“And if he’s been defeated? Captured, even?”
Marcus gritted his teeth and said nothing.
“You know it’ll be butchery here by morning,” Adrecht continued remorselessly. “Right now, at this very moment, those bastards are dragging their guns across the ford. If they get one of those monsters on the near bank, we won’t be able to get within two hundred yards of the waterfront.”
“We abandon the waterfront,” Marcus said. “Dig in around the temple. This place is solid stone. Even thirty-six-pounders are going to take some time to crack it.”
“Right. And the hill is good ground, plenty of material for barricades, no problem. Except for one detail—if we fall back, there’s nothing stopping them from sending men around the sides of the village and coming at us from behind.”
“The walls are just as thick from behind.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about,” Adrecht said patiently. “Once they get there, we’ve got no way out. When they batter this place down around our ears, they’ll have the lot of us on spits.”
“Unless the colonel arrives before that happens.”
“Unless the colonel arrives,” Adrecht said. He paused, then shook his head. “So it comes down to that, does it? You want to bet that Colonel Vhalnich will ride to the rescue.”
“More or less,” Marcus said. His throat was tight.
“With the lives of every man in this command as the stake.”
“The colonel asked me to keep those Khandarai off his back,” Marcus said. “I intend to do it. They don’t dare march past as long as we’re here, and they haven’t got enough men to break off a screening force.”
“I agree,” Adrecht said. “They’ll have no choice but to break in here and kill us all.”
“Unless—”
“I know!”
Adrecht turned away, pacing once across the room, then again. Marcus watched in silence while he completed a third circuit. His chest felt tight.
Finally, Adrecht turned to face him, standing at what was very nearly attention.
“I just want to make one thing clear,” he said. “The men here are our men. The Old Colonials. You know them. You want to risk all their lives for a colonel you’ve barely met and a bunch of recruits?”
“Val is with them,” Marcus said. “And Mor. And Fitz.” And Jen Alhundt. That thought surprised him, and he squirreled it away for later inspection.
“But you’d stay even if they weren’t.” It wasn’t a question.
Marcus nodded.
Adrecht let out a long breath. “What the hell. I owe you, Marcus. My life, maybe. If you want to throw it away now, who am I to stop you?” He straightened up and snapped a crisp salute. “Give the orders, Senior Captain.”
Marcus grinned. Adrecht maintained his serious composure a moment longer, then broke down with a chuckle. The tension drained out of the room like water from a bath.
“They aren’t going to like it,” Adrecht said. “The men, I mean.”
Marcus shrugged. “They always like to have something to grumble about.”
Chapter Fourteen
WINTER
Folsom laid Bobby on the floor of Winter’s tent, carefully arranging the boy’s limbs as though settling him in a casket. The corporal looked half a corpse already, his face pale as milk, but his eyelids flickered and he gave a soft moan when his back touched the ground.
Graff, still powder-blackened and covered with grime, stripped off Bobby’s coat and tossed it in a corner. His shirt was shockingly white underneath, with stark gray rings on his cuffs where they’d protruded from his sleeves.
Winter looked down at the boy and bit her lip. Graff, Bobby had said. No one else. “Corporal Folsom?”
The big man was squatting by the boy’s side. He looked up.
“I need you to take an inventory of the company. Find out how many we had hit, then go to the cutters and try to track everyone down.”
Folsom looked down at Bobby again, then back at Winter. His thick features hardened, but he got to his feet and saluted.
“On your way out,” Winter said, “find a couple of men and have them sit outside the tent. No one comes in without my leave, understand?”
Folsom nodded again and ducked out of the tent. It was still broad daylight outside, and a brilliant lance of light from the flaps glowed by the entrance. That felt wrong, somehow. It should have been twilight.
Graff unbuttoned Bobby’s jacket, lifting it away carefully where it was soaked with gore. He tried raising the boy’s shoulder to get the sleeve off, but Bobby gave another groan, and Graff let him lie and turned to Winter.
