A little more light in the sky, a little more detail in the world, and Lord Governor Meed’s men would be rushing from those trenches and towards the town. The strong right fist of her father’s army. She bit down on the tip of her tongue, so hard it was painful. Excited and afraid at once.
She stretched, looking over her shoulder into the cobwebby little room. She had made a desultory effort at cleaning but had to admit she was pathetic as a homemaker. She wondered what had become of the owners of the inn. Wondered what its name was, even. She thought she had seen a pole over the gate, but the sign was gone. That’s what war does. Strips people and places of their identities and turns them into enemies in a line, positions to be taken, resources to be foraged. Anonymous things that can be carelessly crushed, and stolen, and burned without guilt. War is hell, and all that. But full of opportunities.
She crossed to the bed, or the straw-filled mattress they were sharing, and leaned down over Hal, studying his face. He looked young, eyes closed and mouth open, cheek squashed against the sheet, breath whistling in his nose. Young, and innocent, and ever so slightly stupid.
‘Hal,’ she whispered, and sucked gently at his top lip. His eyelids fluttered open and he stretched back, arms above his head, craned up to kiss her, then saw the window and the glimmer of light in the sky.
‘Damn it!’ He threw the blankets back and scrambled out of bed. ‘You should’ve woken me sooner.’ He splashed water from the cracked bowl onto his face and rubbed it with a cloth, started pulling yesterday’s trousers on.
‘You’ll still be early,’ she said, leaning back on her elbows and watching him dress.
‘I have to be twice as early. You know I do.’
‘You looked so peaceful. I didn’t have the heart to wake you.’
‘I’m supposed to be helping coordinate the attack.’
‘I suppose someone has to.’
He froze for a moment with his shirt over his head, then pulled it down. ‘Perhaps … you should stay at your father’s headquarters today, up on the fell. Most of the other wives have already headed back to Uffrith.’
‘If we could only pack Meed off along with the rest of the clothes-obsessed old women, perhaps we’d have a chance of victory.’
Hal soldiered on. ‘There’s only you and Aliz dan Brint, now, and I worry about you—’
He was painfully transparent. ‘You worry that I’ll make a scene with your incompetent commanding officer, you mean.’
‘That too. Where’s my—’
She kicked his sword rattling across the boards and he had to stoop to retrieve it. ‘It’s a shame, that a man like you should have to take orders from a man like Meed.’
‘The world is full of shameful things. That’s a long way from the worst.’
‘Something really should be done about him.’
Hal was still busy fumbling with his sword-belt. ‘There’s nothing to be done but to make the best of it.’
‘Well … someone could mention the mess he’s making to the king.’
‘You may not be aware of this, but my father and the king had a minor falling out. I don’t stand very high in his Majesty’s favour.’
‘Your good friend Colonel Brint does.’
Hal looked up sharply. ‘Fin. That’s low.’
‘Who cares how high it is if it helps you get what you deserve?’
‘I care,’ he snapped, dragging the buckle closed. ‘You get on by doing the right thing. By hard work, and loyalty, and doing as you’re told. You don’t get on by … by …’
‘By what?’
‘Whatever it is you’re doing.’
She felt a sudden, powerful urge to hurt him. She wanted to say she could easily have married a man with a father who wasn’t the most infamous traitor of his generation. She wanted to point out he only had the place he had now through her father’s patronage and her constant wheedling, and that left to his own devices he’d have been demonstrating hard work and loyalty as a poor lieutenant in a provincial regiment. She wanted to tell him he was a good man, but the world was not the way good people thought it was. Fortunately, he got in first.
‘Fin, I’m sorry. I know you want what’s best for us. I know you’ve done a lot for me already. I don’t deserve you. Just … let me do things my way. Please. Just promise me you won’t do anything … rash.’
‘I promise.’ She’d make sure whatever she did was well thought out. That or she’d just break her promise. She didn’t take them terribly seriously.
He smiled, somewhat relieved, and bent to kiss her. She returned it halfheartedly, but then, when she felt his shoulders slump, remembered he’d be in danger today, and she pinched his cheek and shook it about. ‘I love you.’ That was why she had come up here, no? Why she was slogging through the mud along with the soldiers? To be with him. To support him. To steer him in the right direction. The Fates knew, he needed it.
‘I love you more,’ he said.
‘It’s not a competition.’
‘No?’ And he went out, pulling on his jacket. She loved Hal. Really she did. But if she waited for him to get what they deserved through honesty and good nature she’d be waiting until the sky fell in.
And she did not plan to live out her days as some colonel’s wife.
Corporal Tunny had long ago acquired a reputation as the fiercest sleeper in his Majesty’s army. He could sleep on anything, in any situation, and wake in an instant ready for action or, better still, to avoid it. He’d slept through the whole assault at Ulrioch in the lead trench fifty strides from the breach, then woken just in time to hop between the corpses as the fighting petered out and snatch as fine a share of the booty as anyone who actually drew steel that day.
So a patch of waterlogged forest in the midst of a spotty drizzle with nothing but a smelly oilskin over his head was good as a feather bed to him. His recruits weren’t anywhere near so tough in the eyelids, though. Tunny snapped awake in the chill gloom around dawn, back against a tree and the regimental standard in one fist, and nudged his oilskin up with one finger to see the two men he had left hunched over the damp ground.
‘Like this?’ Yolk was squeaking.
‘No,’ whispered Worth. ‘Tinder under there, then strike it like—’
Tunny was up in a flash, stomped down hard on their pile of slimy sticks and crushed it flat. ‘No fires, idiots, if the enemy miss the flames they’ll see the smoke for sure!’ Not that Yolk would’ve got that pitiable collection of soaked rot lit in ten years of trying. He wasn’t even holding the flint properly.
‘How we going to cook our bacon, though, Corporal?’ Worth held up his skillet, a pale and unappetising slice lying limp inside.
‘You’re not.’
‘We’ll eat it raw?’
‘Can’t advise it,’ said Tunny, ‘especially not to you, Worth, given the sensitivity of your intestines.’
‘My what?’
‘Your dodgy guts.’
His shoulders slumped. ‘What do we eat, then?’
‘What have you got?’
‘Nothing.’
‘That’s what you’re eating, then. Unless you can find something better.’ Even considering he’d been woken before dawn, Tunny was unusually grumpy. He had a lurking sense he had something to be very annoyed about, but wasn’t sure what. Until he remembered the dirty water closing over Klige’s face, and kicked Yolk’s embarrassment of a fire away into the dripping brush.
‘Colonel Vallimir came up a while ago,’ murmured Yolk, as though that was the very thing Tunny needed to lift his spirits.
‘Wonderful,’ he hissed. ‘Maybe we can eat him.’