things. His mother did not announce her presence by opening doors — she announced it by deciding to speak, and the door simply had the good sense to follow immediately after.
He was midway through his third rotation of the morning forms when she appeared at the yard entrance, still in her dressing gown, dark hair not yet pinned, which told him it was earlier than he’d thought — his mother was not a woman who received the day in a state of dishevelment by choice. The dressing gown was a deep burgundy with the Graff crest embroidered at the breast, a gift from his father on some anniversary or another, and she wore it with the same unconscious authority she wore everything, as though clothing were a thing that simply arranged itself correctly around her presence and was grateful for the privilege.
“Inside,” she said. “Now. You’ll catch your death.”
Dietrich lowered the sabre. “It’s not that cold, Mama.”
“It is absolutely that cold, and I didn’t ask for your meteorological opinion.” She pushed the door further open and held it with a pointed look that had not lost one grain of its effectiveness in the twenty years he had been on the receiving end of it. “You’ve been out here for over an hour, your coat is inside, and you’re sweating in five degrees. Inside.”
“I was almost done.”
“You are done. Inside.”
He considered, briefly, the possibility of further negotiation, the way he always briefly considered it and always arrived at the same conclusion. He sheathed the sabre and went inside.
Helene von Graff was forty-four years old, and she carried it the way women of her particular constitution carried age — not fighting it, not surrendering to it, simply moving through it with such forward momentum that it seemed to step aside rather than accumulate on her. She was not a tall woman, which occasionally surprised people who encountered her descriptions before they encountered her, because her letters and her presence in rooms gave the impression of greater physical stature than she actually possessed. The truth was that she was of moderate height and slight build and that none of this mattered even slightly, because Helene von Graff had the kind of personality that rendered physical measurements essentially decorative information.
She had been born a Countess of the House of Steinach, which was a respectable enough house in the eastern provinces with a long military tradition and a somewhat shorter tradition of financial solvency, and she had married Peter von Graff at twenty-one in an arrangement that was technically a political alliance and was in practice a meeting of two people who had, somewhat to the surprise of everyone involved including themselves, decided almost immediately that they were suited to each other in ways that had very little to do with politics. Peter von Graff did not speak often of personal matters. But when he spoke of his wife, the economy went out of his language entirely, and the words came differently.
Dietrich had noticed this his whole life without ever commenting on it.
She closed the yard door behind them and steered him toward the kitchen corridor with a hand between his shoulder blades — the classic Helene von Graff manoeuvre, appearing to guide when in fact directing absolutely.
“Your father told you,” she said. It was not a question.
“This morning.”
“Good. He wanted to tell you himself, so I had to sit on it for eight months, which was a particular kind of misery.” She said this without apparent resentment, more as a statement of historical fact. “I want to talk to you about it. Come have tea. Proper tea, not whatever half-cold thing you were apparently drinking earlier.”
“How did you know it was half-cold?”
“Because you got up before Marta had finished brewing it, sat with your father for exactly as long as he needed to say what he needed to say, and then went immediately to the yard. Which is what you always do when you have something to think about.” She glanced at him sideways. “You’ve been doing it since you were eight. You think I haven’t noticed?”
He had, in fact, assumed she hadn’t noticed. He revised this assumption, as he periodically revised the assumption that there were things about him his mother had not noticed.
The kitchen at the Graff Mansion was a large, low-ceilinged room at the back of the ground floor that smelled permanently of bread and coffee and the particular mineral warmth of the old iron range that occupied most of the east wall. It was, in Dietrich’s honest opinion, the best room in the house, though he had never said this aloud for fear it would be repeated in the wrong company. His father’s study was the most impressive room. The great hall was the most imposing. But the kitchen was where things actually happened — where the staff began their day before dawn, where the house’s real pulse beat, where Helene von Graff could be found at least twice a day in casual conference with the cook, a large and capable woman named Gertrude who had been with the household since before Dietrich was born and who treated the Grand Duke’s wife with the same direct familiarity with which she treated the rest of the world, which Helene had always seemed to find refreshing.
Gertrude was currently at the range, doing something complicated with a large pot that released steam in periodic fragrant bursts. She glanced up when they entered, looked at Dietrich with the assessing eye of someone who had known him since infancy, and said: “You look like your father before a campaign. Sit down.”
“Good morning, Gertrude.”
“It’s cold. Sit.”
He sat. His mother settled into the chair across from him at the kitchen table — the small one in the corner, not the large preparation table in the center — and Gertrude, without being asked, set a teapot between them that had clearly been made not long ago and was presently at the correct temperature.
