The Price of Valor Read online

  The flare of a match brightened the dimness of the tent for a moment, followed by the warmer glow of an oil lamp. Winter’s eyes fixed on Jane, gloriously nude against the light, head tipped back as she drained a canteen. When it was empty, she tossed it aside and came back to the pallet, stepping carefully over the pile of papers she’d toppled. Winter lifted the blanket so she could wriggle underneath it, reveling in the warmth of Jane’s skin pressing against her own. Jane kissed her, lips still wet.

  “What is all that?” Jane said, prodding the fallen stack with one finger. “I thought Cyte was supposed to take care of the paperwork for you.”

  Winter sighed. “Official complaints. Have to be signed by the commander to show that she’s seen them, then sent back to the archives.”

  “Complaints? From who?”

  “Take a wild guess.”

  “The Royals.”

  “The Royals” was how everyone in the Girls’ Own referred to the former Second Battalion of the Eighteenth Regiment of the Royal Army of Vordan, now the Second Battalion of the Third Regiment of the Line of the Army of the East and Winter’s personal headache. Captain Sevran, their commander, had been relatively cooperative, but some of his subordinates were less willing.

  “Specifically, Lieutenant Novus, the senior staff officer.”

  “Let me guess,” Jane said. “He’s the scion of a great and noble family.”

  “More or less.”

  Lieutenants in the Royal Army came in two flavors. Some were commoners who’d been recommended for aptitude to the War College and spent several years training there; captains like Marcus d’Ivoire did a tour as a junior officer before returning for further training. Others were granted their commissions on the spot by the Crown, either in recognition of their illustrious family names or in return for significant financial contributions to the royal coffers.

  The revolution and the war had upset all that, of course, and Janus was upsetting it further, promoting commoners to the unheard-of rank of colonel based on nothing more than his personal judgment. But some people are always willing to pretend nothing has changed.

  “What is he complaining about?” Jane said.

  “Today? That the Second Battalion, in spite of its storied history, is placed behind the First in the marching order.”

  “Do the Royals really have a storied history?”

  “Three hundred years’ worth, apparently. Lieutenant Novus wrote about it in some detail. It seems that one of his ancestors was killed leading it to a glorious defeat during the reign of Farus the Fifth.”

  “So because some idiots got themselves slaughtered a hundred years ago, we should eat their dust on the road all day?” Jane snorted. “That sounds like Royal Army thinking, all right. Janus should have sent the lot of them to the rear and let the volunteers do all the fighting.”

  “Janus needs every bayonet he can get his hands on,” Winter said.

  “Assuming they’ll fight, which I doubt.” Jane shook her head, rubbing her cheek against Winter’s shoulder. “Did I tell you we caught another couple of Royals trying to sneak into our camp last night?”

  “Oh God. Again?”

  “They don’t seem to learn.”

  “You didn’t hurt them too badly, I hope.”

  “We may have pushed them around a bit. But we just sent them back where they’d come from.” Jane grinned slyly. “Kept their pants and breeches, though. Only seemed fair.”

  “You really ought to file a report with their company commanders,” Winter said, though she couldn’t keep a broad grin off her own face.

  “I think my way works better.”

  “Well. A good regimental commander leaves minor matters up to her subordinates.” Winter put on her best pompous officer voice. “I’ll leave things to your best judgment, Captain Verity.”

  “Is that out of that manual you borrowed from Janus?”

  “Indeed. A Comprehensive Guide to Regimental Command. I hear it’s a standard text at the War College.”

  “What does it have to say about kissing your captains?”

  “Surprisingly little.”

  Their lips came together. Winter felt Jane’s fingers running delicately up the inside of her thigh.

  “Perhaps,” Winter said when Jane pulled away for a moment, “I should submit a monograph to the College. To make sure their text is truly comprehensive.”

  “Sounds like an excellent plan to me.”

  Winter grinned wider. “Then, Captain Verity, I officially request that you assist me with my research.”

