Valdemar Books

by Lackey, Mercedes

  She stared at it for a long moment, her mind tired and blank. Then, she folded it and tore it into precise halves, then quarters, then repeated herself until there was no piece larger than the nail of her little finger.

  She stared at the pile of pieces, stirring them a little with her forefinger. A noise from outside made her look up and through the window that gave out on the practice grounds.

  Shallan was running a new recruit against the archery-target, at the trot. He jounced painfully and his arrows went everywhere except in the straw dummy. Her own buttocks ached in sympathy.

  She looked down at the collection of tiny white scraps, then abruptly swept them into her hand and cast them into the fire.

  She stood up, and strode to the door. Her orderly was waiting for her with her cape in his hands, as if her thoughts had summoned him. She paused just long enough for him to flick it over her back and settle it across her shoulders, before striding out onto the practice grounds.

  Her practice grounds. Her recruits.

  Her mouth opened, and the words came without her even having to think about them, as Shallan saw her and snapped to attention, the recruits following her raggedly.

  "So, these are the new ones." She nodded, as she remembered Lerryn doing. "Very promising, Sergeant. Carry on."

  BOOK THREE - The Price of Command

  Seventeen

  Kero rubbed her eyes; they burned, though whether from the smoke from her dimming lantern, or from the late hour, she didn't know and didn't really care. "Maps," she muttered under her breath, the irritation in her voice plain even to her ears. "Bloody maps. I hate maps. If I see one more tactical map or gashkana supply list, I'll throw myself off a gods-be-damned cliff. Happily."

  The command tent was as hot as all of the nine hells combined, but the dead-still air outside was no better, and full of biting insects to boot. At least whatever Healer-apprentice Hovan had put in the lamp oil that made it smoke so badly was keeping the bugs out of the tent. Shadows danced a slow pavane against the parchment-colored walls as the lamp flame wavered.

  She stared at the minute details and tiny, claw-track notations of her terrain-map until her eyes watered, and she still couldn't see any better plan than the one she'd already made. She snarled at the blue line of the stream, which obstinately refused to shift its position to oblige her strategy, and slowly straightened in her chair.

  Her neck and shoulders were tight and stiff. She ran a hand through hair that was damp at the roots from sweat, and she wished she'd brought Raslir, her orderly, along. One-armed he might be, but he had a way with muscles and a little bit of leather-oil....

  But he was also old enough to be her grandfather, and the battlefield was no place for him. He might find himself tempted beyond endurance to engage in one little fray—and that would be the end of him.

  The wine flask set just within her reach looked very inviting, with water forming little crystal beads along its sides, and the cot beyond the folding table beckoned as well. She hadn't yet availed herself of either. She stretched, as Warrl had taught her; slow, and easy, a fiber at a time. A vertebra in her neck popped, and her right shoulder-joint, and some of the strain in her neck eased. Either I'm getting old, or the damp is getting to me. Maybe both.

  The lamp set up a puff of smoke, and she waved it away, coughing, as she reached for the wine flask. And despite her earlier vow to throw herself off a cliff if she had to look at another list, she glanced at the tally sheet. And smiled. She could smile, still, before the battle, before she actually had to send anyone out on the lines, to kill and be killed. If only I never had to send them out to fight in anything but the kind of bloodless contests we had last year. Then I could be entirely content.

  But a year like the last, where all they had to do was show themselves, was the exception rather than the usual, and she well knew it.

  Still the tally sheet was impressive. Not bad, if I do say so myself. It had been ten years since she'd been made Captain, and there had been no serious complaints from any Skybolt or from their clients or the Guild in all that time. And from the beaten force that had come up from Seejay, tails between their legs, she had built the foundations for a specialist-Company that now tallied twice the number Lerryn had commanded.

