The Price of Valor

by Django Wexler

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Still.” Winter took a deep breath and hugged herself a little tighter. “Thank you.”

  Jane tugged off her sock and held her foot in the air, wiggling her toes. “Ahhh. Much better.”

  “Jane—”

  “What do you want me to say?” Jane looked up. “I was acting like an ass. I’m sorry. I’m sorry you nearly had to get killed before I realized it.”

  “It’s all right,” Winter said.

  “No, it’s not,” Jane said. “When you came back to me in Vordan, and told me your story, I don’t think I understood it. I thought you were . . . hiding, pretending, when you talked about being in the army. But this is your life.”

  “It is,” Winter said. She wasn’t sure she’d understood that herself until Jane had said it out loud. “I didn’t mean for it to be. But . . .”

  Jane cocked her head, emerald eyes reflecting sparks from the campfires out in the darkness. Winter uncrossed her arms.

  “Do you mind if I sit down?”

  Wordlessly, Jane shuffled over on her rock, and Winter took a seat next to her. They sat side by side for a moment, in silence.

  “I spent two years living in fear,” Winter said. “After I ran away from Mrs. Wilmore’s, I was so sure someone would come after me. I ran all the way to Khandar, and then I was afraid of what would happen if someone found me out. I had this sergeant, Davis, who was . . . a monster.” Winter touched her cheek. Davis’ bruises had long since faded, but something in the bone remembered. “If he’d ever discovered who I really was, I don’t know . . .”

  Jane put a hand on her arm, and Winter let out a long breath.

  “It all changed when Janus arrived. They made me a sergeant, and then our lieutenant got himself killed, and the men in the company needed me. No one had ever needed my help before. Except for you, and that time I ran away.”

  Jane squeezed Winter’s arm. “You know you can’t blame yourself for that.”

  “Thanks.” Winter swallowed. “Once people start to rely on you, you can never really get free.”

  “I know all about that.” Jane leaned back, kicking her feet, one bare and one booted. “I didn’t mean to start the Leatherbacks, obviously. When I went back to Mrs. Wilmore’s, I was looking for you. But I ended up with a couple of hundred girls expecting me to tell them what to do, and I couldn’t just leave them. And one thing just kept leading to another . . .” She shrugged. “The hell of it is, now they don’t need me anymore. They’ve got you. And I don’t know how to feel about it.”

  “I need you,” Winter said.

  “Not in what you might call a professional capacity,” Jane drawled, and Winter laughed. “So, what are you going to do with me, Colonel Ihernglass?”

  “I think Abby should stay in command of the Girls’ Own,” Winter said.

  Jane nodded. “She’s better at the organizational bullshit than I could ever be. Even back in Vordan it was her and Min who kept everybody fed and made sure the laundry got done.”

  They were silent for a moment. Min had died at the Vendre, shot by a Concordat sniper.

  “I’ll put you on my staff,” Winter said. “I can’t imagine Janus will object.”

  “Just don’t expect me to write out marching orders and file reports.”

  “Cyte can handle that. I’ll keep you around for when some idiot officer needs to be beaten into submission.”

  Jane laughed, and slipped her arm around Winter. Winter sagged against her, with a happy sigh, and rested her head on Jane’s shoulder.

  “What happened to Sergeant Davis?” Jane said. “Will I get the chance to beat the hell out of him?”

  “No.” Winter closed her eyes. “I killed him myself.”

  “Oh.” Jane thought about that for a moment. “Good.”

  After a moment of silence, Winter felt Jane’s finger under her chin, tilting her head back. Jane leaned over her, red hair falling around them like a crimson waterfall, blocking out the world as their lips met. The kiss lasted for a long time.

  “We haven’t got a tent,” Jane said, pulling away just far enough to speak. Her breath was hot on Winter’s face.

  “I don’t think anyone can see us in here.”

  “They might hear us.”

  “I can stay quiet.”

  “Oh?” Jane murmured, pulling Winter closer. “Is that a challenge?”

