This was the last time she trusted a bunch of men to help her do a job. Mama Patience was absolutely right: put a handful of coins into most men’s pockets and they’d either drink it or, if you didn’t keep a sharp eye on them, spend it on women with loose morals.
“Oh, and the half a dozen takers you ‘hired’ for nine gold—at half again the going rate for a mercenary—was really lining them up,” Darius said, raising a single eyebrow at her before making a calming gesture. “Settle down, Lieutenant. The night is young and not all the entertainment has arrived yet. This will work; you’ll see. Not all of us are new and wet behind the ears when it comes to the armed forces.”
She silently glared at all three of them. When the Captain asked her how she had managed to turn fifty pieces of gold into half a dozen recruits, at least she’d be able to say her friends had received one thundering sendoff party.
Why, if she didn’t know for a fact that Darius had no clue she was a girl, she would have thought he was patting her on the head and sending her off to bed like a good little girl. It wasn’t just insulting—it was downright aggravating!
“Ah, here they come now,” Darius said with satisfaction.
Falon looked over to where he was pointing and spluttered. Swallowing the wrong way, she choked as at least a dozen women in colorful—if threadbare—outfits strutted into the giant circle of campfires that marked the boundaries of the party masquerading as a recruitment drive.
“The entertainment has arrived,” the Imperial Training Master said, satisfaction seemingly dripping from the corners of his mouth.
“When you said you were hiring some entertainment, I thought you meant a lute player or three—maybe with a few other instruments, like a flute or harp,” Falon wheezed, certain she was going straight to the underworld when she died for what was being done in her name. When one of her wagons came along behind the women, piled very high with loose hay, she had to sit down as her knees trembled.
Falling back to the earth with a thump, she leaned heavily against the wheel of ‘her’ other wagon. With morbid fascination—the kind experienced when one viewed a bellowing bull charging in the opposite direction as he broke through the neighbors fence line to get at said neighbors cows—Falon wanted to curl up under the wagon and hide.
“Could this party get any more lewd?” she muttered as a pair of men came forward. With the loud, verbal consent of the now squealing women, they picked them up and threw them onto the hay atop the wagon.
“Afraid not,” Darius said regretfully.
Falon felt her eyes getting big as platters. The serious nature of his voice penetrated and she started up at him.
“Eh?” Aodhan asked sounding interested.
“I tried to get them to arrive topless but only half were willing and they wanted extra for the deed,” Darius shrugged. “Alas, I was already taxed for coin. A good debauch doesn’t come cheap, you know.”
Falon placed a hand on her forehead, as she was suddenly feeling quite faint. Paying witness to a debauchery was the last thing a good, well-brought-up girl wanted to endure, but actually paying for one! She covered her face with her hands as the humiliation came crashing down on her.
“Aodhan, how much did you pay for your half of the…‘festivities’?” Falon hazarded to ask. The Old Blood leader paused in consideration, while she held her breath.
“About ten gold, I’d say,” the West Wick Headsman said after a moment’s contemplation.
“So that means you should still have five golds left over,” she said releasing a pent up breath of air.
“Sorry, I meant fifteen golds,”’ the Headsman said with an enigmatic smile and then shrugged, “I forgot about just how much we had to pay our people not to get drunk, so someone could walk the perimeter and guard the loot.”
Falon’s mouth dropped open. She was being gouged for coins by her own people! She opened her mouth to protest but in the flickering firelight and, gauging the enigmatic expression on the Headman’s face, she hesitated.
“You mean to tell me that all we have left of our recruiting funds are eleven pieces of gold?” Falon said in despair.
“Not ‘we’,” Aodhan said seriously, “you.”
Falon stared at him.
“That’s right, Lieutenant, you’re the recruiter here and while I’m to be your Sergeant that means I’ll have something of an interest in how well you do here…always supposing the pay is good enough, of course,” Darius said, his mouth quirking. “Alas, Aodhan and the rest of the boys are heading home,” Darius said with a nod to the Headman.