  “I don’t know,” Jane said, with mock seriousness. “I may have to run that up the chain of command.”

  She smothered Winter’s mad giggles with another kiss, and for a while, rank was forgotten.

  * * *

  The Army of the East snaked along the road, a column of blue that stretched for miles through a country of brown, red, and gold. Autumn had come to the valley of the Velt, and the neat checkerboard of farms and orchards on either side of the road had gone from endless green to a ruddier palette. Here and there, a field of late grain still gleamed yellow in the sun, but most of the harvest was in, and the furrowed land left fallow or planted with winter crops. Breaking up the dark brown of bare earth were the fruit trees, apples, pears, and cherries, whose leaves had turned a riot of red and gold. Neat fenced-in orchards sported row after tidy row, their perfect order mocking the loose discipline of the soldiers marching past.

  More surprising to Winter were the people, farmers and their families, who stood behind those fences to watch the army troop past as though on parade. Young boys yelled their approval and waved wildly, attracting waves in return from the bemused Vordanai troops. When they passed through villages—always laid out on perfect grids, with neat streets lined by half-timbered houses and the inevitable Sworn Church with its spire at the center—it seemed as though the entire population had turned out to line the route.

  It was a far cry from the march through Khandar, where the civilian population had fled or hidden as the armies approached. Given what the Redeemers had done to anyone they suspected of disloyalty, Winter couldn’t blame the Khandarai, nor could she wonder that they’d expected retribution from the Vordanai when they returned. But this was the Free Cities League, where war had for generations been a gentleman’s pursuit, carried out with due attention to the sensibilities of the local inhabitants.

  “They don’t even seem angry with us,” Winter said to Cyte as they rode down the length of the trudging infantry column.

  “This is Deslandai territory,” Cyte said. Winter had learned to consult the ex-University student when it came to matters of history or politics, which were usually perfectly opaque to her. “Desland has always been a shaky member of the League. There’s a lot more Vordanai language and influence here than farther north, even if they are Elysian.”

  “It didn’t stop their troops from fighting against us.”

  “I doubt the Grand Council in Hamvelt gave them a choice,” Cyte said. “Hamvelt has been more or less running the League since the War of the Princes.”

  Winter went quiet a moment, guiding her horse over a tricky rut in the road. She’d been able to avoid riding much as a captain, but a colonel needed to be able to get from place to place quickly, and so she’d reluctantly taken to the saddle. The skill had come back to her surprisingly quickly. Riding had been on the syllabus at Mrs. Wilmore’s, as an essential skill for a sturdy farmer’s wife. Even in her earliest memories, just after her arrival at the institution as a little girl, she felt that she’d been familiar with horses. But rankers didn’t ride, and so for three years in the army the closest she’d gotten to a horse was a pat on the nose.

  All the best mounts had gone to the cavalry, which was desperately short of good horseflesh, so the quartermaster had issued her an aging plodder, a gelding named Ed
gar who exuded a sense of placid resignation. Winter wouldn’t have wanted to push him to a gallop, but he served well enough for walking down a country road. When it came to actual fighting, she would be on her own two feet, colonel or not.

  Cyte rode her mare with considerably less comfort, looking like someone with better grounding in the theory of horsemanship than the practice. Winter needed staff lieutenants, to deliver orders and handle the endless tide of paperwork, and she’d taken Cyte for the latter and Bobby for the former. She’d also requested Lieutenant John Marsh, Bobby’s lover, from the Colonials, and given him a company in the Girls’ Own.

  Ahead, the column had come to a halt. Winter rode past the front ranks of the Royals and nodded to Captain Sevran, ahorse beside the battalion flag and drummers. The Girls’ Own stretched ahead in a loose march formation, small groups of young women standing around chatting in the road, and they waved genially at Winter as she passed rather than offering salutes. Quite a few, Winter saw, were carrying the tall plumed Hamveltai shakos.