  * * *

  Late that night, the rain began.

  It was a light drizzle, not a downpour, but it was continuous and unrelenting. By the time the soldiers awoke, an hour before dawn, uniforms and blankets were already soggy. The road, which was little more than a ribbon of dirt running parallel to the river, slowly but surely transformed into a ribbon of mud. It was churned a little more by every pair of boots that passed over it, until the unlucky companies at the end of the column were slogging through glop as deep as a man’s thigh. Whole groups abandoned the road altogether and wandered through the brush beside it, losing their way or flailing through grass and bushes.

  In spite of the early start Winter had ordered, it was obvious by midday that they were not going to reach their campsite until long after dark. Winter let Edgar pick his way through the mud, snorting in irritation, while she listened to Sevran’s reports.

  “We’re down about thirty, all told,” he said. “Better than I expected. They should be all right until the wagons catch up.”

  “That may take a while, if the rain doesn’t stop,” Winter said.

  Sevran nodded. “I’m more worried about tonight. We’re already getting a lot of stragglers.”

  “At least we should be in the dry when we get there.” The supplies she’d ordered unloaded from the barges included enough tents to keep the regiment out of the rain, if they were willing to squeeze tight. More important, there would be enough food there to fill the soldiers’ knapsacks, which they’d deliberately kept light to make the marching easier. “Start sending officers to round up the laggards while we still have some light to see by.”

  “Good idea.” Sevran saluted, water dripping from the brim of his cap, and rode off.

  Winter went in search of Abby, riding past rank after rank of struggling Girls’ Own soldiers. She saw Anne-Marie, a flash of golden hair amid the drab, wet blue uniforms. The Deslandai girl stumbled and went to her knees, but two of her neighbors caught her by the elbows and swung her back up. Winter smiled to herself and rolled on.

  Abby, mounted, was at the very head of the column, where the mud was only an inch deep. Edgar liked this much better than slogging through muck in the rear, and tossed his head excitedly as Winter urged him into a trot.

  “Not exactly ideal conditions,” Abby said as Winter came alongside.

  “How are you holding up?”

  “All right, I think.” Abby looked over her shoulder at the women of her command. “I won’t know for sure until we round everybody up and count noses.”

  Winter nodded, and hesitated for a moment. “I talked with Jane. She agrees that you should keep the Girls’ Own.”

  Abby blinked and straightened up, setting off a waterfall from some recess of her cap. “She . . . she’s not coming back?”

  “She’ll be on my staff, so she’s not going anywhere. But you’ll be captain of the battalion. You’ve done an excellent job so far.”

  “I . . .” Abby swallowed, then saluted, heedless of the rain. “Yes, sir. Thank you.”

  “If any of the old Leatherbacks give you problems, let me know.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll need another lieutenant to take my place with the Third Company.”

  Winter nodded. “Go ahead and promote someone. I’ll leave the choice to you. Anything else?”

  “I’ll let you know when I think of it.” Abby shook her head, spilling more water. “Looking forward to drying out tonight.
”

  “You and me both.” Damp had never been a problem in Khandar, and Winter hadn’t spent much time in her uniform in the rain. The tight undershirt she used to hide her breasts was chafing badly enough that she thought she’d have blisters. Thank God I insisted on getting everyone fresh boots before we left.

  The march went on, and on, and on, through the afternoon and into the evening, after the sun hid its face beyond a veil of clouds. Torches, spitting and flaring in the rain, marked the length of the column, giving the men and women trudging through the dark something to guide themselves on. It was easy to put a foot astray in the dark, to turn an ankle on a rock or get stuck in a deep mud puddle, and the mounted officers spent more time orchestrating rescues than collecting stragglers.

  Winter pushed forward to the head of the column, hoping to find the campsite, only to meet a pair of scouts returning. She could tell from their faces that the news was not good.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the young man said for the twentieth time.

  “It’s all right,” Winter said. “It sounds like there’s nothing you could have done.”

