Captain Crossfire

Crossfire was not born loud, but he was born early, and he has been making up for it ever since.

His real name is Henrik Vohrn. He came from a southern garrison town called Vohrnmouth — narrow streets, a long curving harbour, a fish market at one end and a watch-barracks at the other. His parents were both fishmongers. They are still fishmongers. They write him letters once a month and address them to Henrik, not Captain Crossfire, because they refuse to acknowledge that the new name is the official one. (He keeps the letters in a small wooden box at the academy.)

He joined the watch at nineteen. He was promoted twice in three years, both times against his commanding officer's recommendation, because his commanding officer thought he was — and this is a direct quote from the personnel file — "insufferable, but reliable."

His job as a junior officer was to lead a small unit of watch-soldiers on patrols through the harbour district. The harbour was complicated. Warehouses pressed against each other along narrow lanes. Market stalls appeared in the morning and disappeared by evening. There were a great many ways for a person to get jumped from behind by an opportunistic thief.

Vohrn lost two soldiers to such jumpings. (They had not been seriously hurt. But they had been embarrassed.) He thought about this problem a lot. He thought about it loudly. He thought about it on long walks, on short walks, at breakfast, and once — memorably — during a wedding. (The wedding was his cousin's. The cousin has forgiven him. Mostly.)

The conventional answer — the answer his commanding officer kept suggesting — was: patrol in tighter formation. Put the soldiers closer together. Have them watch each other's backs. Reduce the gaps.

Vohrn tried it. It mostly worked. The thieves adjusted. They started aiming at the very front of the formation instead of the very back, and the back of the formation could not turn around fast enough to help. The unit was a closer cluster, but the front was now exposed.

Vohrn was, by this point, very frustrated. He swore a great deal. He wrote angry letters that he then crumpled up. He stomped through the harbour at night with his hands clenched behind his back and his coat dragging through puddles, and he thought, over and over:

The problem is that we're all moving at the same time.

This thought, when it arrived, was so quiet that even Vohrn (who is loud) heard it as a whisper. He stopped walking. He looked at the harbour.

The harbour had a long row of bollards along its edge — short fat iron posts that fishermen tied their boats to. Vohrn sat on one of them.

He sat for an hour. He watched the boats come in. He watched the deckhands hopping between vessels. He watched, in particular, a small dinghy moored alongside a much larger trade-ship. The dinghy was tied to the trade-ship with a single rope. When the wind shifted, the dinghy moved — but the trade-ship did not. The trade-ship had been there all afternoon. The trade-ship had appeared, to anybody walking by on the dock, to be part of the landscape.

And from behind the trade-ship, every now and then, a fisherman with a long pole would casually reach out and check a crab pot that the dinghy's movement had revealed.

The trade-ship hadn't moved.

The dinghy had.

The crab pot got checked.

Vohrn stood up so suddenly he nearly fell into the harbour. He walked home. He drew a diagram by lamp-light. He did not sleep.

The next morning he proposed, to his commanding officer, a new patrol formation. It was not tighter. It was, in fact, looser. He proposed that the unit move in a staggered pattern — one or two soldiers visibly walking through the district, the others positioned at fixed posts, hidden behind market stalls and warehouse corners, not moving at all. When a thief approached the visible soldiers, the visible soldiers would simply move aside — and reveal, behind them, a line of fixed posts with crossbows already aimed.

The commanding officer said, "That is the most absurd plan I have heard this year."

The commanding officer let him try it.

It worked spectacularly. Two thieves were apprehended in the first week. Three more in the second week. The total apprehensions for the month were higher than the previous year's total for the harbour district.

The commanding officer, who had been doing his job for thirty-one years and was not a fool, promoted Vohrn again. He also gave him a nickname.

Captain Crossfire.

"Because," the commanding officer said dryly, "you stand still, and the attack comes from behind you, and the thief never sees the second line."

The nickname stuck. Vohrn liked it. He used it on his next promotion paperwork. By the time he was thirty, Captain Crossfire appeared on every official document in the kingdom and Henrik Vohrn appeared only on his mother's letters.

He retired from the watch at thirty-eight. He had, by then, become a famous tactician. The kingdom's chess academy invited him to come and teach. They had, they explained, recently identified the discovered attack — the move where you shift one piece aside to reveal an attack from a second piece behind it — as one of the most under-taught tactical patterns. The academy needed someone to teach it. They wanted a teacher who understood it in his bones.

Captain Crossfire said, "HA!"

(He said this loudly.)

He has been teaching the discovered attack ever since.

He has, this morning in the academy hall, just finished his fourth demonstration of the day. The children are still leaning forward. He likes that about children. They never get tired of AHA. He sometimes wonders, privately, in the quiet moment before he falls asleep at night, whether the adults in his life have ever leaned forward in quite the same way. He suspects not. He does not mind.

A small student — eight years old, with a fork-pin in her hair — raises her hand.

"Captain Crossfire," she says, "what if the front piece is also a piece I want to keep? What if I don't want it to move?"

Crossfire grins. It is the slow grin of a man who has been waiting for this question all morning.

"AHA!" he says. "AHA — but — listen. The front piece doesn't have to die. The front piece just has to get out of the way. It can move to another square. A safe square. A useful square. The discovered attack is not a sacrifice. It is a reveal. The trade-ship doesn't sink. The dinghy doesn't drown. The crab pot just gets checked."

Glass Lantern, sitting near the back of the hall, smiles very faintly. (Glass Lantern's smile is a thing that requires close attention to see. The Captain has, over the years, learned to look for it.)

He nods at her, across the hall. She nods back. They are co-teaching this kit. She is the quietest person he has ever respected.