Helene poured. She did this with a neatness that she had, Dietrich had been reliably informed, attempted to teach each of her children in turn and succeeded with exactly one of them, and it had not been him.
“I’m proud of you,” she said, setting his cup down in front of him. “I want to say that first. Before I say the rest.”
Dietrich wrapped his hands around the cup. “That’s an ominous construction.”
“Don’t be clever.” But her mouth softened at the corners even as she said it. She looked at him for a moment over the rim of her own cup, and her eyes — grey, not green, unlike his — had in them something that was very genuine and very much not comfortable. “The War Academy. Do you know what it actually is?”
“I know what it—”
“I’m not asking if you know what it is on paper, Dietrich. I know you know that. I’m asking if you understand what it is.” She set her cup down. “It’s four years. It’s four years of them trying to make you into a specific thing, and the thing they want to make you into is not always a thing that a mother is glad to have her son made into.”
He looked at her. “You knew this was coming. You said yourself you’ve known for eight months.”
“Knowing something is coming doesn’t mean you stop feeling it when it arrives.” She said it flatly, as though this were obvious, which perhaps it was. “I have been feeling it, quietly, for eight months, while your father made his arrangements and I made mine.”
“What arrangements?”
She reached across the table and put her hand over his, briefly, the way she had done when he was small and frightened of things he would not now be able to name. Her hand was slight and warm and entirely certain.
“Arrangements,” she said, “to tell you what I want to tell you before you go. Which I am now going to do, so you might as well hear it.”
She talked for nearly forty minutes. Gertrude brought bread at some point and left without comment. Outside the kitchen window the morning proper had arrived, pale and clear, the sky over Berlinstadt a thin winter blue above the rooftops.
She talked about the Academy — what she knew of it, which was not nothing, because Helene von Graff made it her business to understand things that affected her children and had spent the eight months productively. She talked about what the first year would be like, the adjustment of it, the controlled brutality of the early training rotations, the hierarchies that would form immediately and the wisdom of navigating them carefully. She talked about his sisters, about what she expected of him in terms of correspondence, about specific frequencies and what counted as acceptable gaps between letters. She talked about eating enough, about not ignoring pain in a way that caused lasting damage, about the distinction between discomfort that should be pushed through and injury that should be reported.
She talked about his father, then. About what it had cost Peter to build what he had built, the specific currency of it. She did not say this in a way that was reproachful or cautionary — she said it in the way a woman says a true thing about a man she loves, with clear eyes and without sentiment, because the sentiment was already understood.
And then she said: “I need you to promise me something.”
“Anything.”
“Don’t say anything before you hear it.”
He waited.
“Promise me,” Helene said, “that you will come back.” She held his gaze. Her voice was steady. It had the specific steadiness of a voice that has been made steady by effort rather than by the absence of feeling. “Not that you will be careful, not that you will be sensible — I want you to promise me that whatever happens, whatever they put in front of you, you will come back.”
The kitchen was quiet except for the range and the distant sounds of the city.
“I promise,” Dietrich said.
She held his gaze for another moment, and he could see in her face the precise arithmetic of what she was doing — taking the promise, knowing its limitations, choosing to accept it anyway because the alternative was not accepting it and that was worse.
“Good,” she said. She released his hand and straightened and became, quite seamlessly, the woman who had a household to run and a day to get on with. “Finish your tea. And the bread — Gertrude made it this morning and she will take it personally if you don’t eat it.”
From the range, without turning around: “I’ll take it personally.”
Dietrich ate the bread.
* * *
The weeks that followed settled into a particular texture — not frantic, not slow, but dense in the way that time before a significant departure always becomes dense, as though each day is quietly aware of the countdown and decides, in response, to make itself count for more than one.
The household felt it. The staff moved with a slightly heightened efficiency that was not quite nervousness and not quite ceremony. His father appeared at the dinner table more consistently than he usually managed, which was noticeable, because Peter von Graff’s relationship with the dinner table was normally subject to the demands of the Iron Corps, and the Iron Corps made demands with the enthusiasm of a creditor who knew you had no other creditors. His mother, who had said what she needed to say over the kitchen table and thereafter conducted herself with complete composure, occasionally looked at Dietrich from across a room in a way that lasted approximately three seconds and then resolved back into composure, and he pretended not to notice because this seemed to be what she preferred.
Julia, his younger sister, did not pretend anything.