  “No, sir.” He swallowed. “We rode upriver with the barges, as ordered.” She’d sent four men with each convoy, to guard against bandits or pilferage by the bargemen themselves, but she hadn’t expected this. “Once we met with the courier, we told the bargemen we were going to stop and wait. They weren’t happy about that, sir. They had other cargoes, they said. But we got them to pull in to bank.”

  “And then they attacked you?” Jane said.

  The ranker nodded, looking around the circle of officers. Abby, Sevran, Bobby, and Cyte were there, in addition to Winter and Jane, standing on a muddy bit of grass overlooking the river Velt. A ring of torches defined the camp, which was conspicuously lacking the tents that Winter had expected to find there.

  “It wasn’t . . . I mean, we didn’t fight much. There were twenty of them and four of us, and they grabbed Clarke while he was taking a piss. And it was raining, so we’d put our powder in our packs. They didn’t hurt us any, just put us over the side and pushed off. Though one of them did shout some lewd things at Ranker Verra.”

  “Any idea where they were going?”

  The young man shook his head. “Somewhere upriver. But we lost sight of them pretty quickly in the rain. I’m really sorry, sir.”

  “Thank you, Ranker. You’re dismissed.”

  He saluted and squelched away. Winter waited until he was out of earshot, then turned to the others. “All right. How bad is this?”

  “Pretty bad,” Abby said.

  Sevran nodded. “We’re low on food. Most of the rankers took a little extra, so there’s enough left for maybe a half ration tomorrow, but that’s all.”

  “If that much,” Abby said. “I’m hearing from the sergeants that we’ve got a lot of ‘lost’ bedrolls and packs today. Everyone was sure there’d be plenty to eat when we got here.”

  “And there are still some wandering in,” Sevran said. It was nearly midnight. “If we want to keep to the same schedule tomorrow, some of the rankers are going to be on barely an hour of sleep.”

  “How about ammunition?” Winter said.

  “Forty rounds each, as usual, but no reserve supplies,” Sevran said.

  “And cartridge boxes may be getting lost, too. Or wet.”

  “Hell,” Jane said. “We’re fucked, aren’t we?”

  The gloomy sentiment passed around the circle, and no one offered an objection. Winter took a deep breath. “So what do we do?”

  She looked at Sevran, who shrugged. “If it were just me, I’d go back the way we came until I met up with the wagons. Plenty of supplies there.”

  “At the wagon’s pace, it might take us two weeks to get to Janus.”

  Sevran nodded. “That’s the problem.”

  Winter glanced at Abby, who stood up a bit straighter. “We should keep going,” she said. “Nobody’s going to starve in a couple of days, and we can gather up all the horses and use them for foraging parties. That ought to get us through.”

  “Assuming there’ll be supplies waiting when we get to wherever we’re going,” Jane said. “Otherwise it could be a lot longer than two days if we have to wait for the wagon train to catch up.”

  “Cyte?” Winter said.

  “I’m not sure how much of a regiment we’ll have left when we get there if we push on,” Cyte said. “The way people are straggling, we might end up leaving half the soldiers behind. Is that really going to be any good to Janus?”

  Winter nodded and looked to Bobby, who shrugged. “I’m with Abby. If she thinks we can make it, we can make it.”

  “And you’re with Sevran, Jane?”

  Jane frowned. “Hell. It’s not that we couldn’t do it. But people are already hurting themselves, and it’s only going to get worse.”

  “That makes three to two,” Cyte said.

  “It’s not a vote,” Sevran said. “We provide our advice to the commander, and he makes the decision. If the colonel says we’re pressing on, I’ll press on.”

  “Thank you,” Winter said. “I need a minute to think about this. Go and see how we’re doing on rounding up our stragglers.”

  The five of them saluted, picking their way through the mud and out into the chaos of the camp. Winter stayed where she was, looking out at the nearly invisible river. Faint lights on the other side marked a hillside village, shimmering through a curtain of rain.

