The Price of Valor

by Django Wexler

* * *

  Hanna Courvier was the cutter for the Girls’ Own, the closest thing the battalion had to a doctor. She’d taken on several of the young girls, those too small to carry muskets, as her assistants, and they’d designated a stretch of soggy hillside as a field hospital. Blankets, sewn together at the edges and staked up with bayoneted muskets wedged in the mud, provided a modicum of shelter from the drizzle.

  Hanna was a solid-looking, tanned woman with long, frizzy hair pulled back into a tightly controlled bun. Winter didn’t know very much about her, other than that she’d come with Jane from the Docks. She realized, belatedly, that it must have been Hanna who treated her after the battle of Gaafen. I never even thanked her.

  The cutter was not in the mood for pleasantries now. She glared at Winter as though holding her personally responsible for the weather, the mud, and everything else that had gone wrong.

  “Miss Courvier,” Winter said, ducking her head politely. “How bad is it?”

  “Pretty fucking bad,” Hanna said. She had the same Docks accent—and accompanying foul mouth—that Jane had picked up. “I’ve been making do with less than nothing. Most of my kit is back with the wagons.” She waved at the area under the blankets. “There’s already more than I can handle. Marching this hard, in the rain and the mud . . .”

  There were at least a score of soldiers lying there, packed shoulder to shoulder, asleep or staring up at Winter, Jane, and Hanna. They were surprisingly quiet, though one man at the edge moaned in a soft, low voice and a woman gave periodic hacking coughs.

  “How many of them can walk?” Winter said.

  Hanna snorted. “I already sent all them that can walk back to their units. These are the ones that’re going to have to be left behind.” She lowered her voice. “Or those who aren’t going to make it, regardless. I’ve got two legs with infected punctures that need to come off, but nothing to do it with. A few others . . .” She shook her head.

  Winter looked over the injured soldiers, feeling sick to her stomach. She paused and turned to Jane. “Is that Molly?”

  Jane nodded. “She and Becks joined up before we left Vordan.”

  Molly had cut her ringletted hair back to a boyish fuzz, and marching had melted the plumpness from her face. Winter remembered her and Becks at the Sworn Cathedral, helping to rescue Danton when Orlanko tried to arrest the Deputies-General. I didn’t know she’d come along. She didn’t look injured, but her cheeks were flushed and her breathing shallow.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Winter said.

  “Shaking fever,” Hanna said. “Exhaustion and damp bring it on. Too many bad vapors.”

  “Will she be all right?”

  “If we had her in the dry in front of a roaring fire, with something besides hardtack to eat, she might be. Out here?” Hanna spit on the grass. “Might as well start digging a grave. She’s not the only one.”

  More names on the list. Winter closed her eyes for a moment and fought down a sour taste at the back of her throat. She turned to Jane, who was doing her best to remain expressionless. Winter knew her too well for that, though. There was accusation in those green eyes, and she found herself looking away.

  “Find some volunteers to stay with them,” Winter said. “It shouldn’t be difficult. Four rankers. Leave as much food as you can spare, and tell them to keep a fire going. The wagon teams have cutters. They’ll do what they can when they get here.”

  “That could be days,” Jane said very quietly.

  “I know.” Winter gritted her teeth. “We haven’t got a choice.”

  That became her mantra, repeated at every step along the road on a day that seemed as if it would never end. We haven’t got a choice. She couldn’t bring herself to fail Janus, not if there was any other option, and that meant this. Winter started at the head of the column, but it wasn’t long before she drifted rearward, the bigger and stronger soldiers passing her by as the weaker and smaller filtered toward the back. Mud sucked at her feet with every step, clinging to her boots in great grimy chunks, making her feel as though she wore iron weights around her ankles.

  The rain stopped, began again in a sudden, violent torrent, then died away to a drizzle once more. The sun was invisible behind the clouds, the world illuminated by a sourceless gray light that left everything flat and without shadows. In her idle moments, Winter wondered if she’d died and gone to her own personal hell. But I’m not alone. Are there hells for entire regiments? Those moments were few and far between, though, and most of the time she had eyes only for the ground directly in front of her. Each tiny puddle might be an inch deep, or an ankle-breaking hole; each stretch of mud could slide underneath her or sink her to the knee.