Julia von Graff was fifteen years old and had decided several years ago that pretending was a waste of the face God had given her, since all her feelings showed on it anyway and she might as well stop fighting the obvious. She was the youngest of the three, small and round-faced and possessed of an enormous quantity of dark hair that she wore in ways that alternately delighted and appalled the household governess, and she felt things with an intensity that her father found privately baffling and her mother found privately exhausting and that everyone else generally found charming in the unguarded way of people who are charmed by something they could never themselves produce.
She appeared in the training yard on the fifth morning after the announcement, while Dietrich was cleaning the practice sabre, and sat herself on the stone wall with her knees drawn up and watched him with an expression he recognized as the preparatory face — the one that meant she was about to say something she had been working up to for some time and had decided she was finally going to say.
He let her have the silence. With Julia, you let things come at their own pace or they arrived sideways and upset everyone.
“You’re going to be gone for four years,” she said at last.
“I am.”
“That’s a very long time.”
“It is,” he agreed.
She looked at the sabre in his hands, then at his face, then somewhere in between. “Alexa was only gone for two years before she came back for the winter break. You won’t get winter breaks.”
“Not in the first two years, no.”
“That’s—” She stopped. Her jaw set briefly with the particular stubbornness that was entirely her own, not their father’s variety of stubbornness, which was architectural, but something more immediate, more surface — a stubbornness of feeling rather than of will. “I think that’s too long. Four years is too long.”
“I know.”
“I’m not saying don’t go,” she added quickly. “I know you have to go. I’m just saying that it’s too long and I think whoever decided four years was the right amount of time was being excessive.”
Despite himself, Dietrich smiled. “I’ll pass that along to the War Academy Commandant.”
Julia looked at him. Then she slid off the wall and crossed to him and put her arms around him with the abruptness and total commitment of someone who has decided that she is going to hug her brother and is not going to make a production of deciding it. She was not tall enough to reach his shoulders properly, which had been a source of ongoing frustration to her for approximately four years, so she settled for his middle, and he set down the sabre and put his arms around her in return.
“You’d better write,” she said, into his coat. “Properly. Not the short ones. Alexa sends short ones and they’re completely useless.”
“Long letters,” he confirmed. “I promise.”
She stepped back and looked at him with eyes that were conspicuously dry through what was clearly an act of considerable will. “And if you get shot I will never forgive you.”
“Noted.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you mean it.”
She picked up the sabre from where he’d set it on the wall and turned it over in her hands with more confidence than most fifteen-year-olds would have managed, because the House of Graff was the House of Graff and even Julia, who had no intention of joining any military institution ever, had been around weapons her whole life. She ran her thumb along the flat of the blade, checked the edge out of habit — a habit she’d picked up from watching her father, probably, without ever being taught.
“I’m going to miss you,” she said, not looking up from the blade. “Terribly. I want you to know that before you go, because I’m probably not going to say it in front of everyone.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m going to miss you too.”
She handed the sabre back, handle first, and then turned around and walked back toward the house with her hands in her dressing gown pockets and her hair catching the morning light, and she didn’t look back, which was exactly how Julia did the things that were hard for her — with her back turned and her chin up and the evidence of the difficulty entirely invisible to anyone watching.
He stood in the yard for a moment after she’d gone.
Four years.
Alexandra von Graff’s letter arrived on the eighth day, by military post from the Academy itself, the envelope marked with the War Academy seal and the Logistics Corps designation in red ink. It was three pages long, which Dietrich read twice before he believed the tone of it.
His older sister was twenty-three. She had been at the War Academy for two years in the Logistics branch, having argued her way into the selection with a combination of their father’s name, her own considerable organizational abilities, and what Dietrich suspected was an extended campaign of determined correspondence that the committee had eventually approved mostly to make it stop. The Logistics branch had formally opened to female officers four years ago, in 1738, following a particularly vicious campaign in the eastern provinces where the supply failures had cost three divisions their effective fighting capacity and someone high up had finally decided that whoever was best at the job should probably be doing the job regardless of what was between their legs.
Alexandra had a gift for logistics the way their father had a gift for mechanical engineering. It was total and native and it made her somewhat terrifying to be in the same room with when she was working, because the speed at which she processed complex systems and identified their failure points was not a comfortable thing to witness if you happened to be responsible for one of those failure points.
Her letter said:
Dietrich —
I heard from Father. Congratulations on the selection, though I note you apparently required him to do the work of putting your name forward, which I take as evidence that you have inherited his strategic patience or are simply still bad at initiating things. I vote the latter.
The Academy is not what you expect. It is worse than what you expect and also better, sometimes simultaneously. The first three months are designed to establish whether you will break. Many do. You won’t, because you’re insufferably stubborn and also because Father has been preparing you for this since birth, so you have the unfair advantage of already knowing what the inside of genuine discomfort feels like.
