He probably got back to Valdemar and came to his senses. He’s probably sitting with friends now, with pretty little Court ladies all around him, thinking what a lucky escape he had, that he could have been stuck with this barbarian merc with a figure like a sword and a face like a piece of granite. She blinked, and a couple of hot tears spilled down her temples into her hair. He’s probably so grateful I left that he’s burning incense to the gods. He’s probably even making jokes about me. Like, “how many mercs does it take to change a candle—”
More tears followed the first. It doesn’t matter. I love him anyway. I’ll always love him.
And I’m better off alone. We both are.
She turned over on her side and faced the canvas wall, with one of the blankets pulled up over her head so they’d think she was asleep if anyone came in. She muffled her face in her sleeve, and cried as quietly as she could manage, with hardly even a quiver of her shoulders to betray her; only the occasional sniff and the steady creeping of tears down into her pillow. And somehow she managed to cry herself to sleep.
When she woke, the tent was dark, and there was breathing on the other side of it. The steady breathing of sleep; somehow Shallan and Relli had come in and settled down without her being aware of it.
She didn’t wake very thoroughly; just enough to register that she wasn’t alone, and remember who it was.
I’m not alone. Somehow that was a comforting thought. I have friends. I can live without him. That was another. Holding those thoughts warmed her; and warmed, she fell back asleep.
It was raining again. A half-dozen of them were in the mess tent, attaching heads and feathers to grooved arrow shafts. Kero reckoned up the weeks in her head, and came to a nasty total.
“This is the winter rains, isn’t it?” Kero asked ShalIan, as they reached for feathers at the same moment. “We’ve gone over into winter, haven’t we?”
Shallan’s studious inspection of the arrow fletchings didn’t fool Kero a bit. “Come on,” she said warningly. “I’m going to find out sooner or later. Cough it up.”
“We’ve hit the winter rainy season, yes,” Shallan replied, glancing uneasily over her shoulder at Kero. “It did come awfully early, but—”
“But nothing. If this is winter, why aren’t we in winter quarters?” Kerb lowered her voice, after a warning look from Relli. “What are we doing still out in the field?” she hissed.
“Well,” Shallan said unhappily, taking a great deal of time over setting her feather. “You know we didn’t get paid enough. And we lost a lot of manpower and material—”
“And? So?” Kero had a feeling she knew what was coming up, and she wasn’t going to like it. “That’s what the reserves are for, Right?”
“Well—uh—” Shallan floundered.
Finally Relli came to her partner’s rescue. “We aren’t going to use the reserves,” she said tersely. “Ardana has a line on a job.”
That was what I was afraid of. “In winter.”
Shallan nodded. “In winter. It’s south of here—”
Kero just snorted. “I come from south of here. We’re going to be fighting in cold rain if we’re lucky. If we’re not—snow, up to our asses, for the next three months. And ice. I trained in weather like that, but most of the rest of you didn’t. Think what it’s going to do to the horses, if you won’t think of yourself!”
“It’s not that bad,” Relli said sturdily, though she wouldn’t look Kero in the face. “It’s in Seejay. Flat as your hand, and not more than a couple of inches of snow all winter. And it’s not supposed to be a hard job—it’s a merchant’s guild thing. Economic. One side or the other is going to get tired of paying, and we can go home. Frankly, it’s better to fight there in winter than summer—summer you’re like to cook in your armor.”
So instead we drown—provided we don’t die of exhaustion on a forced march down through Ruvan.
“So is this just a rumor, or have you got something more substantial?” she asked.
“I’m pretty sure it’s going down,” Relli told her. “I got it from Willi.”
Since Willi was the Company accountant, it was a pretty fair bet that the bid was in. Kero sighed.
“I suppose it could always be worse—”
Three months later, she found herself wishing for that hip-deep snow.
She cleaned mud off her equipment and Shallan’s, scouring savagely at the rust underneath on Shallan’s scale-mail. Rain dribbled down on the roof of her tent, and down the inside of the shabby walls. Practically anything would have been better than the bog that was Seejay in winter.
A cold bog. One that froze overnight and thawed by midday, only to freeze again as soon as the sun set.
And they were the only Company that had been hired.
That should have told us something from the start, she told herself, for the thousandth time. We should have walked before we took this one.
Fighting beside them were the cheapest of free-lancers, one step up from prison scum; drunks and madmen, vicious alley rats who’d knife an ally quick as an enemy. No point in depending on them—and no turning your back on them. The sentries caught the bastards sneaking around camp every night and most days, and everyone had something missing.
Facing them were more prison-scum and a “company” of non-Guild conscripts; old men too damned stubborn to quit fighting, and bewildered farmers hauled in after the harvest.
That was the reason for holding this “war” in winter in the first place: it was after harvest and trading season. No money-making opportunities lost to combat, she thought cynically. As witness the little “bazaar” just outside camp. Everything they think a merc could want; from flea-ridden whores to watered wine.
This entire setup had Kero completely disgusted. Ardana’s “deal”—such as it was—had been for half pay and half resupply. First of all, she should have known never to trust them on that. Secondly, she should have gotten the resupply in advance.
The total had come to half their usual fee, which Ardana covered, stridently defensive, by pointing out that they were undermanned, and she couldn’t ask the full fee for what was effectively half a Company. Then the “re-supply” train had shown up—late—and there was nothing Ardana could say that would defend what came in with that.
We got tents, all right—old enough to have served the Sunhawks in Grandmother’s fighting days; patched, and rotting. We got armor—cheap and rusted. We got weapons—and I practiced with better under Tarma; dull pot-metal that wouldn’t hold an edge if you got a gods-blessing on it. And food—stale journey-rations that could have given the Karsites lessons in tasteless, barrels of meat too salty to eat, flour full of weevils. And as for the horses—Kero shuddered. They’d had to shoot half of them, and half of the ones they’d shot had been so disease- and parasite-riddled they couldn’t even be eaten.
By then it was too late. They’d given their bond. If they defaulted, the Skybolts’ reputation—already suffering from the defeat in Menmellith—would be decimated.