  She chewed a hardtack cracker as she went, without enthusiasm. The men and women around her slogged on, not singing, not even speaking, with no energy to spare for anything except the next breath and the next step. Sometimes they tripped and fell, or flopped to the ground and lay gasping in the mud. More often, when they couldn’t bear any more, they simply vanished, slipping to the side of the road and away into the underbrush.

  It grew darker so gradually that Winter didn’t notice the sun had set until she held up a hand and realized she could only see the outline of her fingers against the sky. Full dark came not long afterward, and torches blazed along the column, making it feel even more like some sort of demonic procession. The entrance to the campsite was marked by a blazing bonfire, which ought to have been ominous, but after so long in the cold and wet, Winter wanted nothing more than to lie down amid the flames and let them roast her dry.

  The scouts were waiting there, and they had food. Chickens were cooking over smaller fires, fat dripping and sizzling, and the delicious aroma of roasting pork served as a beacon. Just the smell revived Winter somewhat, and she sat down beside one of the fires, among the other soldiers.

  “—didn’t want to sell,” one of the scouts was saying, a hard-faced woman with a Docks accent. “Said our money wasn’t worth anything, and he wouldn’t sell to the enemy anyway. So I told him, ‘You see these muskets? They mean we’re taking your goddamned chickens. Your only option is whether you get anything in return.’ He decided he wanted the money after all.”

  “Fucking Hamvelts,” someone else said. “If this is what their country is like, no wonder they’re such ugly bastards.”

  “I don’t know,” someone else said. “Place we stopped, there was a daughter who gave me quite a looking-over, and I can’t say I would’ve minded a turn.”

  “When that dark-haired lad smiled at Neyve, I thought she was going to fall off her horse,” the scout said. “I had to watch to make sure she didn’t sneak away and ride back to have a roll.”

  “Forget the pretty boys,” another woman said. “What about the wine cellar?”

  Winter’s eyes closed, unstoppably, as though they had weights attached. The smell of food made her stomach rumble, but the lure of sleep was stronger, and the voices faded away.

  “Isn’t that the colonel?” someone said in the distance.

  “Let him rest,” someone else said. “He’s had a long day. He’s not used to walking with the rest of us . . .”

  The drums the next morning woke her into a world of pain, cramps and bruises and aching muscles. The sky was lightening back into gray, trees and soldiers stark black silhouettes against it. Winter forced herself up, feet squelching inside the still-soaked boots she hadn’t had the chance to remove, and stumbled toward the nearest collection of officers.

  “Good morning, sir,” Bobby said.

  She seemed unaffected by the brutal march—more gifts from Feor’s naath, if Winter had to guess. She directed a mental glare at the Infernivore. Why can’t you give me the strength of a giant or let me fly or something like that? The demon made no answer, not that she’d really expected one.

  “Morning,” Winter mumbled.

  �
�We’re less than twenty-five miles from where Janus wanted us,” Cyte said. She looked as haggard as Winter felt, eyes feverishly bright above dark circles like bruises against her pale skin. She held up the map and pointed to something Winter couldn’t manage to focus on. “I think the officers should ride with the scouts today. We need to start laying plans for tomorrow.”

  “Ride.” The idea of being on a horse, of not having to lift her own legs out of the mud, sounded like heaven, but Winter couldn’t bring herself to accept it as possible. “Don’t we need the horses for foraging?”

  “Rich pickings yesterday,” Bobby said. “We got more than we needed.”

  “And straggling has gotten worse,” Cyte said darkly. “Which means fewer mouths to feed.”

  And, no doubt, more men and women left behind, collapsed on the road or abandoned in their blankets with the shaking fever. We haven’t got a choice.

