The Price of Valor

by Django Wexler

  “I’m going to go track down Sevran. Pick your best company and let them know they’ll be on the spot tomorrow.”

  “Yes, sir!” Jane accompanied her salute with a lascivious smile. “Hurry back.”

  * * *

  Captain Sevran’s men had erected his tent in the middle of the space marked off for the Royals, and teams of them were hard at work putting the rest of the camp together. Their rows were a bit neater than the Girls’ Own, and their cook fires were a lot more organized, each “pot” of men gathered around its own cook fire. Outside the captain’s tent, a sentry saluted crisply and knocked on the tent pole.

  “Sir? It’s the colonel.”

  Winter’s lip quirked. In Khandar, “the colonel” had always been Janus. Hearing the phrase used in reference to herself always made her want to look over her shoulder.

  The tent flap opened, and Sevran straightened up, silver stripes on his shoulders gleaming. His salute was as neat as his sentry’s.

  “Sir!” he said.

  “There’s a few matters I thought we might discuss,” Winter said. “Do you have a few minutes?”

  “Of course, sir.” Sevran held the tent flap open. “After you.”

  Sevran’s tent was much like her own, with a few well-worn pieces of nonstandard equipment—a trunk, a portable writing desk—marking it as the residence of a long-serving officer. Sevran himself was in his late thirties, his clean-shaven cheeks pockmarked like a crumbling wall from some long-ago illness. He had a long nose and a well-trimmed brown mustache that had yet to show a hint of gray, and he wore his well-tailored uniform with the unconscious comfort of someone who’d spent nearly his whole life in it. Winter fought down a wave of self-consciousness—meeting these old soldiers always made her feel like a fraud, no matter how many promotions Janus had showered on her.

  “Welcome, sir,” Sevran said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m sorry we haven’t had time to really get acquainted,” Winter said. “Things have been a bit busy.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “How are your men settling in to the new organization?”

  His expression flickered, just for a moment. Winter recognized the signs of someone preparing to tell a superior what he wanted to hear.

  “As well as could be expected, sir,” Sevran said. Winter, who’d bullshitted her share of officers, smiled inwardly at the neat ambiguity of the phrase.

  “I’ve received a number of . . . requests from your staff lieutenant. He doesn’t seem pleased.”

  “Novus?” Sevran asked. Winter nodded, and the captain sighed. “I’ll speak with him. It’s nothing against you personally, sir. Some of my officers aren’t happy about being placed alongside the volunteers.”

  “Not just volunteers, but girls,” Winter said. “I know that must bother some of them.”

  “I’ve made it clear to them that the First Battalion is to be treated like any other body of men—of soldiers,” Sevran said.

  Winter guessed that someone higher up—probably Janus himself—had expressed the importance of this point to the captain. She felt a sudden pang of sympathy for him; the situation he’d been thrust into would have been an awkward one for any officer. He had the clear-eyed look of someone determined to do his best under difficult circumstances.

  I think I like him, Winter thought. At the very least, he was not Colonel de Ferre.

  “What do the men think about the situation?” Winter said. “The rankers, not the lieutenants.”

  Sevran hesitated. “Speaking in confidence, sir?”

  “Of course.”

  “There’s a fair bit of grumbling, of course. A lot of them don’t think the First Battalion will fight. I’ve told them that you were in a pretty serious scrap at Diarach, but I’m not sure they really believe it.” He paused again. “A lot of them also think that you’re favoring the First, sir. Because you’ve . . . served with them longer.”

  And because I’m sleeping with the captain. No doubt that had made the rounds already. “I’ve tried to be even-handed.”

  “Some details do seem to fall inordinately on my men,” Sevran said, then hastily added, “Not that it isn’t your right to assign duties as you like, of course. But it isn’t helping morale.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Latrine duty, for example.” Sevran spoke with the air of someone inching across a crumbling bridge. Winter wondered if he thought she was testing him. “My men have been assigned to digging the latrine ditches for the last three camps. Cleaning the horse lines, too.”