  Lieutenant Marsh, riding with the comfortable grace of an expert horseman, met them coming the other way. He was tall, blond, and handsome, with sparkling blue eyes and a ready smile. Winter could see why Bobby had fallen for him, and he’d proven himself unfailingly polite and competent, but she couldn’t help maintaining a certain reserve around the man. He knew at least part of her secret—it was hard to hide the strange, marblelike discolorations that were gradually spreading across her skin—but Winter wasn’t ready to bring him into her own confidence.

  “Sir,” he said, saluting smartly with his free hand.

  “What’s going on?” Winter said, nodding at the stalled column.

  “Wagon train merging,” Marsh said. “One of the forage parties. It’ll be another half an hour before they clear the road.”

  Winter glanced at the sun, which was already well past the overhead and sinking fast toward the horizon. The days were getting rapidly shorter as the year slipped away, something that still surprised her after three years in more equatorial Khandar.

  “We’re not going to get more than another mile today, then,” Cyte said, making the same calculation.

  Marsh nodded. “Bobby and Captain Verity have gone ahead to secure a campsite.”

  “Six miles, maybe?” Winter said, looking back the way they had come. “That’s pretty mediocre marching.”

  “Janus isn’t pushing us,” Cyte said. “Any faster and we’d outrun the wagon train.”

  Unlike on the Khandarai campaign, where the ships of the Vordanai transport fleet had been able to keep the small Colonial army supplied, Janus’ Army of the East had to rely on a slow-grinding supply convoys taking the coast road from depots at Essyle. Fortunately, the battle—known as the Battle of Diarach after the tiny village where Janus had made his headquarters—seemed to have taken all the wind out of the sails of the League army.

  Given a thrashing when they’d expected to deliver one, the divided components of di Pfalen’s force had retreated in two different directions. Di Pfalen’s own army, with mostly Hamveltai troops, had fallen back to the north toward the great bastion of Antova, while a smaller force of mostly Deslandai troops had moved off to the east toward their home city. Janus had left a small force to watch di Pfalen, and marched the majority of his troops, nearly forty thousand strong, down the road to Desland. So far, however, he’d been content to match the pace of the slow-moving Deslandai army, rather than outrunning his supplies in an effort to cut the enemy off.

  “Desland hasn’t got a modern fortification,” Marsh said. “If we get our guns up, we’ll pound their walls to splinters in a few hours.”

  Winter nodded. “They’ll have to turn and fight before we get there. How many miles left?”

  “Forty-five, after today,” Cyte said. Unsurprisingly, she’d turned out to be an expert with maps. “Maybe a week’s march at this pace.”

  “So we’ll have a fight sometime before then.” Winter shook her head. “Marsh, go and tell Captain Verity to make sure there’s a space for drilling in the camp. We’ll have time this evening while we wait for the wagons, and I think we’d better polish up.”

  “Yes, sir!” Marsh saluted again, turned his horse with a light touch on the reins, and trotted up the length of the column.

  By the time the wagons had moved on, the men and women of Winter’s regiment had fallen out all over the road and the surrounding fields, and had to be rounded up by their sergeants. Winter was obscurely pleased to see that the Royals were no better in this respect than the Girls’ Own, although she had to admit they got themselves together a bit faster. The column got moving again as the sun reached the horizon, and it was well into twilight by the time they arrived at the campsite, marked out by pegs in a broad expanse of empty fields. Winter’s tent stood all alone in the center, with a flag planted beside it. Before long, the designated space was a mass of confusion as the long column straggled in and more tents started going up.

  Bobby was waiting with a pair of younger girls. Winter dismounted, wincing at the soreness in her muscles, and handed over Edgar’s reins. The girls saluted—they were noticeably better at it than many of their older compatriots—and led the gelding away.

  “Sir!” Bobby said. She offered a Winter a folded scrap of paper. “From the general. Marching orders for tomorrow.”

  Winter broke the seal with her thumb and glanced over the short document. “We’re to stay in camp until noon, and follow on after the Sixth and their artillery. Another six miles.”

