Lady Knight (8 page)

On the walkway, she inspected its boards. They were as sound as the wall itself, and placed low enough that the top of the wall would give her soldiers protection from enemy archers.

Since the guards were there, the captain introduced them. Kel shook hands with each man, looking him in the eye. Whispers ran the circuit of the wall but Kel refused to try to hear what was being said. She had been through this before, too. These men would respect her, or not, over time. There was nothing she could do now to win them over. She didn’t even try, beyond a smile and a firm handshake. She was responsible for their lives, not their affections. Did it scare them to know a green girl was in charge here? Or did they feel safe this far from the border?

She did not feel safe, for all that this was a well-built refuge. She knew the heavy forests that ranged on either side of the Greenwoods River north of the camp. Last summer had taught her just how many of the enemy could sneak by in such forests. This strong camp might not be enough.

It all depended on the Scanrans, their numbers, their allies and their strange magic that turned chain, iron-coated bone and iron sheets into killing devices. Kel wouldn’t be able to guard hundreds of civilians with the forty soldiers Wyldon had promised her. The refugees had to be trained to fight, not just the men, but the women, even the older children. Her next shipment of supplies had to include weapons if the refugees had none of their own.

In a day or two she’d start riding the country until she knew it like her palm. She’d make sure the refugees and soldiers knew it, too. Standing over the gate, she stared blankly into the distance as she made plans. They’d have to know the roads and trails to Forts Mastiff, Steadfast and Giantkiller, and their escape routes to the south. She was lucky to have local people inside her walls. They’d know the hidden and not-so-hidden trails, bogs, pitfalls and canyons around here, as well as the best hunting and fishing areas.

She realized the captain was speaking. “What? I’m sorry, Captain Elbridge. I was thinking.”

A corner of his mouth twitched - in amusement or scorn? wondered Kel. “I was asking if the lady knight had chosen a name,” Elbridge repeated.

“A name for what?” Kel asked, looking at him blankly.

“This place. We call it ‘this miserable mudpit’, but my lady will be living here. It’s your privilege to name it as you like,” explained the captain.

Kel turned, her hands jammed into her breeches pockets, and surveyed her command. Men crawled over beams, hammered, sawed, unloaded wagons, called out to each other, visited the latrines. Wyldon, Baird, Neal and Merric were emerging from headquarters. She glanced at the road below: here came the sledge with its military guard and its load of cut trees.

“I suppose ‘Mudpit’ is a little depressing,” she admitted. “I’ll have to think about it.”

The captain bowed. “Very good, milady.”

They descended the stairs near the guard shack as the gates swung open. The sledge made its slow way inside the walls.

“I see you’ve conducted your first inspection,” Wyldon said to Kel. “What do you think?”

“Captain Elbridge has done far more than I could imagine,” Kel said honestly. For a hard, cold fish, she thought. “I’ll be hard put to keep up his good work.” As soon as I’ve thrown his whip into the compost heap, where it’ll be of use, she added silently.

“We’ve plenty of work to do in the infirmary,” Duke Baird said. “But I’ve seen the plans. It looks good.”

Elbridge shrugged. “It’s these northern woodsmen. If they could find a way to eat trees as well as work them, they’d be rich men. Still, I confess, I’ll be pleased to be working only with soldiers again. These civilians are too contrary for my taste.”

He, Baird and Wyldon turned away to discuss matters relating to the new Fort Mastiff, while Neal and Merric automatically looked at Kel. “I feel as ready for all this as a babe who picks up a sword,” Merric said with a twisted smile. “Of course, Neal is ready - “

“Mithros save us, they’ll allow just any freak of nature up here, won’t they?” a familiar male voice proclaimed. Kel, Merric and Neal turned to see the speaker. One of the sledge guards, a tall, broad-shouldered young man, dismounted from his horse. Bright blue eyes blazed and a broad grin flashed in a face splattered with mud. Under other mud Kel could see the familiar tunic, chain mail and armband of a sergeant in the King’s Own. “Meathead!” he called, handing his reins to a guard. “They sent you out with no keeper?”