  “Lieutenant Cytomandiclea draws up those orders,” Winter said, frowning. “I’ll speak with her. That does seem unfair.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Sevran said. “That will help a great deal.”

  “I’d also like to try some joint drill between the battalions tomorrow morning,” Winter said. “I have some tactical ideas that will need some practice. Can you pick your best company and bring them out to meet me?”

  “Of course, sir. I think that’s an excellent idea.”

  “Good. Then I’ll see you in the morning, Captain.”

  Winter accepted his salute with a nod and ducked out of the tent. That wasn’t so hard. Sevran looked as though he was willing to work with her, and he could help her keep the lieutenants in line. As long as the rankers didn’t cause trouble, a few blue-blooded officers weren’t much of a concern. This might actually work.

  * * *

  This, Winter thought, is never going to work.

  Weak sunlight shone down through a layer of clouds on the square of packed, furrowed earth designated as a drill field.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s try again.”

  “Close up!” Folsom bellowed. Winter had borrowed the leather-lunged lieutenant for his volume. “Skirmish line, forward! Main line, loading drill!”

  One company of the Royals was drawn up in a three-deep line, about forty yards from end to end. At Folsom’s command, echoed by Lieutenant sur Gothin and his two sergeants, the men began going through the manual of arms, lowering their muskets from their shoulder to the ground, opening an imaginary cartridge, and sliding the ramrod in and out of the barrel. When they’d brought their weapons back to the ready position, sur Gothin shouted, “Fire!” and a hundred empty locks clicked closed. Then they began the pantomime again.

  In the meantime, a company from the Girls’ Own, led by Abby Giforte, was going through a very different drill. They’d spread out in pairs, each ten yards or more from the next, raggedly spaced and a hundred yards up from where the Royals had formed their tight formation. There they pretended to fire by turns, one woman loading—much easier outside the shoulder-to-shoulder press of the line—while the other aimed, pulled the trigger, then switched off.

  So far, so good. The loose skirmish line that Janus had improvised at the Battle of Midvale had confounded the regulars by depriving them of a solid target, and in the weeks since Winter and the other commanders had expanded the idea into a workable set of tactics. The problem was that while their loose formation protected them from massed infantry volleys and artillery, the skirmishers could never stand up to a determined bayonet charge, and without any way to form square they were vulnerable to being ridden down by enemy cavalry.

  That was, in theory, where the Royals came in. Winter’s hope was that the two halves of her regiment might complement each other; the Girls’ Own could disperse to fight in its own style, and fall back behind the solid wall of the regulars’ line when danger pressed too close. It was this second part, the falling back, that had proven to be the problem.

  “Go ahead,” Winter said to Folsom.

  “Skirmish line, fall back!” he bellowed. “Main line, prepare to pass skirmishers!”

  The women of Abby’s company stopped what they were doing and ran back toward where the Roya
ls were waiting. The Royals were supposed to open their formation slightly by turning sideways so the skirmishers could filter through it, then close up again. Twice already it hadn’t worked that way—somehow an extended arm or leg always found its way into a running woman’s path, sending a whole section of the line sprawling to the ground and throwing the whole formation into confusion. Some of the women were getting frustrated, too, and had taken to running full tilt, slamming bodily into whatever was in their way.

  This time, Winter could see, was not going to be any different. A few of the fleetest-footed girls made it through before the main press arrived, but then a grinning, redheaded ranker in the center of the Royals’ line stuck a foot out in the path of a sprinting woman and sent her sprawling to the turf. Her companion, outraged, slammed into him shoulder first, carrying both of them into the man behind him. From that point it was half collision, half brawl.

  And we really ought to be doing it with fixed bayonets, if we expect to stand off cavalry. Winter shook her head. In the center of the line, things had devolved into actual fisticuffs, with a heavyset woman in a loose blue jacket giving a gangly young ranker a pounding. Sergeants on both sides waded in to break it up while other rankers shouted encouragement.

