"You charmer, Josephine," Guy said, the left side of his mouth curling upwards in a lop-sided smile. He pushed his hands into his pockets, ignoring Altair's pronounced eye rolling, and looked back to Mace. He waited patiently for him to put away his sword. Had Mace deserted? Was that what this was? He'd abandoned his post and thought Gawain had been sent to drag him in to face a court martial. Had he done all of that for Tristan? And if so...then why? Why Shaman? Why this civil war? Why this teenage king?
"You've gone native, then?" Gawain asked, testing the waters. "Something tells me this is more than a mission for you...I'm right, aren't I?" He fixed Mace with an intense, searching look, weighing him up. What the hell had happened?

For the first time since he'd arrived on Shaman, something akin to the panic he'd felt when he'd been revived on Umbarra II bubbled up into his chest. Where the hell is my brother? he wanted to ask, to demand, what did that bastard do to him? But he couldn't say any of it. All he could do was fight to try and keep the mask in place, play it off a little longer. What on earth had his father sent him wading into? Gawain swallowed the lump in his throat, his left hand tugging itself free of his pocket unbidden. Before he could stop it, his fingers were dancing anxiously through his hair.

"You are being particularly useless today," Altair's voice said, interrupting his thoughts, "you know that, right?"

"Shut up, Altair."

He should have taken the time to come up with a cover story. Something believably he could tell someone in exactly this kind of situation. Only when his heart had stopped and he'd found himself on a magical island with his only-sort-of-dead father and then travelled back to earth to meet his estranged divine grandfather he hadn't really stopped to consider that he might run into someone he knew when he finally arrived on Shaman.

He supposed he should have learned by now that he had pretty terrible luck.

"What can I say," he managed, shrugging his shoulders. "They didn't mention the whole war thing in the brochure."

"I told you to read the small print," Altair added, shaking his head, "you never listen."

"Explains where you get it from then, doesn't it?" Gawain shot back. He smiled apologetically at Mace.

"Call it a kind of personal reconnaissance," he explained, holding up his hands, "unofficial in every way imaginable, I promise. I am officially on leave. You know I haven't had a day off since I left the academy? Scout is a slave driver, I swear."

Finally managing to get his hands back into his pockets, Gawain looked around again, his eyes narrowing. Something had changed. He stared at the offending tree and then looked back at Mace, raising his eyebrows.

"Captain..." he began warily, "...did that damn tree just move?" Shaman hadn't had moving trees last time. He'd have remembered those kind of details. They were the kind o features that stayed with a bloke, no matter how far away he travelled.

Shaking his head, Gawain returned to the matter at hand. "Fill me in then," he said, "leave yourself out of the story if it'll make you feel better but man, at least let me know what I've stumbled into. You never know, I'm not entirely useless, I might be able to help."

Gawain