“I don’t want to move him more than I have to. You got a nice sharp knife somewhere?”
She nodded and pawed through her pack until she found a heavy-hilted skinning knife, which she’d bought in Ashe-Katarion a lifetime ago because she’d liked the embroidery on the leather sheath. She handed it to Graff. “Anything else?”
“Water.” Graff looked at the mess on Bobby’s stomach and shook his head. “Though I warn you, I don’t think—”
“Water,” Winter repeated, and ducked out of the tent.
The camp outside was chaos, and it took her a few minutes to track down a brace of full kettles. By the time she returned, Graff had gotten Bobby’s jacket off by slicing open the sleeves and spreading them flat, and he was working on the undershirt where it was glued to the boy’s skin with sweat and dried blood. It reminded Winter uncomfortably of a hunter skinning a kill, carefully peeling back each layer to reveal the gory interior.
Also uncomfortable was the presence of Feor, who had crawled out of her bedroll and now sat cross-legged beside the sickbed, one arm still in a sling. Winter had forgotten the girl was there.
“Feor . . .” She hesitated, biting her lip. She couldn’t very well send the girl outside, not now. Even the Khandarai in the army train would no doubt be keeping a very low profile until the excitement of battle had subsided. “You don’t have to watch this,” Winter finished lamely.
She ignored that. “Will he live?”
Winter glanced at Graff, still picking bits of linen away from the ragged hole in Bobby’s skin. “I don’t think so,” she said in Khandarai.
“Oh.” Feor shifted, drew knees to her chest and hugged them tight with her good arm, but she didn’t look away.
“Give me some water,” Graff said, without looking up. “Right here, where it’s bloody. But gently. Just trickle it.”
Winter hurried over with one of the kettles. Looking closely at the wound made her want to gag, and the smell was beginning to cut through the battle stink of sweat and powder. She forced her hands to remain steady and tipped a shallow stream from the kettle across the boy’s skin. Pink rivulets ran down Bobby’s sides and soaked into the inside of his jacket.
Graff’s mouth worked silently, as though chewing something stubborn.
“Right,” he said, not looking up. “Right. Get some clean linen and tear it into strips. I’ll get the rest of this shirt off.”
Winter nodded and went to her trunk. She sacrificed the cleaner of her two spare shirts, and the fabric tore with a sound like a distant volley of musketry. She’d laid out a half dozen uneven bandages when she heard Graff fall backward, followed by a great deal of swearing.
“Oh, fucking Brass Balls of the Beast!”
“What?” Winter’s heart clenched. She turned. “What happened?”
“Just look!” Graff said. “Look at—”
At first she thought he meant the wound, around which he’d wiped the skin clean, until there was only a ragged red hole just to the right of the boy’s navel. He’d unbuttoned Bobby’s shirt to pull away the last bits of clinging linen, and—
“Oh,” Winter said quietly. She looked down at Bobby’s face—a young, soft, feminine face, cheeks unmarred by stubble—and felt a hundred little moments click into place.
“Fuck me,” Graff said. “He—”
“She,” Wi
nter said.
“She,” he repeated dully. “I can’t—I mean—”
“Come on,” Winter said. “This can’t be the first pair of breasts you’ve seen up close.”
“What? But . . .”
“Later,” Winter said firmly. “Now. Do what you can.”
Graff looked up at her, and she tried to put all the calm she could muster into her gaze. He swallowed, nodded, and bent over his patient.
• • •
Some time later, Graff sat back. Sweat trickled across his forehead, and he wiped it away absentmindedly, leaving a smear of red under his bangs.
“It’s no good,” he said. “The ball’s still in there somewhere, but if I go groping around trying to find it I’m just going to make things worse.”
Winter looked down at Bobby’s face. His—her—mouth worked silently, but her eyes were tightly shut, as though in a dream from which she couldn’t escape.
“If we were to take her to a cutter . . . ,” Graff began.
“Would it make a difference?”
