“Damned Serafans,” Theodor cursed through clenched teeth. “Without knowing where or how they’re planning to take advantage of that tactic…”
“We will wait,” Sianh said. “I do not like it, but we cannot react against what we do not know.”
17
THE SILENCE FOLLOWING THE SERAFAN ATTACK CREPT IN EERIE waves over the encampment. We waited, increased patrols and pickets guarding the camp, but no incursion came, and no messengers arrived to bring news of attacks on other Reformist-sympathizing towns or ports.
“I don’t like waiting like this,” Kristos said as we ate our dinner, pea soup with thin shreds of ham and heavy brown bread. The quartermaster, a thickset butcher who had known both Kristos and Niko in the city, had built ovens and his battalion of bakers churned out loaves of coarse bread from the local oats and wheat and rye. “It’s making the men nervous.”
“They are indeed wary,” Sianh said. “Some of them do not even believe that the Serafans could effect such a thing, but even they are worried. Illness is as much a danger in a military encampment as shot and shell.”
“The Serafans have kept the secret of their particular kind of casting for centuries, perhaps,” I mused. “You said that there have been sorcerers at the court for centuries, right?” Sianh nodded. “Why let the secret out now?”
“They think you already have,” Alba said quietly. She daubed the last of her soup with her bread crust. “They know that you discovered their casting,” she added. “They were quite keen to have you dispatched in Isildi, to keep the secret from escaping, but now? It’s loose.”
“So they may as well unleash it to its full potential,” Theodor murmured. “That’s not a comforting thought.”
“Then how do we fight back against this?” Kristos said. It wasn’t a rhetorical question, I realized, as all eyes in the room settled on me.
“I don’t know!” I said. “I—well. Start with the soldiers who were wearing charmed clothing. Let’s see if it affected them less.”
“Very scientific,” Kristos said. “But if it didn’t do anything, or not enough—what then? They can drive us mad, make us ill, render us unable to fight, anytime?”
“Not quite,” I said, thinking out loud. “Unless they’ve got an antidote I don’t know about, there’s no way their own soldiers wouldn’t be just as badly affected.”
Kristos nodded, clearly not satisfied with that answer. “I confess I am entirely underprepared for this kind of thinking. We all are, excepting Sianh, I suppose. But it seems wrong, making these decisions for everyone. Like we’re a troupe of nobles. Like we’re exactly what we’re fighting to stop.”
“Someone must take leadership,” Sianh scoffed. “Especially in the midst of a war.”
“It doesn’t have to be only us,” Theodor said slowly. “Kristos is right. We are quite literally fighting for an established form of representation that’s been denied.”
“The Council of Country, from the Reform Bill,” I said.
Sianh shook his head at his pea soup. “We are not able to pause a war and hold elections. Do not let your ideals compromise your ability to win a war.”
“Who has a better stake than the men who are already here, fighting? Who more than they deserve to confirm some vision of Galitha?” Kristos smiled, an idea growing. “The Reform Bill promised a Council of Country. Our first one is sitting right out there,” he said, gesturing toward the wavy panes of the kitchen window. “They already voted on their officers. They chose their leadership already. We could formalize that structure, and begin establishing government procedures, too, for after the war.”
“They chose men who they thought could lead them in battle the best,” I cautioned. “That doesn’t mean they are the same people who would best write, I don’t know, court martial procedures or rationing orders.” I paused. “And what about the women? They may not be fighting on the field, but they have a stake in this, too.”
Theodor inhaled slowly. “At any rate, the needs of an army are different than the needs of a civilian government. Not to mention,” he added, “there’s precious little agreement about what, precisely, the nation will look like after the war. The Reform Bill retained the nobility in much of their authority and simply added elected councils.”
“The Red Caps never wanted to retain the nobility,” Kristos said. It wasn’t an argument for or against the nobles; rather, he looked tired. “But it’s one or the other.”
“I don’t think it’s up to us to decide,” Theodor said. “And I’m not at all sure that simply instating our officers in government positions is ethical. It has a rather despotic taste, doesn’t it?”