Falon cursed under her breath and got to her feet and while she could see Ernest looking at the other two men with surprise she couldn’t afford to mind that right now.
“What have you done with my money?” she asked in a dangerous voice. It sounded like all her money—the money Captain Smythe had given her for her recruiting drive—had just gone for one very lewd, very expensive party.
The pair of older men exchanged a look and then smiled down at her. “No worries, Lieutenant,” Darius said, holding his hands palm up, “it’ll work out. Besides,” he said turning to gesture towards the men around the wagon, the ale barrels and the fire pits, “we got the recruits here didn’t we?”
Aodhan nodded, “And the boys really appreciate thou throwing a party for them and putting a few extra coins in their pocket like this before they leave for the Wicks. Everything helps, as thou well know.” Then the Headsman added in a soothing voice, “We’ll do right by thee, lad, never fear.”
Falon grabbed her hair with both hands and pulled, the pain in her scalp helping her to focus though the angry haze that was starting to cloud her vision as she scanned the party once again and feeling her spine stiffen.
“Aodhan, I can see three Wicks men over there drinking and another chatting up one of the…‘Maids’,” she said finally, not sure if the women were worthy of the term or not but deciding that to err on the side of courtesy until one knew better was never wrong. “What if they get a bad mix of wood spirits in their ale? For shame.”
“And you—” she rounded on Darius but Aodhan interrupted first.
“Pear wine,” the Headman said, seemingly out of nowhere. It took Falon’s mind a pair of beats to catch up.
“What?” She couldn’t help the growl that entered her voice.
The Headsman looked at her, definitely unimpressed.
“I said we gave them the pear wine; let the strangers take their chances with the ale. Our boys know better,” the Old Blood Leader said, a touch of scorn in his voice for the strangers. “There’s more than enough there for every man of the Wicks to get a light buzz off it, but not near enough to end the night drunk. A few might trade for another man’s share but that just means the rest will be more alert because of it.” He shrugged, “No worries, lad, enough of the boys will be able to perform their duties—even if they do take a few minutes off to cavort with the Dirty Maids now and again.”
The words ‘cavort’ and ‘Dirty Maids’ were not something that she should have ever heard in the same sentence. Falon blanched before re-mastering herself and staring at him grimly.
“Fine,” she said abruptly, she had to remind herself firmly that she was not at home and that this was what men must do when they were away from home. She had heard rumors and half-completed sentences before, enough to get an idea but actually seeing it played out right before her was something else. It made her wonder how she could ever trust her eventual future husband if he had to go off to war—assuming she didn’t die an old spinster because no one would have her, of course.
She rounded on Darius, who was looking entirely too amused by her concern.
“And you,” she glowered, “even if I believe him, that still doesn’t explain how I’m supposed to turn eleven pieces of gold, at one gold piece per man, into half a company of recruits.” Falon crossed her arms and tapped her foot on the floor, “Unless the plan all along was to get me to dip into my own share of
the battle spoils?” She stopped for a moment to consider if that had indeed been the real plan all along.
“There’s no need to strain yourself,” Darius said, stepping to the side and pointing towards Tug sitting at the recruitment table, “it’s all been taken care of.”
“I gave Tug the rest of those coins,” Falon whispered feeling herself turning white, her hands clenching unconsciously. In retrospect, she didn’t know what she’d been thinking by handing what was left of the sign-on bonus to a known fraud and thief—a man known in Lamont Town as ‘Bad Scales’.
“Remember when I asked you to give Tug the rest of your coins to hold onto in the company strong box?” Darius reminded her. And oh, how she did remember how her new minted Sergeant had shown up with an empty box he’d somehow salvaged from the battlefield. When he had given her the key, she had just assumed it was the only one.
“I’ve been played for a fool,” Falon said flatly. Patience had been right. She had handed her money to a man—or, apparently, several of them—and now it was all gone.
