In the end, he simply let her tag along close at his heels. The others made not to notice her. Even Lieutenant Courtemanche, his father’s adjunct and the keeper of the outer office gate, only glanced down at the girl, said nothing, and saluted Abel.
“The commander will see you now, Captain,” he said.
Captain? Abel thought. But he was too tired to correct the man, and too tired to wonder why someone who was normally an extremely meticulous sort when it came to military matters would slip up on his rank.
He didn’t have to wait long to find out. When he stepped into the office, his father looked up from his table full of scrolls and said, “Sharplett is dead. You are now Captain and Regimental Commander of Scouts.”
Abel stiffened to attention. Sharplett.
Stern taskmaster, ass-kicker, and finally a kindly, if grumpy, uncle to me, Abel thought. “Yes, sir,” Abel said. “How, if I may ask?”
“A raid ten days ago,” said Joab. “An undermanned patrol, near to the Escarpment. All massacred. He seems to have been targeted. They hung him by his own-”
Joab glanced down, seemed to see the girl for the first time.
“He was killed,” he finished.
“You should give it to Colefax,” Abel said. “He has seniority.”
“No,” Joab said. “You.”
Then Joab stood up and smiled at the little girl. “You are Loreilei Jacobson, I presume?” he said. He came around the desk and bent down on his haunches so he was eye to eye with the girl. Abel saw a frown flicker across his face when he noticed the slave scar, but it did not displace his smile, which was genuine. “It is Lorielei, isn’t it?”
The girl stared back at him, blinked twice, then replied, as if she were just discovering the fact for herself in the speaking of it, “My name is Lorielei. Yes.”
Then Joab looked up and shook his head at Abel. “I made it worse, didn’t I? Trying to get you away from that woman?”
“I didn’t do it for that,” Abel said.
“I’m sure you believe you did not,” said Joab. He turned back to Loreilei. “Your mother has missed you. She will be very glad to see you. Very, very glad. Do you want to see her?”
The girl nodded.
“Ah!” A cry from the door. Abel turned. A woman in a diaphanous green robe was standing there. The kohl around her eyes was running in black traces down her cheeks. “My baby, my baby,” Adele Jacobson whispered. She hesitated for a moment, as if to be sure she was stepping into a room and not into a beguiling and empty dream, but then she ran the three paces from the door to the girl and took the child in her arms. “Loreilei.”
The girl said nothing, but after a moment, she too was crying, letting her mother hold her, envelop her.
“How did you-”
“Wigwag from the outpost,” said Joab. “I sent for her immediately. We couldn’t have her around here, of course, so she was waiting in the officer’s mess. I imagine Courtemanche sent for her as soon as you came in.”
“Thank you, Father,” Abel said.
“Yes,” he said. He watched the mother and daughter reunion a bit longer. “Lilleheim will have some good news. They sorely need it. As will the Jacobsons.”
The woman, Adele Jacobson-she was Edgar’s sister, and Loreilei was his niece-was already ushering the child toward the door. “You will have a bath, and your room, I told them not to, never to change it…oh, it’s just like it was. And we’ll see to your cut.” She looked at the slavery scar. “I think we can, yes, it should be possible with a little powder to…oh, never mind, darling, that doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but that you’re back. Let’s go to the wagon. Luther is waiting with the wagon. We’ll go home. Let’s go home. Don’t you want to go home?”
She asked this as if uncertain of the answer, but the girl nodded. Still, she did not smile, but she was crying, which, for Abel, was the best sign he’d seen from her for days that she might, someday, heal from what had been done to her.
As Adele led her away, the girl, who was Loreilei, but would always be the girl to him, turned around and gave him a parting look.
It was a look that was near to being frightening, it was so intense. He did not attempt to fathom the feeling behind it. Then she turned back to her mother, and was gone.
“I have something for you, Captain,” Joab said. Abel turned back to his father.
There was the unmistakable clang of metal upon metal as Joab drew his saber from its scabbard. “Few are permitted such a weapon. Captains and above.”
“Father, it’s yours. As DMC.”
“Not at all,” Joab replied. “I inherited this. It is the Dashian blade.”
“No other captain has one.”
“In Treville, perhaps. You are now a regimental commander,” Joab said. “Plenty of Guardians and Regulars in Lindron carry them.” Joab set the saber on his desk, considered it for a moment in its bare form. Then he unhitched the belt and scabbard, and, re-sheathing the saber, set saber and scabbard together back on the desk. “I always told myself I’d give this to you after you had done something…extraordinary.” He smiled. “And, of course, after you’d made captain, which I have always fully expected.”
“Father, I don’t know what to say,” Abel replied. “It is completely ineffectual against artillery. We had exactly no battles, no encounters even, where we grew close enough for sword-work with the enemy. The only time I might have used it, it would have been impossible to conceal, and concealment was what I needed at the time.”
“I know all this well. Believe me, I’ve experienced it myself,” Joab said. “And yet, I expect you to wear it into battle.”
“Why?”
“For the family? For glory?” Joab said. “Some matters cannot be put into words. Just take it, Abel.”
Your father has a point, lad, Raj said. You should do as he wishes.
“As you command,” Abel replied. He picked up the saber and scabbard and buckled it around his waist.
“That’s that. Now, to practical matters,” Joab said. Abel took a stealthy glance but noticed no tear in his father’s eye. Sentimentality was certainly not one of his father’s weaknesses. “Do you have an idea when they’re coming?”
“Yes, I know exactly. Next new three-moon night.”
“That actually makes a lot of sense,” Joab mused. “You have an estimate of how many?”
“It will be…overwhelming.”
“And where they will strike?”
“No, I don’t know that,” said Abel. He sighed. Not a sigh of regret, but of relief.
Safe, for a moment, to breathe, he thought. To not fear my next breath will see an arrow or bullet in my back.
He smiled. “But I do have an idea of what their thinking might be,” he said. “We left them with a certain map, you see.”
“My father is a complete bastard,” Abel said as he paced across the room. Mahaut sat up in a chair. They were in her sitting room now, the room outside her bedroom, her long sickroom, in Lilleheim. He’d thought he would sleep one night in Hestinga, collapse in the bed in his father’s house, the same room he’d grown up in, with the pallet becoming a cot, with the chest of clothing and his few toys replaced by a respectable wardrobe he’d bought with two months of saved wages. But that was not to be.
And then, rested, he would ride to Lilleheim, leave his dont and sleeping roll at the outpost, and go to see her in the village. Instead, he had ridden to Lilleheim shortly after delivering his report. No rest. He’d barely stopped moving.
His father had ordered him back to the Redlands immediately to take over Sharplett’s command from the outpost at the Upper Cliffs. He was to leave in the morning. He’d managed to secure permission to wait until after breakfast, so he’d bought at least that much time.
He’d tormented himself with fantasies that Edgar Jacobson might be there, having returned from his urgent business at Garangipore, but that was not the case.