  The mention of food made her suddenly, ravenously hungry, as though her stomach had been waiting for the perfect moment to pounce. Bobby directed her to the remains of a campfire, where half a roast chicken sat cold and greasy on a tin plate. Winter tore it to pieces with her bare hands, pulling the thin bones apart to suck the dark meat from them and licking the grease from her fingers afterward. When she stood up, she felt a bit more human, and brushed hopelessly at her muddy, sweat-stained uniform.

  The scouts rode out, a handful of men and women on horses that looked almost as hard-used as the soldiers. Winter, Abby, and Sevran rode with them, with Jane, Bobby, and Cyte following, while the rest of the officers coaxed the mass of exhausted rankers into one last effort. Edgar was muddy and tired-looking, and Winter rode him as slowly as she could afford to while Sevran filled her in on the latest dismal reports.

  “My sergeants tell me men were still wandering in this morning, saying they’d walked all night. There are probably more who took a nap in a hedge somewhere and got left behind.”

  “They won’t get lost,” Winter said. “A blind kitten could follow our trail through the mud.”

  Sevran nodded. “But roll call was down about two hundred. If today is the same, we’ll be lucky to have four hundred men fit to fight tomorrow morning.”

  “The Girls’ Own are holding up a little better,” Abby said, with only a hint of competitive pride. “But I can’t hope for more than five or six hundred.”

  That made nearly half the regiment left behind on the road to Desland, straggling, wounded, or dead. Winter wondered if any of the new Deslandai recruits had made it. I doubt this was what they had in mind when they signed up. She couldn’t bring herself to blame them if they’d turned back; no doubt more of the Vordanai would have done the same, if they weren’t so far from home.

  “We’ll have to hope that’s enough,” Winter said.

  “And that whatever Janus has planned for tomorrow doesn’t involve much marching,” Jane muttered.

  “Janus knew what he was telling us to do when he sent his orders,” Cyte said. “A good general knows exactly what he can ask of his soldiers.”

  Jane only grunted.

  The day wore on. Winter found herself dozing on Edgar’s back, only to shake awake again as the horse navigated around a hole or a mud puddle. She’d long ago given up trying to give him much direction, as he was clearly better at picking his way through the drenched ground than she was. From time to time a scout rode back from the vanguard to report that they hadn’t encountered anything worth noting, friendly or enemy. At lunch, they ate hardtack and cold chicken from their saddlebags in the saddle.

  The rain had stopped, and after noon the sun finally broke through the clouds, a blindingly brilliant light after the dim morning but one that seemed to have lost all power to warm. The autumn wind cut through wet clothes like the sharpest of knives, and without the effort of walking to keep herself warm, Winter found herself shivering. She wrapped herself in a blanket from her bag that had stayed mostly dry, and hunched close to Edgar’s solid warmth.

  As the sun was setting, she was woken from her half-conscious reverie by calls from the scouts.

  “Riders! Cavalry ahead!”

  Awake at once, Winter blinked away the fog in her head and reined Edgar to a halt, the other officers clustering around her. Her hand went to her sword, for all the good it would do. If the cavalry were Hamveltai, they would face little opposition from the exhausted Third Regiment.

  But no. When the approaching horsemen became visible, they wore blue jackets and trousers, along with the gleaming steel cuirasses that were the pride of Vordan’s elite heavy cavalry. Each man carried a carbine, a shortened musket that could be used from horseback, along with his cavalry saber. In the lead was a diminutive figure standing tall in his stirrups, wearing a tall, plumed hat. He waved excitedly.

  “Oh Lord,” Winter said.

  “You know him?” Jane said.

  “He was our cavalry commander in Khandar. Captain Henry Stokes,” she said. “We called him Give-Em-Hell.”

  “Why?” Cyte said.

  “You’ll see.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  MARCUS

  In spite of the fact that his only physical pain was the aching of his arms from rowing, Marcus felt bruised.

  Again. Once again, he’d led men into a nightmare, a confrontation with forces they couldn’t hope to match. He remembered the sick lurch of his stomach as the dead had risen in the Desoltai temple, the feeling that everything he knew about the world was coming apart. The screams of the soldiers the walking corpses had torn to pieces. What good are ordinary people against creatures like that?