Darius had the grace to actually look wounded by the insinuation. “Nothing like that,” he said sounding more than a little put out, “I just had him change them into an assortment of lesser denominations. The coins will stretch further that way.”
“What difference could that possibly make…” she hesitated. ‘Bad Scales’ she realized with a sinking sensation, “We’re cheating our own men?” Falon whispered viciously, unable to believe her ears.
“’Cheating’ is a hard word,” Darius replied in a deliberately mild voice.
Falon glared at him. “But accurate, I’ll wager,” she snarled.
“Listen,” he said, pointing at Tug and trying to divert her attention.
Almost beside herself at this point, Falon followed his finger and whirled to glare over at the odious, fat man behind his recently salvaged campaign desk. Over the din of the growing crowd, she could hear him speaking.
“Step right up, fighting men of Stagland, and join the Fighting Swans Battalion, the hardest fighting, hardest drinking, and hardest fornicating company of infantry in the entire army! We broke the lines under Lieutenant Falon and rolled up the Left Wing under the command of Captain Smythe! Gods save the Kingdom and his Marshalship, the Prince! The first drink is free regardless of if you join up, but if you sign on, you’ll also get this here coin,” Tug waved a coin that flickered gold in the torch light in his one hand and a dull wooden square with a large hole in the middle of it in the other, “this chit, and as much free food and drink as you can handle! Not to mention one free tumble with the Maids—if you’re feeling up to it!”
“We only had eleven gold coins remaining,” Falon said, shaking her head in disbelief, “and we only have the one stallion to roast on the spit. How can we pay—let alone feed—them all?!” There had to be over fifty men gathered within their circle of campfires, and more kept drifting in as the music picked up.
“The Wicks men didn’t need all the food in your wagons to get home with,” Darius said easily, “so we lightened the load a might.”
“With my food?” Falon wished she could say she didn’t believe her ears but she was long past that now. “So that’s what’s in those giant stew pots they’re bringing out now—my family’s extra remaining food?!”
“Thou needed to recruit men, and we needed the extra room in the wagons for the wounded and the spoils,” Aodhan informed her evenly. “What you lose in food, you make up for in warm bodies for the battalion.”
“What am I going to feed all these men we’re supposedly hiring? I mean, without all that food they’re feasting on right now,” Falon said as men from all over the camp seemed to be converging on the impromptu little celebratory feast.
“Unless you were planning to keep the family wagons here, you’ve nothing to carry the food with anyway,” Darius reminded her. “Either way, the food wasn’t making it back to your family,” he said flatly, cutting to the heart of her worries.
She flushed at being found out for the penny-pinching, food hoarding person her family’s financial circumstances had reduced her to.
Then she looked back over to where Tug was flashing another gold colored coin in the air. “I’m not sure I can be a part of this,” Falon said stiffly.
Darius started to look exasperated as he suddenly turned and glared at her. “I can put a stop to all of this and you can explain to the Captain what happened to his sign-on bonus or you can sit down, lean back, and let the rest of us handle this. But if your morals are getting in the way just let me know and the men already here can just eat for free. This, Lieutenant Falon, is how men are recruited when you’re on a threadbare budget, and the only ones too stupid to know it are the first timers who didn’t bother paying any attention to their elders in the first place,” he said flatly.
“I should have been informed,” Falon glared and returned his look just as flatly, “and besides, we don’t have enough coins!”
“You just have been,” Darius grated, “and you let me and Tug Bad Scales worry about the coins. There will be enough of them before the evening’s gone, never you fear.”
“What if they mean to send their money home to their families?” Falon demanded hotly. “And all that wife or daughter gets is a worthless, forged coin instead!”
“Do these men look like they’re worried about sending money home?” Darius asked with disbelief pointing out to the crowd. “And it’s not my problem if Tug offers them a coin and men assume they’re getting gold when they sign up.”