Neal laughed and strode forward to hug the slightly taller man despite the mud. Kel almost ran to the newcomer as well, remembering just in time that a commander couldn’t throw herself at an old friend. She knew Domitan of Masbolle, Neal’s cousin and a sergeant of the King’s Own, very well indeed. They’d become friends during her four years with the King’s Own. She’d had a terrible, unreturned, crush on him -he was handsome, mud or no.

Neal pushed Dom away. “Insubordinate!” he scoffed. “That’s Sir Meathead, to you. What have you been doing, chasing mudhoppers?”

“It’s a skin treatment. I’ve got so chapped here in the north,” retorted Dom. He turned to Kel and bowed. “Lady knight,” he said, and straightened with a wide grin. “You did it. We knew you would.”

Kel reached out her hand; they clasped forearms, Dom squeezing hers tightly before he let go.

Another voice sounded out. “Squire Kel - I mean, lady knight!” The other men who’d been guarding the sledge came over. Kel cheerfully shook hands with each of them, Dom’s squad in the King’s Own. One hot day the previous summer, at a place called Forgotten Well, she had commanded these men after an arrow-shot had put Dom out of action. Both Wolset and Fulcher now wore mud-splashed armbands with the circle mark for a corporal. Dom had lost one corporal before he’d been wounded, the second was killed after Kel took command. She’d given Wolset a field promotion to corporal for keeping his head, and Dom had confirmed it. Two of the other six men before her she did not know. They simply bowed to her and stayed back, watching with interest.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” she asked Dom when the greetings were over.

“Lord Wyldon asked for one of our squads to work here till the place is finished, since we’ve been in the area almost a year. It’s just coincidence that my boys got tapped,” Dom told her. “Have you seen Giantkiller? Just when we got the place all fixed up, the regular army kicked us out. I bet they ruined all of our chair cushions.”

“I noticed a sad lack of taste,” Neal said in his usual drawl, “but I figured it was left over from when the King’s Own lived there.”

Dom grinned, then looked at Kel. “Do you like your flag?” he asked.

She smiled at him with all the gratitude in her heart. “I love it,” she told him.

“He don’t get all the credit,” Corporal Wolset said. “It was me that thought of it.”

“And you what nearly ruined the embroidering,” retorted Corporal Fulcher.

Dom cleared his throat. “Here comes command. We’ll talk later, Lady Kel, Sir Meathead.” He waved his squad back to the sledge. They helped the civilians unload the logs.

“That was friendly,” Merric remarked, folding his arms.

“They’re from Third Company,” Kel said. “We rode together for four years.”

“Dom’s squad fought one of the metal killing devices under Kel’s command.” Neal’s voice sounded clearly over the racket of nearby hammers and saws. His wry tone told Kel what he thought of her not mentioning such important specifics. “Dom got shot; they lost two men.”

“And it took all of us to beat the cursed thing,” Kel retorted, wishing Neal hadn’t spoken. It seemed like bragging, even if it was Neal’s comment, not hers.

“You fought one of those things?” Elbridge demanded, hard eyes fixed on Kel.

She was starting to feel cross. She didn’t want to boast. Wolset had trapped the thing’s head as the other men roped its limbs. Still, she didn’t appreciate the captain’s disbelief, either. “Together with Sergeant Domitan’s squad, captain,” she replied, locking her hands behind her back as a reminder to keep her face and voice bland and polite. “None of us wants to repeat it.”

“Mithros witness that,” murmured Duke Baird.

Wyldon and the captain murmured the ritual reply “So mote it be,” Neal and Merric just a syllable behind them. Kel said nothing. She didn’t think anything she said to Mithros on the subject of the killing devices would stop the war-god from allowing more of them to swarm over the border that summer.

After lunch, Wyldon, Kel, Merric, the captain, Owen and a squad rode out to view the land immediately around the fort, returning with Elbridge’s regular patrol as the sun vanished behind the western mountains.

That night the soldiers who rode with Lord Wyldon took supper in the barracks where they slept. Those who would remain to guard the camp - recovering wounded men, convicts and such whole soldiers as Wyldon could spare - took their supper in the mess hall, together with Dom’s squad, and the civilian loggers, carpenters, smiths and men-of-all-work. The nobles, Captain Elbridge and Dom shared a table at one end of the building.