  And in many ways, it was four Companies, not one, each with its own pair of Lieutenants. For some reason that she could not fathom, shared command had always worked well for the Skybolts, though no one else could ever succeed with it. The largest group was the light cavalry; next came the horse-archers. Those two groups made up two-thirds of their forces. The remaining third was divided equally between the scouts and the true specialists.

  Those specialists included messengers, on the fastest beasts Kero's Shin'a'in cousins would sell her; experts in sabotage; and the nonfighters—two full Healers, and their four assistants, and three mages and their six apprentices. The chief of those mages, and the jewel Kero frequently gloated over, was White Winds Master-class mage Quenten, a mercurial, lean and incurably cheerful carrot-top sent as a Journeyman straight to the Skybolts by Kero's uncle.

  He will tell you that he wants (gods help him), adventure, the young mage's letter of introduction had read. And for a moment, Kero had hesitated, knowing that a lust for "adventure" had been the death of plenty of mercenary recruits, and the disenchantment of plenty more. But then she had read on. Don't mistake me, niece. He is as patient as even I could want, with a mind capable of dealing with the tedious as well as the exciting. What he calls "adventure," I would call challenge. There isn't enough outside of the magics of warfare to sharpen his skills as quickly as they can be sharpened. So although we are a school of peace, I send Quenten to you, knowing you will both be the wealthier for the association.

  So it had proved; she'd never known her uncle to be mistaken, so she took the young man on, and rapidly discovered what a prize she had been gifted with. He had, over the course of the years, managed to convince Need to extend her power of protection-against-magics to cover all of the Company. When she asked him how he had done it, he grinned triumphantly. "I did something to make it look as if you were the Company and the Company was you," he said, a light in his eyes that Kero had responded to with a smile of her own.

  And if Need was aware that her magic had been tampered with, she hadn't bothered to do anything about it. Now the Skybolts were in the unique position of having mages whose concentrated efforts could be directed to things other than defensive magics. No one else could enjoy that kind of advantage. It made their three mages capable of doing the work of six. Only the armies of nations could afford that many mages deployed with a group the size of a Company. Most Companies couldn't even afford to field more than one mage, and the Skybolts used that advantage mercilessly.

  After all these years, Kero still wasn't certain of how aware the sword was of the things that went on around her. In her first years as Captain, it had still occasionally tried to wrest control away from her, yet she had the impression that the blade wasn't really "awake" when it made these periodic trials. She sometimes thought that it reacted to her self-assertion the way a sleeping person would to an irritating insect.

  When was the last time it tested me? She pondered, taking a long slow sip from the wine flask. The water slicking the sides of the pewter flask cooled the palm of her hand, and the chill liquid slid down her throat and eased the tickle in the back of it. She closed her eyes and savored it. About five years ago. And I know I got the feeling that it wasn't going to try again. Gods, I hope not. Not now, anyway. Damned thing is likely to decide for the enemy!

  That was because the current campaign was against her old enemies, the Karsites. And that recollection made her smile with bitter pleasure. She had quite a debt to collect from the Karsites, and this was the first time in ten years that she'd had a chance to do so. The Skybolts were fighting beside the Rethwellan regular army on behalf of the male monarch of Rethwellan, against the self-styled female Prophet of Vkandis, and that could bring
trouble from Need, if the sword noticed. Kero recalled only too well the time the blade had refused to fight against one of the Karsite priestesses. She didn't relish the idea of it turning on her again.

  "If there's one thing I can't stand besides maps," she muttered to herself, "It's a holy war. These religious fanatics are so damned—unprofessional."

  Messy, that was what it was. Seems like the moment religion enters into a question, people's brains turn to mush. Messy wars and messy thinking. Messy thinking causing messy wars.

  The Karsites had been causing trouble since long before the disaster in Menmellith, and had continued to do so afterward. But this was the first time that the followers of the Sunlord had ever actually moved openly against Rethwellan. The so-called Prophet, claiming to be the original Prophet, reborn into a female body to prove the Oneness of the deity, had managed to raise a good-sized army on the strength of her charisma and the "miracles" she performed. She had moved that army into the province south of Menmellith during the winter, while travel was hard and news moved slowly. By spring she had taken it over and sealed it off.