Find the people worth knowing in the first week. Not the loudest ones and not the most impressive ones — the ones who keep their heads when the rest are losing theirs. Those will be your people. The rest you will work with and respect and then go your separate ways.
The instructors in the Combat branch are excellent. Hauptmann Schreiber takes the close-quarters module in your second term and he is the most frightening man I have ever met in a training context, and I say this having met Father’s Iron Corps veterans. Pay attention to every word he says.
I will not be back for winter, but I will be back at the summer interim and by then you’ll have enough to talk about for both of us.
Don’t be an idiot. Try not to get hurt. These instructions are only slightly less important in that order.
— Alexa
P.S. The food in the main mess is passable. The food in the junior officers’ mess is excellent. Get into the junior officers’ mess as quickly as possible. You will thank me.
He folded the letter and set it on his desk and sat looking at it for a while with something that was approximately gratitude and approximately amusement and approximately the particular fondness that exists between siblings who have spent years being each other’s most honest critics and have arrived, somewhere along the way, at a functional peace.
He wrote back that evening. His letter ran to four pages.
Eric von Lebers arrived on the tenth day, unannounced, in the early afternoon, having apparently told the housekeeper that he had an appointment, which he absolutely did not have, and having apparently been so convincing about it that Marta had let him in and was now somewhat flustered about the whole business.
Dietrich heard him before he reached the study — heard the voice in the front hall, warm and carrying and threaded through with an irrepressible lightness that was simply Eric’s natural frequency, the register in which he operated regardless of the situation. He was talking to Marta about something — Dietrich couldn’t quite make out the words — and he could hear in Marta’s responses the way she was trying not to smile, which was the universal and inevitable consequence of extended exposure to Eric von Lebers.
The study door opened without a knock.
“You look terrible,” Eric said, leaning in the doorway. “Have you slept at all in the past ten days or have you been in the yard continuously?”
Dietrich looked up from the map he’d been studying — a detailed survey of the Academy grounds and the surrounding district of Eisenmark, which he’d obtained from the administrative office and had been examining with the thoroughness that was either commendable preparation or a nervous habit wearing the clothes of commendable preparation. “I look exactly the same as I always do.”
“That’s what I mean.” Eric came in and dropped into the chair across the desk with the ease of a man who had been dropping into chairs in this particular study for the better part of fifteen years. He was of similar height to Dietrich, though somewhat leaner, with fair hair that was perpetually disheveled in a way that managed to look almost deliberate, and a face that had the specific quality of being immediately and comprehensively likeable — open, quick-eyed, with a mouth that seemed to find the world continuously entertaining in a way that was never unkind. He was the second son of Count Frederich von Lebers, whose house sat two ranks below the House of Graff in the ducal order, and whose estate bordered the Graff family’s country holdings in the Westmark. Dietrich and Eric had been running at each other across the boundary wall of those estates since they were approximately five years old.
Eric looked at the map spread across the desk and raised his eyebrows. “You’ve annotated it.”
“I’ve made observations.”
“You’ve annotated it in three different colours of ink.” Eric leaned over the desk to look more closely. “Is that a key?”
“It’s a reference system.”
“Dietrich.” Eric looked up. His expression was one of great and genuine affection that was also trying very hard to be stern and not quite managing it. “You are going to the Academy in five weeks. You have been accepted. You are going. You don’t need to study the map of the grounds before you arrive.”
“Knowing the layout—”
“Will happen naturally when you are there and can see the actual buildings.” Eric sat back. “I’ve been accepted too, you know. Did your father tell you? Mine told me three days ago. I have not once looked at a map.”
This was almost certainly true and not even slightly surprising. Eric’s approach to preparation was philosophical rather than logistical — he tended to assume, with a confidence that was either naive or deeply wise and had so far mostly proven to be the latter, that he would manage what he needed to manage when he needed to manage it, and that excessive prior anxiety was poor use of time that could otherwise be spent living.
“You’re going to the Combat branch?” Dietrich asked.
“Infantry sub-track. You?”
“Walker Corps.” It came out without hesitation, which was appropriate since he’d known the answer for approximately his entire life. The Walker Corps. His father’s branch, his father’s world, the steel heart of the Drachenstahl military. There had never been any other answer. “Assuming I qualify for the sub-track.”
“You’ll qualify.” Eric said it with a simplicity that was not performative encouragement but simple statement of fact. He had known Dietrich long enough that certain things did not require elaboration. “Your father has been putting you in cockpit simulators since you were what, fourteen?”
“Twelve, actually.”