  Jane’s right that people are going to get hurt. There had been a few broken bones already, and that was only among the men and women who’d made it into camp. Who knows how many are still out there? Or how many have decided to wander off? There was no way the sergeants could police for desertion with straggling as bad as it was. If we press on, with no tents and no food . . .

  When she closed her eyes, she could see the note Janus had sent, his neat handwriting aglow in her inner vision.

  . . . do everything in your power . . .

  . . . you have yet to disappoint me.

  Failing Janus was unthinkable, somehow. He’s always come through for us, in the end. Now that he was relying on her, could she do less than everything in her power to help?

  But . . .

  Janus hadn’t come through, not for everyone. Not for Adrecht Roston, whose bleached bones were lost somewhere in the Great Desol. Not for all the men they’d lost on the trek to the Desoltai temple, in pursuit of the Thousand Names. Not for Min, or Chris, or all the rest of the young women who’d died thus far following Winter and Jane. There are going to be more names on that list, whatever I do now. Can I really ask them to keep going, with no food, no shelter, and maybe a battle at the end of it all?

  Drums rolled an hour before dawn the next morning, tearing the soldiers of the Third Regiment from their all-too-brief slumber. The rain had slackened but not stopped, so the rankers rolled their blankets and assembled their sodden kit under a gray, drooling sky.

  The officers, meanwhile, assembled in a semicircle in front of a flat boulder, where Winter could stand and be heard. Sevran and Abby were on either side of her. True to his word, Sevran hadn’t flinched when Winter told him of her decision, only nodded and calmly issued orders for the continued march.

  The lieutenants and sergeants, thirty or so in all, milled about in a loose crowd. She could see Folsom, standing stolidly in the center with Graff hunched to one side and Marsh, Bobby’s lover, on the other. The noble lieutenants of the Royals, Maret and sur Gothin and the rest of Lieutenant Novus’ erstwhile friends, kept to themselves in a sullen group, as did Becca, Winn, and the rest of Jane’s older Leatherbacks. In between were the rest—long-serving, hard-bitten sergeants from the Royals mixed women from the Girls’ Own who had largely been promoted by Winter herself or elected by their own companies. Their expressions were downcast, the recruits affecting the cynicism of th
e veterans, but underneath it Winter could feel an almost childlike need for reassurance. She coughed, and swallowed hard.

  “You’ve probably heard by now,” she said, voice thin and reedy in her own ears, “that a bunch of bargemen turned traitor and made off with the supplies we were counting on. We’ve got fifty miles to go before tomorrow night, and that’s going to mean some empty stomachs. There’s no way around it.”

  There was a chorus of low groans and whispered comments.

  “We’ll be lucky to get half that far,” a woman said. The Girls’ Own hadn’t had the grin-and-bear-it attitude toward orders ground into them like the regulars. “The mud is sucking the boots off my rankers’ feet.”

  “We’ll keep going as long as we have to,” Winter said.

  “Why?” the woman shot back. “What good is one more regiment going to do, out of a whole battle?”

  “I have no idea,” Winter said. “But Janus told me it was important, and that’s good enough for me.”

  More grumbling, this time from the two isolated groups of the nobles and the Leatherbacks. In between, though, Winter saw mostly nods, led by Folsom and Graff. For the recruits, Janus’ name was a thing to conjure with, the genius who’d led them to nothing but victory. Even the Royals were starting to come around.

  “We’ll do what we can about food,” Winter went on. “As of now, I need every horse we’ve got for foraging teams. That includes mine.”

  “You can’t be serious!” Lieutenant de Vend burst out. He was one of Novus’ cronies. “You expect us to slog through the mud?”

  “I’m happy to slog through the mud all day if it means we’ll have something to eat at the end of it,” Marsh shot back. De Vend scowled, but said nothing.

  “That’s all,” Winter said, ignoring them both. “Let’s get moving.”

  There was a shuffle as the assembled officers made a ragged salute, and then they dispersed. As the crowd cleared, Winter saw Jane coming over through the muddy grass of the campsite.

  “Something wrong?” Winter said.

  Jane looked grim. “You’d better come see.”