  The King of Rethwellan made no secret of the fact that he suspected collusion on the part of the provincial governor. Kero was fairly sure, from her sources of information within the Guild, that he was right. The governor was an old man, a man who had suffered through a series of serious illnesses. Kero had seen his kind before, and sniffed cynically as she thought about him. Odds are he's figured out that he's as mortal as the rest of us for the first time in his life, and he's been looking frantically for someone, anyone, who'll promise him a quick and easy route into some kind of paradise when he kicks over the traces.

  She sipped again at her wine; carefully, it wouldn't do to have a head in the morning. But wine was the only thing that kept the dreams away.

  She resolutely turned her mind away from those dreams. Not because they were unpleasant; quite the contrary, they were too pleasant. Seductively so. The trouble was, they featured Eldan, and he was a subject she was determined to forget.

  He can't have forgiven me for sending the Guild up to collect that ransom instead of going myself. Either that, or else by now he's completely forgotten me, assuming he's even still alive.

  She'd dreamed of him often... far too often for her own comfort. The dreams had come frequently, in those first years, when she was unsure in her command, and unhappy—and lonely. Sometimes in those night-visions they hadn't done more than talk, and she'd come away with answers she desperately needed.

  But sometimes, especially lately, they'd done a great deal more than talk. Since she was half-convinced that her dreams were simply fantasies conjured up by her sleeping mind, those dreams were a cruel reflection on her current state of isolation, and while those incorporeal rolls in the hay might be what she wanted, they didn't make waking up any easier of a morning.

  She told herself, over and over, that her self-imposed loneliness didn't matter. Look at what she had built in the past few years! Most male mercenaries never made Captain, most male Captains had not achieved their rank until well into their late forties. That it had cost her little more than hard work, sleepless nights, and a lack of amorous company was hardly something to complain about. And she knew very well the reasons why she needed to keep herself free from amorous entanglements. Tarma had explained that aspect of command to her in intimate detail, with plenty of examples of what not to do.

  A Captain of a Company did not take lovers from the ranks; that was the quickest way in the world for suspicions of favoritism to start—and that let in factionalism and divisiveness. A Captain always remained the Captain, even among old friends.

  The hired charms of the camp-followers were not at all to Kero's taste—and her peers either regarded her (rightly) as possible competition, or at best, a rival and equal power. But there was more to it than that, though most of Kero's peers would have laughed (if uneasily) if she'd told them her chief reason. It was asking for trouble to take someone into your bed with whom you might well find yourself crossing swords one day. You never know who's going to be hired to come up against you. Having someone on the other side who had that kind of knowledge of me—in no way am I going to take that kind of risk.

  She put the flask down, and traced little patterns on the table with her wet forefinger. That's the one thing Tarma never warned me about, she reflected, waving away another puff of sharp-scented smoke. She never told me that rank and holding yourself apart makes for lonely nights. She always had Grandmother for friendship—and she never wanted a lover thanks to that vow of hers. Gods know being Swordsworn would be easier than overhearing some of what goes on in the tents after dark. She could ignore it; I try, but can't always.

  Being Captain didn't necessarily mean an empty bed, even if you didn't much care for whores. More than a few of her fellow Captains went through wenches the way a ram goes through a flock of ewes. They tended to pick up country girls bedazzled by the glamour and danger, and abandon them when their lovers got a little too possessive. Kero had never been able to bring herself to just lure off some wide-eyed farmboy as if she was some kind of mate-devouring spider. And besides, more than half the men she met these days seemed overwhelmed by her.

