The Price of Valor (2 page)

WINTER

“K
eep it up! They're giving way!” Winter Ihernglass shouted.

The air was thick with acrid smoke, slashed by the brief brilliant flares of muzzle flashes. Musketry roared around Winter like a continuous crackling peal of thunder, and she had no way of knowing whether her soldiers could hear her. Her world had contracted to this small section of the line, where a dozen young women of the Girls' Own stood behind the shot-torn hedgerow, each going through the drill of loading her musket: ramming the ball home, priming the pan, and bringing the weapon back up to firing position.

The Hamveltai were unseen in the murk, visible only by the flash of their own muskets. But they were weakening—Winter could feel it—the return fire becoming more scattered and sporadic.
Just a minute more
. She walked along the line, shouting herself hoarse and slashing the air with her sword, while the constant din of the muskets rattled the teeth in her skull.

Ahead, she saw one of the casualty teams, made up of girls too young or too small to carry a musket. They worked in threes and fours, running up to the hedge whenever a soldier went down and dragging her back a few paces to assess the injury. As Winter watched, the team ahead of her abandoned a woman who'd taken a ball high in the chest and leaked a wide swath of blood into the muddy earth, and went back to retrieve a plump, matronly woman who'd fallen on her side, clutching a shattered hand. As they got her to her feet, one of the smaller girls suddenly doubled over, clutching at her gut with both hands. One of her companions looked her over, shook her head, and left her where she fell.

Brass Balls of the Beast.
It was a scene Winter had witnessed before, but she
couldn't get over how quickly girls who'd been selling flowers in Vordan not three months earlier had adapted to the brutal necessities of the battlefield. She thrust away a pang of guilt. There wasn't time for that.
No time for anything but survival.

Winter hurried past the casualty team, stepping quickly around the dying girl, and continued down the line looking for Bobby. The young woman, who'd been a corporal in Winter's company on Janus' Khandarai campaign, now sported white lieutenant's stripes on her shoulder. A knot of women were gathered behind a dense spot in the hedge, loading awkwardly while crouched and then standing to loose another shot into the thickening bank of smoke.

“Bobby!” Winter said, grabbing her arm and pulling her close enough to hear over the din. “Go to Jane, tell her to move in!”

Bobby's pale skin was already grimed with powder residue. Like Winter, she was one of the few in the Girls' Own to have an honest-to-goodness regulation uniform; unlike Winter's, hers was no longer tailored to conceal the truth of her gender from prying eyes. When Janus had created the all-female Fifth Volunteer Battalion from the ragtag group of volunteers Winter and Jane had led into battle at Midvale, Bobby had elected to discard her disguise. She had been the one who'd taken the nickname “Girls' Own”—a play on the name old royal regiments, the King's Own, and the Boy's Own Guide series of books for children—and turned it from mockery into a badge of honor. Next to Winter and Jane, she was probably the most respected officer in the battalion.

She was also—cursed, enchanted, Winter didn't know what to call it—by the Khandarai
naath
that had saved her life. Winter knew that the scars of her wounds had healed, not in puckered skin, but as smooth, glittering stuff like living marble.

Bobby saluted to acknowledge the order, handed her musket to the nearest soldier, and hurried off to the right, bent double to keep her head from sticking above the hedge.
For all the good that will do.
A hedgerow might deflect a musket ball, but mostly it was good for hiding behind, and that only mattered against aimed fire. Nobody was aiming now; if not for their muzzle flashes and the accompanying noise, Winter wouldn't have been able to say whether the enemy was still there. She turned back in the other direction, keeping her eyes open for any signs of wavering or incipient panic, and was pleased to find her soldiers still firmly committed to their bloody work. The Hamveltai were laying down a hot, heavy fire, but for the moment the Girls' Own seemed to be standing up to the pressure.

As she moved toward the left, she could hear the deeper growl of artillery underneath the musketry. The hedge led to a small hamlet in that direction, no more than a dozen buildings, which was defended by a battalion of volunteers and half a battery of guns. Something was on fire—she could see the glow, even through the smoke—but the noise indicated the men there were still fighting hard.

