By the Sword (51 page)

But who is? asked a little voice in the back of her mind.

The Guild representative that had come with them spoke for the first time. “Neither Tre nor Kynan are trained in tactics, logistics, and supply the way you are, Kerowyn. Their expertise stops at groups larger than a squad. And neither of them care for mages.”

“How do you know I'll be any better?” she asked, dropping her hands.“

“You can't be worse,” Shallan replied emphatically.

“You've seen for yourself how vulnerable a Company is to bad leadership,” the Guildsman said solemnly. “We think that judging by your past performance, you would step down rather than cause the Company harm.”

She stared at his impassive face; he was cut of the same cloth as the Arbitrators, if a great deal younger.
You know I would,
she thought at him, as if he could hear her.
These are my friends, my family. It would be hell on earth to spend the rest of my life leading them into situations where some of them are going to get killed....

And in that moment, she suddenly understood Eldan, and the way he felt about his duty and his own people. His “Company” was simply very much larger than hers.

She tightened her jaw, and raised her chin a little. “All right,” she told them all. “You've convinced me.”

Shallan let out a whoop, and the others started to congratulate her, but she held up a hand to forestall them. “Let's first find out if we actually
have
a Company left.” She turned to the Company accountant and quartermaster. “Scratcher, how bad is it?”

The man she queried did not much resemble a scholar; he was as lean and hard as any of the rest of the Skybolts, but there was a shrewd mind behind those enigmatic eyes. He chewed the end of his pen, studied the open book before him, and muttered to himself a little. Finally he looked up.

“With all the losses we took in people and supplies, Captain, we're going to exhaust the bank just replacing them. We aren't going to have enough to take us out again in the spring. We may not have enough to last the winter.”

The Guild representative stirred a little, and Kero took the chance to read his thoughts.

She ground her teeth silently.
Take a loan that would be years in repayment? And what if we have a bad year,

or a bad run of years.
What,
then?
She shifted her weight, and a crackle of parchment in her belt pouch made her frown.

Then she remembered. Eldan's ransom. Which
she
couldn't get. But the Guild?

She smiled slowly, and pulled it out, leaving the letter within. “Here,” she said, handing it to the Guildsman. “This is from the Herald I pulled out of the fire. I think you can see he's played fast and loose with the conditions. Think the Guild can do something about that?”

The flat-faced mercenary took the parchment from her, opened it, and his lips pursed in a soundless whistle. “All that for a mere Herald? Are you certain he wasn't a prince?”

She shrugged. “All I care about is that right now that little piece of paper can make us if we can redeem it.”

The Guildsman scrutinized the writing carefully, then suddenly, unexpectedly, smiled. “It specifies that the
holder
of the note is the one who has to redeem it in person,” he pointed out. “If you signed it over to us, in return for an immediate sum minus—oh—ten percent,
our
representative would be the holder.”

He'll never forgive me.
“Done,” she said, reaching for Scratcher's pen. “Send it half in supplies and weapons. The
Guild
I trust.”

The rest was over quickly, leaving Kero alone in the wardroom, her hand clenched around the letter still in her otherwise empty pouch. Slowly, she drew it out.

She stared at it for a long moment, her mind tired and blank. Then, she folded it and tore it into precise halves, then quarters, then repeated herself until there was no piece larger than the nail of her little finger.

She stared at the pile of pieces, stirring them a little with her forefinger. A noise from outside made her look up and through the window that gave out on the practice grounds.

Shallan was running a new recruit against the archery-target, at the trot. He jounced painfully and his arrows went everywhere except in the straw dummy. Her own buttocks ached in sympathy.

She looked down at the collection of tiny white scraps, then abruptly swept them into her hand and cast them into the fire.

She stood up, and strode to the door. Her orderly was waiting for her with her cape in his hands, as if her thoughts had summoned him. She paused just long enough for him to flick it over her back and settle it across her shoulders, before striding out onto the practice grounds.

Her practice grounds. Her recruits.

Her mouth opened, and the words came without her even having to think about them, as Shallan saw her and snapped to attention, the recruits following her raggedly.

“So, these are the new ones.” She nodded, as she remembered Lerryn doing. “Very promising, Sergeant. Carry on.”

Kero rubbed her eyes; they burned, though whether from the smoke from her dimming lantern, or from the late hour, she didn't know and didn't really care. “Maps,” she muttered under her breath, the irritation in her voice plain even to
her
ears. “Bloody maps. I
hate
maps. If I see one more tactical map or
gashkana
supply list, I'll throw myself off a gods-be-damned cliff. Happily.”

The command tent was as hot as all of the nine hells combined, but the dead-still air outside was no better, and full of biting insects to boot. At least whatever Healer-apprentice Hovan had put in the lamp oil that made it smoke so badly was keeping the bugs out of the tent. Shadows danced a slow pavane against the parchment-colored walls as the lamp flame wavered.

She stared at the minute details and tiny, claw-track notations of her terrain-map until her eyes watered, and she still couldn't see any better plan than the one she'd already made. She snarled at the blue line of the stream, which obstinately refused to shift its position to oblige her strategy, and slowly straightened in her chair.

Her neck and shoulders were tight and stiff. She ran a hand through hair that was damp at the roots from sweat, and she wished she'd brought Raslir, her orderly, along. One-armed he might be, but he had a way with muscles and a little bit of leather-oil....

But he was also old enough to be her grandfather, and the battlefield was no place for him. He might find himself tempted beyond endurance to engage in one little fray—and that would be the end of him.