“You’re right.” Kristos grimaced. “That does complicate things.”
I gazed out the window over the sloping field toward the main encampment. Who knew what those men were thinking? Surely they were shaken. The skirmishes had been small thus far, but men had died, and now Serafan curse magic cast a shadow over them, too. “What about new elections? I think this army needs a bit of optimism. And it needs to be unified. We have Red Caps and reluctant Reformists alongside one another. They need some kind of promise of what this country will look like.” I paused and tried to smile. “When we win.”
“When we win.” Theodor couldn’t help a small smile. “So we could hold new elections and form a Council of Country—our first.”
“Why, you could hold your elections tomorrow and have your council within two days,” Alba said, faintly amused, like a mother watching her children inventing the rules to a game.
“No, wait.” Kristos drummed his fingers on the big kitchen table. “Not tomorrow. Let me publish that we’re doing this. Any man enlisted for the duration of the war has a vote, provided he gets here by Threshing Market.”
“You’re having a market?” Alba asked.
“Galatine harvest festival,” I explained. “That gives you less than a month to get the word out,” I said to Kristos. “Is that enough?”
“It will have to be,” Kristos said.
The fierce tattoo of drums interrupted us. Sianh ran to the window, with Kristos jostling beside him. Drummers beat to assemble at the center of camp, and troops rushed to fall in, muskets in hand. I turned to Theodor, who was sliding his arm through his sword belt. He met my eyes and nodded, once. Whether a full-scale battle or a skirmish, we were ready.
18
FIG BURST THROUGH THE DOOR OF THE KITCHEN, THE ECHOES OF the drums amplifying his urgency. “Word from Hazelwhite village. A troop of horse under—oh, one of those Pommerly bastards you all talk so much about.”
“They’re not,” I said, unable to resist a bit of moral guidance despite my shaking hands, “actually bastards. Mind your language.”
“Sophie, report to the surgeon,” Sianh said. “Perhaps you can be of some use there. It is too unclear what is underway in Hazelwhite for anything else.”
I nodded. I knew that I needed to discover how my charms and curses might affect an active battle eventually, but that could wait. Something more familiar—health charms in fabric—waited for me at the field hospital. The surgeon and a complement of surgeon’s mates and nurses occupied a sagging marquee tent on the far end of the camp. Theodor had studied proper layout of a military camp with his tutors, along with botany and ornithology and fine penmanship and dozens of other subjects far less useful at the moment. The placement of the medical corps away from the main body of camp would, he ascertained, limit the spread of disease.
The head surgeon was a stout man, shorter than me, with a barrel chest and thick, competent hands.
“Don’t need more nurses,” he barked as I ducked under the drooping door flap. He had a wooden chest open in front of him and inventoried the supplies inside. “Ration quota’s full.”
“I’m not a nurse,” I said. “I won’t need rations, either.”
He looked up, still holding a bottle of some kind of cloudy tincture. “My apologies, you’re the prince’s—what exactly are you? Can�
��t keep up on wedding gossip.”
The honest lack of deference was refreshing. “I’m nobody,” I replied. “My name is Sophie.”
“Ha, Sophie Nobody—but your last name is either Balstrade or Westland and either has quite a bit of cachet around here.”
“It’s Balstrade. For now.” I paused—who knew when I might formally marry Theodor? Not now, that was for certain.
“Don’t really mind either way, they’re both honest fellows.” He shrugged. “I’m Hamish Oglethorpe.”
“I’m sorry.” I reacted to his comically awkward name before thinking, but to my relief Hamish burst out laughing.
“It’s true, my parents were cruel old skunks. But why are you here, if not to apply for the nurses’ corps?”
“No interest there,” I said, “but if you’ve heard gossip at all, you probably know that I cast charms. For health, if it’s needed.”