“Twelve. Right.” Eric picked up the edge of the map, looked at the annotation key, set it back down. “How’s the house? Your mother must be somewhere between quietly celebrating and quietly suffering.”
“She gave me forty minutes of advice in the kitchen on the second morning and has been making her peace with it since. Julia cried. She didn’t admit to it, but she did.”
“Julia cries at sunsets. How is that going to survive four years of you being gone?”
“She’s going to write me long letters complaining about it, I imagine.” He paused. “Alexa wrote from the Academy.”
Eric’s eyebrows went up. “And?”
“Useful. Alarming in places. Characteristically direct.”
“So exactly what you’d expect from Alexa.” Eric was quiet for a moment, and then a grin broke across his face — the full one, the unguarded one that he couldn’t have suppressed if he’d tried, which he never did. “We’re going, Dietrich. We’re actually going. Does it feel real to you yet? Because I keep waking up and it feels like something I invented.”
Dietrich looked at him. He thought about the dispatch letter in his coat pocket, still there, still folded, still with the Imperial seal. He thought about the map under his hands and the annotation key in three colours of ink and his mother’s voice saying promise me you’ll come back with the steadiness that cost her something.
“It feels real,” he said. “I think that’s what I’m struggling with.”
Eric looked at him for a moment — the assessing look he sometimes produced, beneath the lightness, that reminded Dietrich that Eric’s ease was chosen rather than inevitable, that there was a great deal more going on behind those quick eyes than the default warmth suggested. Then he stood up and stretched with theatrical completeness.
“Well,” he said. “In that case, you need to stop looking at maps and come have lunch with me, because I passed a place on the way here that had a board outside claiming to serve the best Schnitzel in Berlinstadt, which is an enormous claim and one that I think we have a civic responsibility to test.”
“I’ve eaten.”
“When?”
“This morning.”
“That was hours ago. That doesn’t count.” Eric was already moving toward the door. “Come on. You can be anxious about the Academy at dinner too. Bring the map if it makes you feel better.”
Dietrich looked at the map. He looked at Eric in the doorway. He looked at the three colours of ink.
“I’m not bringing the map.”
“I genuinely don’t care either way. Are you coming?”
He got up. He got his coat from the hook by the door and fell into step beside Eric, and in the front hallway Marta said goodbye to them both with the slightly flustered warmth she always produced around Eric von Lebers, and outside the Graff Mansion the air was cold and sharp and the city of Berlinstadt was doing what it always did — moving, grinding, steaming, filling the enormous sky with coal smoke and Walker exhaust and the noise of two million people going about the business of their lives.
Dietrich pulled his coat closed. The afternoon light was slanted and winter-gold on the cobblestones.
“Which direction?” he asked.
“South. About six blocks. There’s a steam tram if you want it.”
“Let’s walk.”
They walked south, into the city, into the afternoon, and Eric talked — about his own preparations and the lack of them, about his father’s advice which had apparently run to considerably fewer words than Dietrich had received, about something that had happened at the von Lebers’ country estate last month involving a horse and his youngest brother that had resulted in a broken fence and a letter of formal apology to a neighbouring tenant. Dietrich walked and listened and said the right things at the right moments, and somewhere on the third block something in his chest that had been coiled tight since the morning of the letter began, incrementally and without announcement, to ease.
This was what Eric did. He had always done it. It was not a skill Eric had cultivated or a strategy he employed — it was simply what his presence produced, naturally and without effort, in the people around him. The world got lighter. Not smaller, not less real — lighter. As though it remembered that it was also, among other things, supposed to be liveable.
They passed a Walker on its patrol circuit at the intersection of the fourth block — a Mark IV, Dietrich noted automatically, the older configuration with the wider hip joint and the shorter primary arm, one of the two hundred and thirty that were permanently garrisoned in Berlinstadt. It moved through the intersection with the measured authority of something that could, if called upon, put its foot through a building, and the people on the street moved around it and kept moving, because in Berlinstadt you learned to keep moving around Ironwalkers very early or you never got anywhere at all.
Dietrich watched it pass. The operator’s hatch was open at the top of the chassis, and through it he could see the top of the operator’s head, helmet and goggles, the figure reduced to near-abstraction by the scale of the machine around them.
Five weeks and three days.
“That’s the one,” Eric said, pointing ahead to a narrow-fronted establishment with a hand-painted board over the door and, emerging from somewhere inside, a smell that made an honest and compelling case for itself. “The evidence is favorable so far. Come on.”
Dietrich looked at the Walker’s retreating back for one more moment. Then he followed Eric through the door.