The wine flask set just within her reach looked very inviting, with water forming little crystal beads along its sides, and the cot beyond the folding table beckoned as well. She hadn't yet availed herself of either. She stretched, as Warrl had taught her; slow, and easy, a fiber at a time. A vertebra in her neck popped, and her right shoulder-joint, and some of the strain in her neck eased.
Either I'm getting old, or the damp is getting to me. Maybe both.

The lamp set up a puff of smoke, and she waved it away, coughing, as she reached for the wine flask. And despite her earlier vow to throw herself off a cliff if she had to look at another list, she glanced at the tally sheet. And smiled. She could smile, still, before the battle, before she actually had to send anyone out on the lines, to kill and be killed.
If only I never had to send them out to fight in anything but the kind of bloodless contests we had last year. Then I could be entirely content.

But a year like the last, where all they had to do was show themselves, was the exception rather than the usual, and she well knew it.

Still the tally sheet was impressive.
Not bad, if I do say so myself.
It had been ten years since she'd been made Captain, and there had been no serious complaints from any Skybolt or from their clients or the Guild in all that time. And from the beaten force that had come up from Seejay, tails between their legs, she had built the foundations for a specialist-Company that now tallied twice the number Lerryn had commanded.

And in many ways, it was four Companies, not one, each with its own pair of Lieutenants. For some reason that she could not fathom, shared command had always worked well for the Skybolts, though no one else could ever succeed with it. The largest group was the light cavalry; next came the horse-archers. Those two groups made up two-thirds of their forces. The remaining third was divided equally between the scouts and the true specialists.

Those specialists included messengers, on the fastest beasts Kero's Shin‘a'in cousins would sell her; experts in sabotage; and the nonfighters—two full Healers, and their four assistants, and three mages and
their
six apprentices. The chief of those mages, and the jewel Kero frequently gloated over, was White Winds Master-class mage Quenten, a mercurial, lean and incurably cheerful carrot-top sent as a Journeyman straight to the Skybolts by Kero's uncle.

He will tell you that he wants (gods help him), adventure,
the young mage's letter of introduction had read. And for a moment, Kero had hesitated, knowing that a lust for “adventure” had been the death of plenty of mercenary recruits, and the disenchantment of plenty more. But then she had read on.
Don't mistake me, niece. He is as patient as even I could want, with a mind capable of dealing with the tedious as well as the exciting. What he calls “adventure,” I would call challenge. There isn't enough outside of the magics of warfare to sharpen his skills as quickly as they can be sharpened. So although we are a school of peace, I send Quenten to you, knowing you will both be the wealthier for the association.

So it had proved; she'd never known her uncle to be mistaken, so she took the young man on, and rapidly discovered what a prize she had been gifted with. He had, over the course of the years, managed to convince Need to extend her power of protection-against-magics to cover all of the Company. When she asked him how he had done it, he grinned triumphantly. “I did something to make it look as if you were the Company and the Company was you,” he said, a light in his eyes that Kero had responded to with a smile of her own.

And if Need was aware that her magic had been tampered with, she hadn't bothered to do anything about it. Now the Skybolts were in the unique position of having mages whose concentrated efforts could be directed to things other than defensive magics. No one else could enjoy that kind of advantage. It made their three mages capable of doing the work of six. Only the armies of nations could afford that many mages deployed with a group the size of a Company. Most Companies couldn't even afford to field more than one mage, and the Skybolts used that advantage mercilessly.

After all these years, Kero still wasn't certain of how aware the sword was of the things that went on around her. In her first years as Captain, it had still occasionally tried to wrest control away from her, yet she had the impression that the blade wasn't really “awake” when it made these periodic trials. She sometimes thought that it reacted to her self-assertion the way a sleeping person would to an irritating insect.

When was the last time it tested me?
She pondered, taking a long slow sip from the wine flask. The water slicking the sides of thepewter flask cooled the palm of her hand, and the chill liquid slid down her throat and eased the tickle in the back of it. She closed her eyes and savored it.
About five years ago. And I know I got the feeling that it wasn't going to try again. Gods, I hope not. Not now, anyway. Damned thing is likely to decide for the enemy!

That was because the current campaign was against her old enemies, the Karsites. And
that
recollection made her smile with bitter pleasure. She had quite a debt to collect from the Karsites, and this was the first time in ten years that she'd had a chance to do so. The Skybolts were fighting beside the Rethwellan regular army on behalf of the male monarch of Rethwellan, against the self-styled female Prophet of Vkandis, and that could bring trouble from Need, if the sword noticed. Kero recalled only too well the time the blade had refused to fight against one of the Karsite priestesses. She didn't relish the idea of it turning on her again.

“If there's one thing I can't stand besides maps,” she muttered to herself, “It's a holy war. These religious fanatics are so damned—
unprofessional.
”

Messy, that was what it was.
Seems like the moment religion enters into a question, people's brains turn to mush. Messy wars and messy thinking. Messy thinking causing messy wars.

The Karsites had been causing trouble since long before the disaster in Menmellith, and had continued to do so afterward. But this was the first time that the followers of the Sunlord had ever actually moved openly against Rethwellan. The so-called Prophet, claiming to be the original Prophet, reborn into a female body to prove the Oneness of the deity, had managed to raise a good-sized army on the strength of her charisma and the “miracles” she performed. She had moved that army into the province south of Menmellith during the winter, while travel was hard and news moved slowly. By spring she had taken it over and sealed it off.