  “You little shit!” the woman shouted. “You want to grab my tit so badly, maybe try buying me dinner first!”

  “Who’d want to?” the Royal spit back, wiping blood from under his nose. “The thing looks like a paper sack full of lard.”

  “Be kind to the boy, Vena,” another woman said. “He hasn’t seen one since his mam tossed him out.”

  “And you haven’t had a prick in so long you whittled yourself one!”

  “I ought to. It’d stand up better than yours!”

  “That’s enough!” Folsom roared. “Companies separate and form ranks, now!”

  The sergeants set to pulling men and women apart and pushing them into some semblance of formation. Winter waited until they were approximately in line and had quieted down before she spoke.

  “Lieutenants sur Gothin and Giforte, with me, please. The rest of you are dismissed.”

  The two lieutenants followed Winter to the edge of the drill field, where Captain Sevran and Jane had been watching the carnage. The rest of the rankers dispersed, headed to their respective camps in opposite directions.

  “That could have gone better,” Jane said. A curl at the corner of her lip told Winter she’d been laughing.

  Sevran shot Jane a look, then shook his head. “I agree that the men need more practice, sir. It’s a difficult maneuver.”

  “It’s not difficult,” Abby said, taking a position at Jane’s side. “Your men are deliberately fouling it up.”

  Sur Gothin, a thin, prematurely balding man, removed his cap and scratched the top of his head. He looked at Sevran, then at Winter.

  “They might be, at that,” he said eventually. “I’m sorry, sir. I’ll try to put the fear of God into them, but they’re a bit angry about all this.”

  “They’re angry?” Jane snapped. “How do you think we feel?”

  “J—” Winter checked herself. “Captain Verity, please. We need to make this work. Captain Sevran, please spread the word that I’m not happy about this, and that we’ll be making some changes.” She sighed. “No specific punishments yet. We’ll work out something more . . . general.”

  “Yes, sir.” Relief was obvious in Sevran’s face. It would have been well within Winter’s authority to demand that examples be made, but she guessed it would be counterproductive. “I’ll make that clear, sir.”

  “Thank you. That’s all for now.”

  Sur Gothin and Sevran saluted and left in the direction of their camp.

  “Should I be calling you Colonel Ihernglass, sir?” Jane said, smiling.

  “In front of them, yes.”

  The smile faded. “You don’t have to put on a show for them. You remember what the general told you. If they don’t respect you, we can always shoot a few of them.”

  “That wouldn’t help.” Winter looked sidelong at Jane. “When you were running the Leatherbacks, did you shoot anybody who talked back?”

  “I had to crack heads from time to time.” Jane frowned. “But we were all on the same side, more or less. This is different.”

  “It shouldn’t be. The other side is over there”—Winter waved in the general direction of east—“the Leaguers, not the Royals.”

  Jane shook her head. “It’s a nice sentiment, but I still don’t trust them farther than I can spit.”

  And that, Winter thought as Jane walked away, is exactly the problem.

  * * *

  “Lieutenant?” Winter said. “Are you there?”

  Cyte folded the tent flap open and blinked in the sun. It was nearly noon. “Sir! What can I do for you?”

  “I have some ideas I want to run by you.”

  Cyte waved her inside. The ex-student had a tent to herself, next to the one Bobby and Marsh shared. A folding desk featured centrally, occupied by an unrolled leather map painted in fine detail. A magnifying lens and a pair of dividers sat atop it. Winter looked at them curiously.

  “What are you looking for?” she said.

  “Oh.” Cyte flushed slightly. “Just . . . an exercise, sir. I plan my own route of march for the army and try to guess where the enemy might be. Then, when the general’s orders come down, I figure out where I went wrong.”

  “Or where the general went wrong.”

  Cyte laughed. “That seems unlikely, sir.”