On the right side of the line, the hedge took a dogleg forward a hundred yards before ending at a wide dirt path. Jane was waiting on the far side of that angle with another four companies, hunkered down and silent up until now, waiting to execute the trap. Winter didn't want her troops going toe-to-toe with a battalion of regulars longer than they had to.

Reaching the center of her line, Winter pressed herself against the hedge between a pair of soldiers and listened.
A couple of minutes for Bobby to run to Jane, a couple of minutes to get ready . . .

A chorus of hoarse battle cries, identifiably feminine even through the rattle and bang musketry, rolled out of the smoke on the right. All along the line, Winter's soldiers echoed the cheer, which was followed in quick succession by a blaze of new firing. More flashes stabbed through the smoke, at right angles to the Hamveltai position, as Jane led her troops in a charge with fixed bayonets that took the enemy line end-on. As Winter had guessed, that convinced them that their position was untenable, and before another minute had passed there was no more shooting to her front. Along the hedgerow, the women of the Girls' Own were cheering themselves hoarse.

“Make sure those muskets are loaded!” Winter shouted, over the celebration. “They'll be back.”

*   *   *

“You should have seen the looks on their faces,” Jane said. “Bastards were so surprised they didn't even have a chance to shoot back.”

“Nicely done,” Winter said. Though rumors of the infamous female regiment had no doubt spread through the enemy camps by now, the League soldiers were always startled when they came to actual face-to-face contact with the Girls' Own. Winter was happy to use their hesitation to her advantage, if it meant keeping her troops alive. “Any prisoners?”

“A few dozen,” Jane said. “Plenty of wounded out there, but we didn't take any that couldn't walk.”

They were squatting in the muddy dirt, a few yards back from the hedge. With the lull in the fighting, some of the Girls' Own were helping the casualty teams, carrying the wounded to a temporary station in the rear and dragging
corpses clear of the firing line. Winter had cautioned them not to go too far. It was too easy to get caught up helping a wounded comrade and forget that the battle wasn't over yet.

To the left, artillery still growled, but the musketry had died away, indicating that the attack on the hamlet had tapered off while the League cannoneers continued the argument with their Vordanai counterparts at long range. The smoke was beginning to drift apart, torn into scraps by the late-morning breeze. Looking at the sun, Winter thought it was still at least an hour before noon; she already felt as if they'd been there for days. She closed her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and returned her mind to the matter at hand.

“See if any of the men you took speak Vordanai. I'd love to know what else they've got out there.”

“You think they'll try it again?”

“I think they've got to. They want to push through here to take Janus from behind.” It felt odd to her to casually refer to the general of the army—much less a count of Vordan—by his first name, but it had become a universal practice among the troops he commanded, as a demonstration of their affection for their strange commander. “They tried a narrow swing around the hamlet, and ran into us. So what's next?”

Jane shrugged. “You're the soldier.”

Winter grimaced, but it was true, in a sense. While there were times when she still felt like a fraud—it was hard not to, when everyone but a select few thought she was a man—it was hard to deny that she had more military experience than anyone else in the Girls' Own, with the possible exception of her ex-corporals Graff and Folsom. For that matter, she had more combat experience than almost anyone in Janus' Army of the East, which was an awkward conglomeration of old Royal Army troops and scratch battalions of revolutionary volunteers.

Jane's experience was of a different sort. They'd been lovers, long ago, at Mrs. Wilmore's Prison for Young Ladies, before Jane had been dragged away into involuntary marriage to a brutal farmer and Winter had escaped to join the army. While Winter had spent three years in Khandar, lying low, Jane had escaped from servitude, freed the rest of the girls from the Prison, and brought them to Vordan City. There they'd fought criminals, tax farmers, and anyone else who got in their way, forming the core of the Leatherbacks and striving to provide a rough justice to the Docks. When Winter and Jane had been reunited
in the chaos of the revolution—with a helping hand, Winter guessed, from Janus bet Vhalnich—Jane's girls joined the fight to save the city from Orlanko.