  Compared to the trek across Khandar, moving the Army of the East was a terrifyingly complicated endeavor. With more than ten times as many men, moving in a single column would have left the army hopelessly slow and strung out. Instead, Janus had organized a complicated progress by multiple parallel roads, with a cavalry screen protecting the whole unwieldy mass from enemy ambush. In lesser hands, it easily could have collapsed in a mess of snarls and confusion, but so far delays like that afternoon’s had been rare. Winter sensed the hand of Fitz Warus—now commanding the Colonials—in the meticulous allocation of march routes and detailed orders.

  “Better to wait here than on the road, I suppose,” Bobby said. She looked tired, Winter thought, with a pang of guilt. Ever since her promotion, she’d pushed a great deal of work onto Bobby’s young shoulders. “Shall I pass the word to let the rankers sleep in?”

  “No. I want you to take a rest, but the regiment should be up and breakfasted as usual. We’ve got some drilling to do.”

  Bobby raised her eyebrows. “The girls aren’t much used to drilling, sir.”

  “It’s about time they had a taste of the real military life.” Winter flashed Bobby a grin she didn’t feel. “Just like we did, eh?”

  “Yessir!”

  Bobby saluted again, and Winter waved a hand. “Go find your tent.”

  Marsh would be waiting for her, Winter knew. She hadn’t heard any rumors about the two of them yet, but it was only a matter of time.

  Not, Winter thought, that I have any right to register a complaint. No sooner had she ducked into her own tent than Jane was kissing her, arms wrapped around her shoulders to pull her close. Winter was stiff with surprise for a moment, then softened in her lover’s arms, worming her fingers into the sweaty red tangle of Jane’s hair, which now nearly reached her shoulders.

  “You really ought to salute first,” Winter said when they finally pulled apart.

  “Sorry.” Jane snapped a crisp salute. “Sir! Permission to stick my tongue down your throat, sir!”

  Winter put a hand over her face to hide a grin. “You want to shout a little louder? I’m not sure the whole camp heard you.”

  “I’m pretty sure the whole camp already knows Captain Verity and Colonel Ihernglass are fucking.” Jane lowered her voice. “It’s the details of how we go about it that might surprise some of them.”

&
nbsp; Jane’s hands descended from Winter’s shoulders to her hips by way of the small of her back. The feel of her fingers left Winter flushed and breathing fast, but she managed to disengage from Jane’s grasp and take a step back.

  “Not now,” she said.

  “Spoilsport.”

  Winter rolled her eyes. “You’re incorrigible.”

  “I’m sure if I took the time to look up what that meant, I’d be very insulted.”

  They stared at each other for a second, straight-faced, then broke down in silent laughter. It was at moments like this that Winter felt her love for Jane most keenly. This was the old Jane, the Jane who’d lived with her at Mrs. Wilmore’s and taken the worst the old harridans running the place had to offer with a cocky grin.

  Sometimes, though, the surface cracked, and something ugly showed through. Winter remembered the quay back in Vordan City where she’d only just talked Jane out of cold-blooded murder. There was a rage in her, simmering just out of sight, and Winter sometimes wondered if this semblance of the girl she’d known long ago was all an act for her benefit.

  Jane, watching Winter’s expression, let her smile fade. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” Winter sighed. “I need to see Captain Sevran.”

  “Uh-oh. Should I be jealous?”

  Winter rolled her eyes. “I doubt he’s read my new edition of the handbook yet.”

  “Are you going to get him to make that idiot Novus stop sending you complaints?”

  “I doubt he can,” Winter said. “But I think we need to do some joint drill. My guess is there’ll be fighting in less than a week, and the Girls’ Own and the Royals are going to have to learn to work together at some point.”

  Jane made a disgusted face. “The girls will do what I tell them to. Just make sure the Royals will do the same, and be ready to kick Captain Sevran’s ass if he tries to pull what de Ferre did. We’ll be fine.”

  “A little practice won’t hurt.”

  “If you say so.” Jane shrugged. “Personally, I’d rather have the extra sleep, but you give the orders around here.”