  Winter smiled. Something about Cyte reminded her of herself, when she’d first come to Khandar. Cyte didn’t have the fear of discovery driving her, of course, but she had the same quiet dedication to mastering all aspects of her new profession that had driven Winter to memorize the drill books. That enthusiasm had been beaten out of Winter by a succession of vicious, lazy sergeants and the general lassitude of life in the garrison; she hoped that she would do better by Cyte.

  “We’ve been having some . . . problems with the drills we came up with.” Winter sketched a summary of what had happened that morning, and Cyte frowned.

  “There’s bad feeling between the Royals and the Girls’ Own, then?” she said.

  “You might put it that way, yes,” Winter said dryly. Cyte had a gift for maps and history but could sometimes be oblivious of what the people around her were thinking. “By the way, have you been handing the Royals all the scut-work on purpose?”

  “Scut-work, sir?”

  “Latrine ditches, horse lines, that sort of thing.”

  “Oh,” Cyte said. “I thought you asked for them to get all the nasty stuff. Captain Verity came by to tell me while I was drawing up the rotas. Did I get it wrong?”

  Jane. Winter ground her teeth. It wasn’t that she couldn’t appreciate Jane wanting to shift the worst chores away from her girls and onto the Royals, but . . . She’s not helping.

  No sense in taking it out on Cyte, though. “Don’t worry about it. But in the future, try to divide things up evenly. It’ll be good for morale.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “Now, when you lay out today’s camp, I’d like to do it a little differently.” Winter grabbed a pencil and a piece of scrap paper and started sketching.

  * * *

  The day’s march, commenced just after noon, was over by sundown. Following behind the wagons at a leisurely pace, they’d covered another six miles. Cavalry scouts reported there were still no signs the enemy planned to make a stand any time soon.

  Winter had sent Cyte and Bobby ahead to lay out the camp, keeping Jane by her side. It was a cowardly move, just as it was cowardly not to broach the subject of Jane using Winter’s name to fudge the duty rosters. But either was going to provoke an argument, Winter sensed, and she only wanted to have it once.

  She glanced at
her lover as they rode together, through the failing light, into the campsite. Given the choice, Jane liked to walk alongside her men, but she’d been happy enough to ride beside Winter for the day’s journey. She was better on horseback than Winter would have guessed—another legacy of Mrs. Wilmore’s institution—but still not as comfortable as Winter herself, or soldiers like Marsh, who seemed born to the saddle.

  “Getting cooler,” Jane observed, holding up one hand to test the breeze. “We’ll need coats before long. I . . .” She hesitated, peering at the colored markers and the tents going up between them. “Something’s gotten screwed up here.”

  Winter sighed. Sometimes you just have to tear the scab off. “It’s not screwed up. I told Cyte to change the layout.”

  “What? Why?” Jane looked around. “You’ve got us all mixed up with the Royals!”

  “Alternating lines by company, in a checkerboard pattern,” Winter said. That left each line of Royals’ tents directly facing a line of Girls’ Own.

  Previously, the two battalions had camped separately, with the drill field between them like the neutral territory between two feuding powers. In addition to the sentries who guarded the entire camp from ambush by the enemy, Jane always posted lookouts from the Girls’ Own to watch the Royals for mischief.

  “You can’t be serious,” Jane said. “Do you have any idea what’s going to happen?”

  Winter shrugged. “Maybe they’ll compare cooking?”

  “Don’t play dumb.”

  Jane turned her horse into Winter’s path, forcing her to stop, and fixed her with a glare. Winter sighed.

  “We can’t have the Girls’ Own treating everyone else in the army as the enemy, Jane.”

  “It’s not like I want to. But—you know the Royals, the way they behave! De Ferre was ready to leave us to die. They are the enemy, whether we like it or not.”

  “That was de Ferre.” Winter thought of the piles of complaints. “I’m sure some of the nobles hate the Girls’ Own, but the rankers don’t. They come from the streets and the farms, the same as your girls do.”

  “If they’re on our side, they should have come to help us,” Jane said. “Whatever de Ferre told them.”