  I've been awfully circumspect, she thought, with perverse pride, looking back over the years. There were three—no, four minstrels. That worked. All four of them were too cocky to be intimidated by me. The only problem was, while the Skybolts make good song-fodder, they don't offer much more to a rhymester. So I lost all four of them to soft jobs in noble houses. There were a couple of merchants, but that didn't last past a couple of nights. And there was that Healer. But every time I went out he was in knots by the time I came back, figuring it would be me that got carried in for him to fix—that alliance was doomed from the start. It's been cold beds for the past two years now. Unlike Daren.

  She had to smile at that, because this campaign against the Karsites had brought her back into personal contact with "the boy," as she had continued to think of him. Meeting him again had forced her to change that memory, drastically. He'd matured; not his face, which was still boyishly handsome, if a bit more weathered, but in the expression around the eyes and mouth. Not such a boy anymore—

  They hadn't renewed their affair; it would have been a stupid thing to do in the middle of a war for one thing, and for another, while they found themselves better friends than ever, they discovered at that first meeting that they were no longer attracted to each other.

  Daren had achieved his dream of becoming the Lord Martial of his brother's standing army. One thing about him had not changed; he still worshiped his older brother. Kero toyed with the flask, holding its cool surface to her forehead for a moment, and wondered if the King knew what a completely and selflessly loyal treasure he had in his sibling. She hoped so; over the past several years she'd learned that loyalty in the high ranks was hardly something to be taken for granted.

  Daren was as randy as Kero was discreet. He hopped in and out of beds as casually as any of the Captains she knew, and there'd even been rumors of betrothal once or twice, but nothing ever came of it.

  We're too much alike. She smiled, thinking about how even their battle plans still meshed after all these years. Far too much alike to ever be lovers again. Just as well, I suppose. He just makes me feel too sisterly to want him.

  "Captain?" Her aide-de-camp stuck his head just inside the flap of the tent. "Shallan and Geyr to see you."

  Gods. I forgot I sent for them. Must be the heat. She stifled a yawn. "Good; send them in." She made certain two special bits of cloth were at hand, and fished one particular map out of the pile and smoothed it out on the table.

  "Captain?" Shallan said doubtfully.

  "Come on in," she replied easily. "No formality."

  Her old friend—whom Kero wanted to make Lieutenant of the specialist corps—slipped inside, followed by the man Kero intended to make Shallan's co-commander.

  A year ago Shallan had lost Relli
to a chance arrow, and for a while Kero was afraid they were going to lose the surviving partner to melancholy or madness. But given the responsibility of command of a squad, Shallan had made a remarkable recovery. She and Geyr had never actually worked together; Kero had a shrewd notion they'd do fine, not the least because they were both she'chorne. They looked like total opposites; Shallan still a golden blonde as ageless as the mysterious Hawkbrothers, and Geyr, a native of some land so far to the south Kero had never even heard of it before he told her his story, a true black man from his hair to his feet.

  The two of them stood a little awkwardly in front of her table. She stayed seated; even though she had said "no formality," she intended to keep that much distance between them. They were friends, yes—but they had to be Captain and underling first, even now.

  "How's Bel?" Shallan asked immediately. The scout-lieutenant had been taken victim, not by wounds, but by the killer that fighters feared more than battle—fever. That same fever had already struck down one of the co-commanders of the horse-archers.

  "I had to send him back, like Dende," Kero replied regretfully. "The Healers think he'll be all right, but only if we get him up into the mountains where it's cool and dry. That's why I wanted you here. I want to buck Losh over to command the horse-archers, and put you two in charge of the specialists."

  Shallan's mouth fell open; Geyr looked as if he thought he hadn't rightly understood what she'd said. He scratched his curly head, as Shallan took a deep breath.

  She waited for them to recover; Shallan managed first. "But—but—"

  "You've earned it, both of you," she said. "I've been shorthanded with the horse-archers, and that's really where Losh belongs. The troops know you, and you've both been handling squads up until now with no complaints. I think you'll do fine."

  "What about the dogs?" Geyr asked slowly, the whites of his eyes shining starkly against his dark skin. "Do I keep on running the dogs?"