“I’d heard that,” he said, noncommittal. “I’d heard you were coming with wagons full of charmed gunpowder or some such, too, going to make this war an easy win. But here we are, ready to fight a battle, perhaps, the old-fashioned way.” I thought for a moment he was serious, that he blamed me, but then he winked.
“Give me some credit—the uniforms are charmed. Not the gunpowder,” I said with a faint laugh. “We weren’t sure how that would turn out.”
“Ah, might blast out of the guns and turn into roses, pepper the opposing forces with perfume, is that it?” He chuckled and put a few bottles back in his trunk, then pulled a few others out.
“One never does know,” I said. “I can, however, with your permission, lay a health charm on—oh, the bandages would be best.”
“My permission? You may be nobody, so you say, but you outrank me.”
I hesitated. I had the authority of the men in command who had sent me, if nothing else. “No, this is your surgery. Your surgical theater,” I amended.
He choked on a phlegmy laugh. “Ha! Like the fine university! Except mine is built of canvas that reeks of old cheese.”
He wasn’t wrong. “Do I have your permission?”
“You have it and more. My stock is there,” he said, pointing to a stack of linen, and I put out of my mind thoughts of torn flesh and blood.
“Do you need anything in particular?” Hamish asked, but I was already pulling charm from the ether, smoothing it into the fibers of a bandage.
“Someone will have to roll these back up again,” I murmured. “I’ll do it when I’m finished.” I fell into the quiet rhythm of charming, so much like sewing yet different, my materials not physical but ether itself. The gold thrummed in the fibers of the linen, the warp and weft infused with charm magic as I pressed it into the fabric.
Working took most of my concentration, so when I had finished I was not surprised to see that one regiment had marched on Hazelwhite—the First, the only regiment already completely outfitted in gray uniform coats. One of the nurses had rerolled all the bandages. “Now what?” I asked Hamish.
“Ah, that’s the worst part of this job. We wait.”
A thick purple dusk had fallen while I’d worked, tucking shadows into every corner of Hamish’s tent and rapidly dropping the temperature outside. A cool dew spread across the grass; it would be frost before long, I thought, and after that—after that, winter, and an army to feed on meager rations. I didn’t harbor much hope that we would conclude this war quickly.
I turned back toward the house, not sure where to go, what use I might be. If fighting came here, perhaps I could weave a defensive net of charm over the troops, as I had done in the collapsing ballroom at Midwinter. Or perhaps—I swallowed. The curse magic flung at the Royalist navy cannon had produced death and destruction exponentially greater than what I had envisioned or, I thought, actually cast. The chain reaction of an exploding cannon on shipboard was, perhaps, a unique circumstance. Or perhaps not.
The cold dew seeped through the seams of my shoes. There was no going back now—if this camp was attacked, I would have to do what I could. And that would mean learning, as I experimented with life and death, what utilized my talents most efficiently.
It was a far cry from stitching charmed gowns in my atelier.
“If you’ve nowhere better to be,” Hamish said, ducking under the doorway of his tent, “I’ve some port somewhere.”
“Should you be drinking before—” I stopped myself.
“Before my kind of work, seems appropriate.” His smile was grim. “But it’s a cold night. A drop of something is sustaining.”
He made it sound like health advice, so I accepted. He had a small table in the corner of the tent, set with a pair of battered pewter candlesticks and a green glass bottle shaped like an onion. He fished a pair of thick-stemmed glasses from his personal trunk and poured a few fingers of tawny port into each.
“I thought you said a drop!” I laughed.
“It’s port, not whiskey,” he countered. “Now you tell me—how do I expect these charms of yours to work?”
“They’ll better a man’s chances,” I replied. “It’s not fail-safe. Not a magic spell that heals someone or anything like that.”
“Figured that would be too good to be true,” he said. “So I do my usual butchering and your bit just… gives me a boost, is that it?”
“Exactly.”
“You were a seamstress before, is that right?” He waved his half-empty glass. “A seamstress and, what have you, sorceress.”
“Yes, I was a seamstress. And what have you.”