Now they made up almost half the Girls' Own, and Jane herself had accepted an officer's rank, but she didn't pretend to know anything much about tactics. Winter scratched a rough line in the earth with the toe of her boot. “If I were them, I'd feel us out to the right. If they've got another couple of battalions, they could throw one against us here and push another one down the road to get behind us.”

“And if we run for it, they can surround the town,” Jane said. She looked to the south, where only the occasional hedge broke the endless, open country. A lone wood-topped hill, miles distant, loomed like a distant gray monolith. “If they get us with horsemen in the open . . .”

Winter nodded. Jane might not have had a military education, but she had good instincts. The Girls' Own were brave, dedicated troops, but they didn't have the training to form square and stand off cavalry in the open. The volunteers who made up most of the rest of the force Janus had left to blunt the League advance were the same. They had only one regiment of “Royals”—professional soldiers of the old Royal Army—and a retreat under those circumstances could easily become a rout.

“I'll send Bobby to Colonel de Ferre,” Winter said. “If he brings up the reserve before they get here, we can give them another nasty surprise. They've got to get sick of banging their heads against this wall eventually.”

Jane nodded and got to her feet. “I'll get some of the girls out past the smoke to give us a bit of warning.”

Winter stood a bit more slowly, her legs already aching. Her throat felt suddenly thick, in a way that had nothing to do with having spent the morning shouting at the top of her lungs.

“Be careful,” she said.

Jane smiled, her familiar, mischievous smile, and gave a slapdash salute. Winter fought a sudden impulse to wrap her arms around her. Instead she nodded, stiffly, and watched Jane stride back toward the front line.

A passionate embrace between the commander of a battalion and his chief subordinate might have been a bit unorthodox, by old army standards, but Winter wasn't sure it would have made a difference if she'd given in to the temptation. Caution was an old, ingrained habit, though, and she tried to impress the importance of it on Jane. They lived in a weird fog of half-truths and lies—the
fact that Captain Ihernglass was sleeping with Lieutenant “Mad Jane” Verity was an open secret, at least among the Girls' Own, who gossiped as badly as the old Colonials had. But only a small cadre among them, Jane's former Leatherback girls, knew the secret of Winter's gender. So far, they'd kept her confidence—Jane's girls were nothing if not loyal—but having that knowledge so widely spread made Winter intensely nervous.

Bobby hurried over and snapped a crisp salute. One of her sleeves was red with blood.

“Jane said you wanted to see me, sir?” she said.

“Are you all right?” A foolish question, Winter thought. Bobby was the one soldier on the field who was virtually guaranteed to live through the day's fighting, thanks to the ongoing legacy of her experience in Khandar.

“What?” Bobby caught sight of the blood and shook her head. “Oh, it's nothing. I was helping with the wounded.”

Winter nodded. “I need you to ride to Colonel de Ferre. Tell him we need reinforcements here, at least a battalion, to extend the line on the right. We haven't got the strength to stretch that far, and if they get around us this whole position could come unstuck.”

“Yes, sir!”

Bobby saluted again and hurried rearward. There was a small aid post there, where the battalion cutters did what they could for the casualties until they could be taken for proper care. Beside it was a string of horses, kept ready for couriers and other emergencies. Winter watched her mount up, then turned back to the front.

The corpses of the fallen had been removed from the line, and the injured helped to the rear. Now small parties vaulted the hedgerow, cautiously, and searched among the dissipating smoke for enemy wounded. Any who seemed likely to survive were taken prisoner and sent through the line for treatment.

The enemy were Hamveltai regulars, called yellowjackets for their lemon-colored coats, striped with black and worn over black trousers. They wore tall black shakos with gold devices on the front and long red plumes fluttering from the peak, the very image of professional soldiers. The contrast with the Vordanai, whose only uniform was a loose blue jacket worn over whatever each soldier had brought along, could not have been greater. But neat uniforms did not seem to provide any special protection from musket balls.