“No,” he admitted. “Probably not. There’s too much bleeding, and h— She’s already running a fever.”
“Any idea how . . . long?”
“A few hours at best,” he said.
“Will she wake up?”
Graff gave a weary shrug. “I’m no doctor, just a corporal who picked up a little stitching and sawing. Though I doubt even a doctor could tell you.”
Winter nodded. “You’d better go, then.”
“What?” He looked up at her. “Go where?”
“Someone in the rest of the company must need your help. Folsom, if no one else.”
“But—” Graff gestured helplessly at the girl on the floor.
“I’ll stay with her,” Winter said. “Someone should.”
He turned away, but Winter caught a fleeting glimpse of relief in his face. She tried not to hold it against him.
“I’ll check back in,” he said, retreating. “Later. And you can come and find me if he—I mean, when she—”
“I will.” Winter ushered him to the exit. When the tent flap had fallen closed, she stared at it wearily for a few moments, then turned around and sat down beside Bobby.
Graff had covered the wound with makeshift bandages, though the blood was already soaking through. Winter kept her eyes on the girl’s face. It was tight and drawn with pain, her boy-short hair clingy and matted with sweat. Winter smoothed it absently with one hand.
“No cutters,” she murmured. “Well, of course not.”
She hadn’t even thought about that possibility herself. This girl planned better than I ever did. The breasts that had so disturbed Graff were only slight swells, and Winter wondered how old Bobby really was.
I wish she’d told me. A fantasy, of course. Winter knew as well as anyone that a secret spoken aloud, even once, was a secret lost. But I would have asked her so many things. How she made it through recruitment. Where she came from. Why she came to Khandar. It was singularly cruel, she thought, to discover that she wasn’t alone just hours before she would be alone again.
Winter was surprised to find that she was crying. She closed her eyes against the tears, but they welled regardless, trickling down her cheeks and pattering onto Bobby’s jacket. One drop touched the corner of her mouth, and she licked automatically, tasting the salt and the acrid tang of sweat and powder.
“Winter.” Feor was leaning forward, peering at Bobby.
“You don’t need to gape at her,” Winter said.
“Her,” Feor muttered, as though tasting the word. “A girl.” And then something else, low and fast, that Winter didn’t understand.
“In fact,” Winter said, “I should cover her up. Somebody might burst in here, and I’ll be damned if—”
“I can help her,” Feor blurted.
Winter froze. A spark of hope, the tiniest ember, ignited briefly in her chest, though she felt stupid for encouraging it. But the priestesses of Monument Hill did collect all sorts of esoteric knowledge, didn’t they? Was it possible Feor had some strange powder, some recipe, something—
She quashed her sudden enthusiasm and said, “You might have said something earlier.”
“Earlier I did not know the corporal was a woman,” Feor said. “Obv-scar-iot will not bind to a man.”
Winter hadn’t understood the burst of archaic Khandarai. “What is it you want to do?”
“I can bind her to my naath,” Feor said, so quiet she was almost inaudible.
“Ah.” The ember of hope flickered and died. “Magic. You mean you can help her spiritually.” Winter tried to keep her tone level—Feor looked so serious, and she didn’t want to trample on the girl’s beliefs—but she couldn’t help but a twist on the last word.
“It’s not—”
“Look,” Winter said, “if you want to . . . to say a prayer, or what have you, I’m not going to object. But I’m not sure Bobby would want you to. She was a Free Church man—woman—like the rest of us.”
“It is not a prayer,” Feor said patiently. “Prayers are requests to the Heavens and the gods above and around us. A naath is an invocation, a command. It will be obeyed.”
“All right,” Winter said. “Go ahead, if you think it will do any good.”
Feor sat in silence for a moment, her good hand clenched on her injured arm. She looked—frail, somehow, and Winter felt guilty for her harsh tone. She moved carefully around the sickbed and put a hand on the girl’s shoulder in what she hoped was a comforting way.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to . . . it’s just hard.” She looked down at Bobby and then dragged her eyes away, but too late. The tears returned. She rubbed bitterly at her face with the heel of her palm.