“Quite the change to this. At least I’m still in my line of work—was a barber surgeon in Havensport.” He had the look of a professional—he could have just as easily been my neighbor in Galitha City, the gruff but capable barber surgeon a street over from my old shop who could pull a tooth before the patient had finished opening his mouth. “You could probably learn to stitch wounds, you know.”
“I thought you didn’t need any more help.” The port was warming my chest and settling my stomach.
“Ha! I hadn’t considered your qualifications.” He pressed his lips together. “I’m not a proud man. I’m not one of the noble’s physicians, riding on a reputation. I hung out my shingle, I earned my pay. Never made enough to put on airs about it. If you think you can do anything else here, you’re welcome to stay. I don’t know your trade, but it seems it might be you can do more than work a little magic into bandages.” He tapped his empty glass on the table. “And if you don’t want to, I don’t fault you. If there’s a true battle out there, this place will be hell for a while.”
I took a steadying sip of the port. I had seen the face of men’s brutality imposed on other men in Galitha City twice already, at Midwinter and under Niko’s command. It still wove a knot of nausea in my stomach, but if I could do anything to help, I had some obligation. “If I’m needed elsewhere, I’ll have to go,” I finally said.
“Fair enough. I wouldn’t press your services on the wounded when those still fighting might need it more.”
A tall blond surgeon’s mate thrust his head through the door. “They’re coming back,” he said.
“What happened?” I asked. “Did we push them back, is Hazelwhite still ours? Were the horse—”
“I don’t know anything but that we pushed them back.” He hesitated. “It wasn’t a large troop of horse, or infantry after them, and they pulled back without much resistance. As though they were testing us and found us a tougher fight than they anticipated.”
“After the Serafan curse,” I said. Hamish raised an eyebrow. “It makes sense. They were testing our strength, seeing if they could overpower us easily, after the curse.”
“Didn’t work,” Hamish replied with a snort.
The wounded arrived shortly after, and I kept myself out of the way, pressed against mildewed canvas that leaked dew at the seams. Most of the wounded weren’t bad off. Nurses and mates cleaned and bandaged wounds outside while the more serious injuries were brought in to Hamish.
&
nbsp; Even those weren’t what I had feared, at least not at first. Hamish stitched a slash wound from a saber while the poor First Regiment corporal averted his eyes and bit his lip. I pushed health charms into the thread Hamish used, the stitches themselves charmed to stave off infection. Then I wove a cloud of charm magic around him, calm and healing and a bright white light that I sensed was purest charm, and let it settle on him. Of course, I couldn’t tell if it made any difference; I couldn’t set a twin of the man next to him with an identical wound. Still, he seemed more hale than I would expect after seeing the glint of the curved needle the surgeon used.
I settled into my spot in the corner, unnoticed by the men brought in needing stiches and, for one swearing sergeant, a broken arm set. I laced golden charm magic around all of them; it wouldn’t last, not long. Not as long as the bandages or the sinews stitching their wounds shut. Yet it seemed to help; the sergeant stopped cursing shortly after I settled the charm on him.
Then a loud commotion broke out from outside and a man, wan as death, was carried in on a stretcher. Hamish roughly helped the sergeant to his feet, pushing him outside to the care of the nurses in a neighboring tent. His operating table cleared, he directed the man to be set down.
I caught my breath. He had been shot in the abdomen, the wound seeping blood and his shifting body revealing things I was sure I wasn’t supposed to be able to see. He was pale, nearly gray, and his eyes lacked focus. Yet I could tell, looking closer, that he was young. Probably sixteen, seventeen.
And he wore the silver-braid-trimmed blue uniform of a Royalist army officer.
“Well, then,” Hamish murmured as he peeled layers of blood-soaked wool and linen away from the wound. The fibers had shredded and torn, and I wondered how much of the young officer’s waistcoat and shirt Hamish had left inside him. The thought nearly made me gag, so I pushed my mind back into work, into the repetitive and nearly meditative motions of drawing charm magic and laying it around the wounded man.
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