  For a moment, he damned Janus, the Thousand Names, and everything that had happened since the day Colonel Vhalnich stepped off the boat onto the rocky shore of Khandar. Maybe it would be better if the Redeemers had slaughtered us all.

  Except, of course, it wasn’t Janus’ fault. The Priests of the Black were real, working under the surface, still manipulating events a hundred years after they’d supposedly been abolished. Raesinia was proof enough of that. Janus only opened my eyes. But he never asked if I’d rather have kept them closed.

  “Marcus?” Raesinia said.

  “Hmm?” Marcus blinked. They were sitting in the dining room of Twin Turrets, with the map still laid out on the table. It had gone four in the morning, and exhaustion was settling over him like a cloak. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

  “How long will it take your message to reach Janus?”

  “If we’re lucky, by tomorrow night.” Marcus silently cursed the elaborate security measures that kept him ignorant of the location of Willowbrook. He understood the necessity, but he wanted to sit by the flik-flik line until new instructions came through, not wait for a signal and a courier handoff that might be flubbed. “And if he’s prompt, we could have a response by the day after tomorrow.”

  “That’s too long.” Raesinia bit her lip. “I think we should go to the Deputies in the morning.”

  “With just the arrest list?” That was all they’d gotten out of the night’s disaster, and that only because Raesinia had had the presence of mind to stuff it in her pocket. “It’s hardly proof.”

  “The warehouse is still there. The Deputies could send investigators. Maurisk can’t move all that equipment overnight.”

  “Are you certain? Maybe he has someone who can make cannon get up and dance.”

  Raesinia shook her head, smiling slightly. “That would be something to see, at least.”

  “I’ll think about it.” Marcus squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. “Sleep on it.”

  This time Raesinia’s smile was more genuine. “Get some rest.”

  She, Marcus noted, didn’t seem tired at all. He wondered if she slept, and if her condition prevented it how she occupied herself all night. The thought of his own bed, so sinfully large and soft compared to the camp beds he’d spent his campaigns on, was
extremely attractive. Just a little more to take care of first.

  Marcus got up, stumbling a bit over his chair, and excused himself to go in search of Uhlan. He found the Mierantai lieutenant by the back stairs, talking in a low voice to one of the serving women. Her eyes were full of tears, an uncharacteristic display of emotion for the stoic mountain people. One of the men had meant something to her. Sweetheart? Brother? Whatever it was, he hadn’t come back.

  “Sir.” Uhlan patted the woman on the shoulder and she hurried away, ducking her head perfunctorily in Marcus’ direction. Marcus cleared his throat, uncomfortably.

  “Is she . . . going to be all right?”

  “Yes, sir,” Uhlan said.

  Marcus couldn’t bring himself to ask for details. He shook his head. “I’m sorry about your men.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Uhlan said. “We volunteered for this. It was a risky assignment.”

  I didn’t know their names. The Mierantai had been happy keeping themselves to themselves, and Marcus had always left it that way. I ought to have at least known their names.

  “If there’s anything I can do, for the families, or anything . . . ,” he managed.

  “It will be taken care of,” Uhlan said. “But thank you.”

  What is Mieran County like, if it breeds people like this? Marcus shook his head. “All right.”

  “Our security here is poor, sir, now that it’s only Ranker Dracht and myself,” Uhlan said. “In my opinion, we ought to relocate to somewhere more defensible and request reinforcements.”

  “I’ve sent to Willowbrook.” There was at least a company of Mierantai there, Marcus knew. “In the meantime, all we can do is be ready. Make sure everyone knows we may have to leave in a hurry.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Have you seen Andy?”

  “I believe she’s in the kitchen, sir.”

  Andy was indeed in the kitchen, sitting at the plain wooden table the servants used for their meals. She had a bottle of something sticky and red, which was already half-empty. When she looked up at Marcus, her eyes were fever-bright.