"I see," Tamman said slowly, then pursed his lips. "May I ask why not, Father?"
"Because Lady Sandy was right," Stomald said simply. "We're trapped in a war, and if I was wrong to think Lady Harry and Lady Sandy angels, the Inner Circle is even more wrong in what it believes. There will be time to sort things out once the Guard is no longer trying to kill us all, My Lord."
The priest smiled wryly, and Tamman smiled back. Damned if he could have taken the complete destruction of his worldview as calmly as Stomald seemed to be taking it!
"At the same time, My Lord," Stomald went on a bit more hesitantly, "Lady Harry told me of her relationship with you." Tamman stiffened. Pardalian notions of morality were more flexible than he'd expected. Unmarried sex wasn't a mortal sin on Pardal, but it was something the Church frowned upon, yet Stomald's tone was that of a wary young man, not an irate priest.
"Yes?" he said in his most conversational tone.
"My Lord," Stomald met his eyes squarely, "I love Lady Harry with all my heart. I don't pretend to be her equal, or worthy of her," Harriet made a sound of disagreement, but he ignored her to hold Tamman's eyes, "yet I love her anyway, and she loves me. I... do not wish for you to think either of us has betrayed you or attempted to deceive you."
Tamman gazed back for several seconds while he wrestled with his own emotions. Damn it, he had seen this coming, and Harry had been his friend long before she'd become his lover! They'd both known the forced intimacy of their battleship-lifeboat was what had made them lovers, and he'd known it was going to end someday, yet for just an instant he felt a terrible, burning envy of Sean and Sandy.
But then he shook himself and drew a deep breath.
"I see," he said again, holding out his hand, and Stomald took it with only the briefest hesitation. "I won't pretend it does great things for my self-image, Stomald, but Harry's always been her own person. And, much as it might pain me to admit it, you're a pretty decent fellow yourself." The priest smiled hesitantly, and Tamman chuckled. "It's not as if I haven't seen it coming, either," he said more cheerfully. "Of course, she couldn't tell you what she felt, but the way she's talked about you to the rest of us—!"
"Tamman!" Harriet protested with a gurgle of laughter, and Stomald turned bright red for just an instant before he laughed.
"She's been watching you like a kinokha stalking a shemaq for weeks," Tamman said wickedly, and watched both of them blush, amazed that he could feel such genuinely unbitter pleasure in teasing Harriet.
"You're riding for a fall, Tamman!" she warned, shaking a fist at him, and he laughed. Then she lowered her fist and stepped closer. She put her arms around him and hugged him tightly. "But you're a pretty decent fellow yourself," she whispered in his ear.
"Of course I am," he agreed, and put his own arm around her, then looked back at Stomald. "You don't need them, but you have my blessings, Stomald. And if you need a groomsman—?"
"I—" Stomald began, then stopped, blushed even brighter, and looked at Harriet appealingly.
"I think you're getting a bit ahead of yourself," she told Tamman, "but assuming we all get out of this in one piece and I get him home to Mom and Dad, we might just take you up on that."
"Shit!"
No one understood the English expletive, but Sean's officers understood the tone. All of them were splashed from head to toe in mud, and Sean stood in cold, thigh-deep water that rose nearly to the Pardalians' waists. The rain had stopped, but the air was almost unbearably humid, and swarms of what passed for gnats whined about their ears. The column stretched out behind them, for Sean was leading the way now, since his implant sensors made it far easier for him to pick a route through the swamp—or would have if there'd been a way through it, he thought savagely.
He inhaled and made himself calm down before he opened his mouth again, then turned to his staff.
"We'll have to backtrack," he said grimly. "The bottom drops off ahead, and there's some kind of quicksand to the right. We'll have to cut further north."
Tibold said nothing, but his mouth tightened, and Sean understood. Their original plans had called for passing the column's head through the swamp in ten or twelve hours, and so far they'd been slogging around in it for over twenty. What had seemed a relatively simple, if unpleasant, task on the map had become something very different, and it was all his own fault. He had the best reconnaissance capabilities on the planet, and he should have scouted their route better than this. If he had, he would have known the foot of the valley's northern wall was lined with underground springs. The narrowest part of the swamp was also one of the least passable, and his stupid oversight had mired his entire corps down in it.
"All right," he said finally, sighing. "We won't get anywhere standing here looking at the mud." He thought for a few moments, calling up the map he'd stored in his implant computers on the way through, then nodded sharply. "Remember where we stopped for lunch?" he asked Tibold.
"Yes, My Lord."
"All right. There was a spit of solider ground running northeast from there. If there's a way through this glop at all, we'll have to go that way. Turn the column around and stop its head there. While you're doing that, I'll see if Lady Sandy can pick a better path than I can."
"At once, My Lord," Tibold agreed, and turned to slosh back along the halted column while Sean activated his com.
"Sandy?" he subvocalized.
"Yes, Sean?" She was trying to hide her own anxiety, he thought, and made his own tone lighter.
"We're gonna have to backtrack, kid."
"I know. I had a remote tuned in."
"In that case, you know where we're headed, and I'm one dumb asshole not to have had you checking route for us already." He sighed. "Tune up your sensors and see if you can map us a way through this slop."
"I'm already working on it," she said, "but, Sean, I don't see a fast way through it."
"How bad is it?"
"From what I can see, it's going to take at least another full day and a half," she said in a small, most un-Sandy-like voice.
"Great. Just fucking great!" Sean felt her flinch and shook his head quickly, knowing she was watching him through her remotes. "Sorry," he said penitently. "I'm not pissed at you; I'm pissed at me. There's no excuse for this kind of screwup."
"No one else thought of it, either, Sean," she pointed out in his defense, and he snorted.
"Doesn't make me feel any better," he growled, then sighed. "Well, I guess standing around pissing and moaning won't make it any better, either. Let's get this show back on the road—such as it is!"
He turned to slog off in Tibold's wake, and the swarming clouds of gnats whined about his ears.
Even Sandy's estimate turned out to have been overly optimistic. What Sean and Tibold had envisioned as a twelve-hour maneuver consumed over three of Pardal's twenty-nine-hour days, and it was an exhausted, sodden, mud-spattered column of infantry that finally crawled out of the swamp proper into the merely "soft" ground south of it. Thank God Tibold had warned him against even trying to bring artillery through that muck, Sean thought wearily. Their five hundred dragoons had lost a quarter of their branahlks, and Lord only knew what would have happened to nioharqs. Given his druthers, he decided, he'd take Hannibal's elephants and the Alps over a Pardalian swamp and anything.