“Right, then,” Magnus said wearily, and withdrew his hand from the washbasin. “Try that.”
Tavi drew his arm out of the tepid water of the washbasin and flexed his fingers. Soreness made the movement painful, but the swelling had all but vanished, and the throbbing pain had faded to a shadow of what it had been before.
“It’s good,” Tavi said quietly. “I didn’t know you were a healer.”
“Just an assistant healer during my stint in the Legions. But this kind of thing was fairly routine. It’ll be tender. Eat as much as you can at dinner and keep it elevated tonight if you want to keep it from aching.”
“I know,” Tavi assured him. He rose and offered the healer his restored hand. Magnus smiled a bit whimsically and took it. Tavi helped him up, and they both went to the stewpot over the fire. Tavi was ravenous, as always after a healing. He wolfed down the first two bowls of stew without pausing, then scraped a third from the bottom of the pot and slowed down, soaking tough trailbread in the stew to soften it into edibility.
“Can I ask you something?” he said to Max.
“Sure,” the big Antillan said.
“Why bother to teach me the technique?” Tavi asked. “I’ll be serving as an officer, not fighting in the ranks.”
“Never can tell,” Max drawled. “But even if you never fight there, you need to know what it’s about. How a legionare thinks, and why he acts as he does.”
Tavi grunted.
“Plus, to play your part, you’ve got to be able to see when some fish is screwing it up.”
“Fish?” Tavi asked.
“New recruit,” Max clarified. “First couple of weeks they’re always flailing around like landed fish instead of legionares. It’s customary for experienced men to point out every mistake a fish makes in as humiliating a fashion as possible. And in the loudest voice manageable.”
“That’s why you’ve been doing it to me?” Tavi asked.
Both Max and the old Maestro grinned. “The First Lord didn’t want you to miss out on too much of the experience,” Magnus said.
“Oh,” Tavi said. “I’ll be sure to thank him.”
“Right, then,” Magnus said. “Let’s see if you remember what I’ve been teaching you while we ride.”
Tavi grunted and finished off the last of his food. The practice, the pain, and the crafting had left him exhausted. If it had been up to him, he would have simply lain down right where he was and slept-which had doubtless been intentional on behalf of Max and Magnus. “I’m ready when you are.” He sighed.
“Very well,” Magnus said. “To begin, why don’t you tell me all the regulations regarding latrines and sanitation, and enumerate the discipline for failure to meet the regulations’ requirements.”
Tavi immediately started repeating the relevant regulations, though so many of them had been crowded into his brain over the past three weeks that it was a challenge to bring them up, tired as he was. From sanitation procedure, Magnus moved on to logistics, procedures for making and breaking camp, watch schedules, patrol patterns, and another hundred facets of Legion life Tavi had to remember.
He forced his brain to provide facts until weariness was interrupting every sentence with a yawn before Magnus finally said, “Enough, lad, enough. Get some sleep.”
Max had collapsed into lusty snoring an hour before. Tavi sought his bedroll and dropped onto it. He propped his arm up on the leather training helmet as an afterthought. “Think I’m ready?”
Magnus tilted his head thoughtfully and sipped at his cup of tea. “You’re a quick study. You’ve worked hard to learn the part. But that hardly matters, does it.” He glanced aside at Tavi. “Do you think you’re ready?”
Tavi closed his eyes. “I’ll manage. At least until something beyond my control goes horribly wrong and kills us all.”
“Good lad,” Magnus said, with a chuckle. “Spoken like a legionare. But bear something in mind, Tavi. “
“Hmmm?”
“Right now, you’re pretending to be a soldier,” the old man said. “But this assignment is going to last a while. By the time it’s over, it won’t be an act.”
Tavi blinked his eyes open to stare up at the sea of stars now emerging overhead. “Did you ever have a bad feeling about something? Like you knew something bad was about to happen?”
“Sometimes. Usually set off by a bad dream, or for no reason at all.”
Tavi shook his head. “No. This isn’t like those times.” He frowned up at the stars. “I know. I know it like I know that water’s wet. That two and two is four. There’s no malice or fear attached to it. It just is.” He squinted at the Maestro. “Did you ever feel like that?”
Magnus was silent for a long moment, regarding the fire with calculating eyes, his metal cup hiding most of his expression. “No,” he said finally. “But I know a man who has a time or two.”
When he said nothing more, Tavi asked, “What if there’s fighting, Maestro?”
“What if there is?” Magnus asked.
“I’m not sure I’m ready.”
“No one is,” the Maestro said. “Not really. Old salts strut and brag about being bored in most battles, but every time it’s just as frightening as your first. You’ll fit right in, lad.”
“That’s not something I’ve had much practice in,” Tavi said.
“I suppose not,” Magnus said. He shook his head and took his eyes from the fire. “Best I rest these old bones. Best you do the same, lad. Tomorrow you join the Legions.”
Chapter 4
They rode into the First Aleran Legion’s training camp in the middle of the afternoon. Tavi idly picked a few loose black curls from his collar, rubbed his hand over the stiff brush of short hairs left on his head, and glared at Max. “I just can’t believe you did that while I was asleep.”
“Regulations are regulations,” Max said, his tone pious. “Besides. If you’d been awake, you’d have complained too much. ‘
“I thought it was every soldier’s sacred right,” Tavi said.
“Every soldier, yes, sir. But you’re an officer, sir.”
“Who should lead by example,” Magnus murmured. “In grooming as well as uniform. ‘
Tavi glowered at Magnus and tugged at the loose leather jacket he wore, the leather stiff and heavy enough to turn a glancing blow of a blade, dyed a dark blue in contrast to the lighter tunic he wore beneath. He wore a Legion-issue belt and blade at his side, and though his favored training had been in a slightly longer weapon, the standard sidearm of the Legions felt comfortable in his grasp as well, particularly after the practices with Max and the Maestro.
The Legion camp was fully the size of his uncle’s stronghold at Garrison, and Tavi knew that they were of similar size for a reason: all Legion camps were laid out in precisely the same fashion in order to make sure that all commanders, messengers, and various functionaries of the armed forces always knew their way around any given camp, as well as making it possible for militia newly recalled to duty to fit in with the highly disciplined, organized troops of a Legion. Garrison, Tavi realized, was quite simply a standard Legion camp built from stone instead of canvas and wood, barracks replacing tents, stone walls and battlements replacing portable wooden palisades. It housed less than the full complement of men it could, and while Lord Riva claimed that this was because of his confidence in Count Bernard’s alliance with the largest clans of Marat in the lands beyond Garrison, Tavi suspected it had far more to do with funds being skimmed from Riva’s military budget and into other accounts.
The land around the camp had been trampled thoroughly by thousands of marching feet in the past several weeks. The thick, green grass common to the Vale was mashed flat, only in places rebounding from repeated trampling. Tavi could see several hundred troops at training even now, at least half a dozen cohorts of recruits drilling in the brown-gold tunics they would wear until they’d earned their steel armor. They bore large wooden replicas of actual shields, weighted and heavier than the actual items, as well as wooden poles the length of the common Legion fighting spear. Each recruit, of course, bore his own weighted rudius, and the marching men had the slack-faced, bored look of miserable youth. Tavi caught not a few resentful glares as they rode by the marching recruits, swift and fresh and lazy by comparison.