“You don’t understand,” Feor whispered.
Winter closed her eyes. “You’re right. I probably don’t.”
“It would be heresy,” Feor said. Winter was astonished to feel the girl shaking like an autumn leaf under her hand. “The blackest, most wrong kind of heresy. To bind obv-scar-iot to her—not a Chosen of Heaven, not even of the true faith! Mother would never forgive me. My whole life would be as nothing. Useless.”
Feor was crying now, too. She leaned into Winter, who slipped an arm around her automatically. The girl’s slim body was convulsed by sobs.
“I’m sorry,” Winter repeated. “I didn’t understand what you were offering.” In Vordan it had been a hundred years since the Priests of the Black had hunted noncomformists with the torturer’s knife, and a century of Free Church tolerance had taken the sting out of accusations of heresy. The Redeemer pyres in Ashe-Katarion could attest to the fact that the Khandarai took their religion more seriously.
Feor looked up, eyes still shining, and drew a long breath. She put on a determined expression. “Of course not. How could you?”
“I’m sure that Bobby”—Winter forced herself to look at the corporal’s pained, twisted face—“I’m sure she’d appreciate anything you could do.”
“She might not. The binding can be unpredictable, even for those who have prepared for it all their lives. She might curse us both afterward.”
“Afterward?” Winter looked down into Feor’s serious face. “You really think she’d live?”
“Oh, yes.” A faint smile crossed the girl’s lips. “Obv-scar-iot will not be stopped by such a trivial injury.”
“What does that mean, obv-scar-iot?” From the pained look on Feor’s face, Winter knew she’d botched the pronunciation.
“It is the name of my naath.” This at least Winter understood. Naath meant “spell” or “sorcery”—literally “a thing which is read” or “reading.” “It means,” Feor went on, “something like ‘magic for the creation of a Guardian.’ Or so I was taught.”
“And it will”—Winter hesitated—“heal her?”
Feor nodded. “But . . .”
“But?”
The girl took another long breath and wiped her eyes. “I am naathem
. It is given to me to bind the naath, but once bound it cannot be undone until the bound one’s death. Nor can I bind another until that time. I may only be able to perform the binding once in my lifetime.” She paused. “You saved my life. You and the others, but it was you who sheltered me when you might have . . .” Feor stopped, swallowed, and went on. “I have no way to repay you other than this.”
“Feor,” Winter said, “you don’t have to—”
“I want to.” The girl pursed her lips. “It is only that . . .”
She trailed off, very quietly. Winter stared at her, and after a long pause she spoke aloud.
“. . . I meant it for you.”
“Me? But—” Tired and befuddled as she was, Winter leapt to the appropriate conclusion very quickly. Obv-scar-iot will not bind to a man. She thought about denial, but one look at Feor’s face made it clear there was no point. Winter swallowed hard and slowly removed her arm from the girl’s shoulders. “How long have you known?”
“For some time.”
“And how . . .”
Feor shrugged. “I am naathem.”
Magic. “But you didn’t know about Bobby?”
“I spent only a little time with her. I would have known, eventually.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Why should I?” Feor said. “You obviously wished it to be a secret. Knowing that I knew the truth would only have made you uncomfortable. And I worried . . .” Her cheeks went scarlet. “I worried that if you knew I had found out, you might not let me go.”
Winter had to smile at that. “Really?”
“Only at first,” Feor said. “Before I truly knew you.”
Well, it could be worse. The first person to find out doesn’t speak any Vordanai. Winter shook her head. “God above. It’s been a long time since anyone knew.”
Feor nodded seriously. “I thought, if you were wounded in battle, I could at least do this for you. Save your life, perhaps, as you saved mine.”
“But if you use this naath now, on Bobby, you won’t be able to help me next time,” Winter said.
Feor nodded, looking miserable.
“Do it,” Winter said. “I’ll just have to survive on my own.”
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