“I will serve, sir,” Cheris said. As long as it was possible to be played as a web piece and survive, she meant to try.
Was that another glimpse of the fox’s unwavering eye? “Do you know what your primary examiner said of you before approving you for service?” Subcommand Two said.
“As I recall, sir,” Cheris said mildly, “I graduated in the top six percent that year from Academy Prime.”
“He noted your conservatism and wondered what had driven you toward a faction full of people who take risks on command. Are we to interpret your continued service as evidence that you have a Kel’s heart after all?”
“I will serve, sir,” Cheris said again.
Subcommand Two could have demanded a more substantive response, and didn’t. Her face smiled again, this time with a fox’s patient pleasure, and winked out.
The two ways to win at gambling were to read the situation and know the odds. Cheris had calculated her situation already. She had only a single life to offer, and she was aware of the ugly deaths that awaited her should she fail, but at some point you had to trust yourself.
After Cheris was sure the meeting was over, she stared at her reflection in the terminal. It still displayed the Ashhawk Sheathed Wings. When she had been younger, she had hoped for it to change and show her something new about herself, but today as always, there was nothing new to show.
She would have to go to her soldiers and break the news to them. Aware of her duties, she submitted a very terse report and signed off on the casualty intake form, wincing at the numbers. She hoped she would have an opportunity to pay a call on the injured in Medical, but she doubted it.
“Medium formal,” she told the uniform, and it obliged her. Her hands were sweating inside the gloves.
The hall outside her quarters was quiet and almost chilly, and the slight curve intensified as she walked down its length. The curve was partly illusion, a topological trick to enable the voidmoth to hold more passengers, but her eye was fooled nonetheless.
It was only a single circuit to the high halls where the Kel infantry ate separately from the moth’s regular crew. There was a painting on the wall just before she reached the doors, on textured paper: the queen of birds holding court in a winterdrift forest, and to her side, a fox half-hidden and wholly smiling.
Their assigned high hall, when she entered it, was less full than it should have been. The other halls, for the other companies that had not survived, would stand empty. The servitors had arranged the tables to make the place look less vast. Some of them hovered in the air as they made fussy adjustments to the furnishings: the ashhawk with wings outspread, Brightly Burning, bannered across the wall; the calligraphed motto that was found everywhere the Kel went, from every spark a fire; tapestries woven from the threads of dead soldiers’ uniforms and embroidered with their names and the names and dates of the battlefields that had claimed their lives.
Every soldier rose at her entrance, spoons and chopsticks clinking as they set them down. Cheris paused long enough to return the honor, and smiled with her eyes. Lieutenant Verab was sober-faced as always, but Ankat returned the expression with a sardonic grin. Ready to tell the officers’ table a brand-new Kel joke, no doubt. He had a better repertoire than anyone she’d ever met. Then she headed to her seat at the center of the officers’ table, and indicated that they should sit again.
The communal cup was waiting for her. It was lacquered red and graven with maple leaves, and someone had refilled it nearly to the brim. Verab, who sat at her right, passed her the cup. He looked very tired, and she lifted an eyebrow at him. He shrugged slightly: nothing important. She didn’t challenge the lie. Cheris felt tired herself, knowing the news she was going to have to break to him, and to the rest of her company. Schooling her expression to calm, she took one sip. The water was sweet and cool, yet she felt it ought to be bitter.
She had a bowl of rice, and the communal platters had familiar fare: fish fried in rice flour and egg and leaves of sage, pickled plums, quail eggs with sesame salt. Some fresh fruit had been saved for her. Verab was mindful of her love for tangerines, a sometime luxury; plus he didn’t care for them himself. She looked at the food and thought about all the meals she had shared with these people, the times she had dragged herself out of a battle knowing that soon she would be able to sit down with them and eat the food they ate, and listen to the Kel jokes that she really wasn’t offended by, even though she sometimes pretended to be as a joke in itself, and comfort herself with the voices of those who had made it through. All of that was about to end.
“I have bad news,” Cheris said. “They’re breaking up the company.”
They were staring at her, even Verab, who should have guessed. “Doctrine,” he said. His voice cracked. Verab was fifth-generation Kel. His family would take it hard.
“You may be able to serve again, some of you,” Cheris said, aware of the inadequacy of her words, “but that depends on the magistrates’ assessments. I’m sorry. I don’t have details.”
“Kel luck is always bad,” Lieutenant Ankat said. He was about to make a joke of his own, she could tell, sheer anxiety. She looked at him, hard, and he swallowed whatever it had been.
“It’s duty,” Cheris said. Right now duty seemed arid. “I am not to go with you. They have another use for me.”
A murmur rippled up and down the table, quickly quelled. They knew the euphemisms, too.
They weren’t looking forward to the future. Most of them would lose Kel tradition and formation instinct. They might remember the mottoes and formations, but the mottoes would give them no more comfort, and the formations would no longer have any potency for them.
“Good luck where you’re going then, sir,” Ankat said, and Verab murmured his agreement. He didn’t believe this had just happened. She could tell by the stricken look in his eyes.
“I would hear your names and dates of service,” she said quietly. It would make all of this real, and the ceremony would give them something to hold onto, even if that something wasn’t precisely comfort. “All of you. Acknowledge.”
“Sir,” they said in one voice. Ankat looked down at his hands, then back at her.
It was not the formal roll call. They had no drum, no fire, no flute. She would have included those things if she could. But even the servitors had heard her. They stopped what they were doing and arranged themselves in a listening posture. She nodded at them.
They started with the most junior soldier – Kel Nirrio, now that Dezken was dead – and ascended the ladder of rank. Nobody ate during the recital. Cheris was hungry, but hunger could wait. She didn’t need to commit the names to memory, as she had done that long ago, but she wanted to make sure she remembered what every intent face looked like, what every rough voice sounded like, so she could warm herself by them in the days to come.
She spoke her name last, as was proper. The hall was otherwise silent. And then, breaking the rituaclass="underline" “Thank you,” she said. “I wish you well.”
For all that she was leaving them, she couldn’t help feeling a guilty twinge of anticipation for the challenge to come; but it would not do to let on.
“Eat, sir,” Ankat said then, and she ate, not too fast and not too slow, making sure to finish with the two tangerines Verab had set aside for her.
CHAPTER THREE
CHERIS HAD HOPED for more specific orders, but no such luck. She slept uneasily and woke in the middle of the night, four hours and sixty-two minutes before she would ordinarily rise. The room was dark, with only a single candlevine glowing.