Falon looked over at the men quaffing low quality ale, well-fortified with wood spirits and accepting steaming piles of horse meat and stew into their wooden bowels. She could also hear the high pitched giggles coming from the hay wagon. Then she considered what she would say to Captain Smythe after their last, less than cordial encounter, when he had given her this recruiting job. Could she afford to throw this money away?
“I’ll pay them back,” she said under her breath, silently promising all the unwitting men out there. Squeezing her eyes shut because her family was counting on her not to mess things up and she couldn’t afford for Lamont to send an official messenger to speak with her Father about any less than loyal behavior. She just couldn’t.
That meant she had to have the men because there was no way she could show up to the Captain empty-handed. If he thought she was still upset—which she was—or holding a grudge at being ‘recruited’ herself—which, if she was being completely and entirely honest, was probably much too close to the truth to effectively deny—then she could be stripped of her rank and thrown into the dungeon for stealing his Lordship’s lucre. That was a risk she couldn’t take, not when she might not be the only one to suffer—she had to protect her sisters and little brother.
“Do what you have to,” Falon whispered, trying and failing to projecting an uncaring demeanor. On the inside something inside her broke, just by being a party to it this fraud, she had become something dirty and unclean, “you’re right. So if you’ll just excuse me, my wounds are starting to hurt. I think I’ll sit here for a while, like you said.”
Fitting words to action she carefully sat back down beside her campaign pack as if her wounds were hurting more than they were.
Looking back up, she saw the three of them looking down at her with varying expressions on their faces. “Well,” she said, struggling for an appropriately arch Officer’s tone in her voice and she thought succeeding at keeping her face a mask, “carry on, then. If for some reason you need me, I’ll be here.”
“Lieutenant,” Aodhan and Darius muttered after a moment and then turned away. Ernest hesitated, but seeing that she wanted to be alone, he also left.
As they walked away, Falon heard Darius say, “Have the Wicks men ‘encourage’ anyone who wants to leave to stay for some more ale but let them go if they insist, unless we know for sure they signed up. We’ll wait until closer to midnight and then issue the men clubs. Whoever’s still here after t
hat—and has the smell of ale on his breath—has just signed up for the duration.”
“I noticed a lot of men from Quinn,” Aodhan said after a pause.
“Is that a problem?” Darius asked sounding concerned.
“So long as it’s none of the men from my village, I don’t care, but they might if there are too many of them in one place at the same time when they wake up. They might…object,” Aodhan warned.
Feeling like a cold, cruel and uncaring person, Falon hardened her heart in order to steel herself over what had to be done. Still, she turned her back on the rambunctious affair.
She didn’t know a lot of the things a man—or even a boy—would have, but seeing how her people were tricking these men into joining the Fight Swans, she realized she wasn’t any better than Captain Smythe or his Lordship. Even if the men seemed to be having a good time, she couldn’t put the principle of the thing out of her mind.
Pulling out her small collection of journals, she opened hers and began pouring her heart out onto its pages. It had been too long since she’d felt like writing. Spurred on by the knowledge that this might be her last chance to send a letter home, she took out one of her few precious pieces of paper and began to write. The Wicks men were leaving in the morning and her letter could return home with them and the wagons.
Chapter 4: Dealing with Dresses
Dear Falon,
I pray this Letter finds you alive in body, whole in spirit and in the favor with our Liege Lord. I am greatly concerned regarding a recent rumor we’ve been hearing through his lordship’s Reeve Modesto about how you have been made an officer in the militia.
It is not that I want to cast doubt your abilities, far from it, for when it comes to boys one could not ask for a more loyal and dutiful brother, or if asking, expect to find such a creature. Still and nevertheless, due to your ‘shy and retiring nature’ are you sure that accepting a commission is the right thing to do? Not to mention what his Lordship might think if he were to discover the truth of your natural disposition regarding the ‘manly’ art of war?
The Painting (Rise of the Witch Guard Book 2) Page 4