Listening to the men talk, Kel wished that Dom and his squad were to stay all summer, and not just because he was easy on the eyes. Cleaned up and wearing a fresh blue tunic, Dom was fair-skinned, with Neal’s curved brows and that same long nose, wide at the tip. He also had a relaxed, comfortable charm that made anyone feel confident. That charm could help to ease Kel’s dealings with the men she had to command. Dom would influence those who believed Kel to be no warrior. Like Raoul, Dom had always taken Kel’s fighting skills as a matter of course. He would make it clear to any doubters that she pulled her weight in a fight or a march. She knew that she couldn’t depend on Dom, though. Once the real fighting began, he would return to Fort Steadfast and Raoul.

Over supper, news from the palace and the border was traded. Kel let the others do the talking as she sneaked bits of meat to Jump. At last Lord Wyldon pushed his plate away. Duke Baird had finished some time ago, and Captain Elbridge was nearly done.

“Keladry,” Wyldon said quietly. “Time.”

“Yessir,” Kel said automatically. She extracted herself from her seat between Neal and Merric, then wiped her hands on a handkerchief. For a moment she nearly forgot and raised her hands to check her hair, but stopped herself in time. It would not do for men, who she was to command to see her do something so feminine when her mind should be on business.

I can’t do this, she thought desperately as she took a last swig of apple juice and set down her cup. I’m eighteen! Someone should be commanding me, not the other way round! Wyldon’s trusting me with their lives, and me with the paint still wet on my shield…

Somehow her feet and legs carried her down the long rows of men and tables, past Tobe and Saefas to the open part of the hall. Before her now sat four squads of soldiers, forty men in uniform and about sixty-five civilians, who were all refugees. These were the first people she had to deal with in her new position, and they would carry their impression of her to those who would arrive soon.

Kel looked for something to stand on and found a wooden box. She wiggled it when she put it in position, just to make sure it could bear her weight. The men, who had watched her come their way, chuckled quietly.

Kel looked up and smiled. “There’s so much of me,” she explained. “It would be undignified if I stepped on it and it broke.”

Another, louder chuckle rose from them. One of the knots in her chest came undone. Just like the men of Third Company, they liked a joke at an officer’s expense. Carefully she stepped on to the box: it held her. She waited as men set down their forks and knives.

As she waited, she looked them over, face by face.

None of them, not even the healthiest soldier, was untouched by the hard times of recent years. She recognized the convict soldiers: they bore a silver circle on their foreheads. It would shine under hair, mud or face paint; it could not be cut out with a knife. The only way to remove it was to use spells that were carefully guarded by palace magistrates. Even without the mark, Kel would have known the convicts. They were the thinnest of all, hollow-eyed and gaunt-cheeked. Right now they looked to be near exhaustion from a day of guard duty and unloading wagons.

She would have to feed them up if they were to manage any serious fighting. They were criminals, of course. They’d no doubt deserved their sentences to the mines and quarries. She’d known two men who had been sentenced to prison, and she’d hated them for their crime. Presumably the men here were guilty of the same or worse, but surely the officers knew starved men had no strength to fight.

One convict stood and walked down between the tables, peering at Kel.

“You, there,” Captain Elbridge called. He fell silent; Kel guessed that Wyldon had told him to let her manage this. She kept her eyes on the approaching man. There was grey in his coarse-cut black hair, grey in the stubble on his chin, too. His nose was a long prow of bone, his eyes shadows in their sockets. From the darkness of his skin and from his features, he was kin to the tribes of the southern desert. He was too pale to be full-blooded Bazhir, and as he drew closer she saw his eyes were grey, not brown. His uniform was patched and worn; of course they wouldn’t give convicts the best, she realized. That irritated her. Are they supposed to come here to fight and die quickly, so we can make more room in the quarries and mines? she wondered, keeping her face mild and blank.

“Can I help you, soldier?” she asked when he stopped a yard from her.

He rubbed his chin with bony fingers. “I begs pardon for my forwardness, lady knight,” he said, awkwardly gallant, “but was you anywheres near the River Hasteren in summer, seven years gone? Hill country?”

“Yes,” Kel replied, puzzled. “Lord Wyldon took the pages there for summer exercises in camping and field craft.”

“You seen any fighting, them days?” the man asked. “Nothin’ big, just a scramble, like. With hillmen?”

Now Kel was curious as well as puzzled. “We rode with the army when they cleaned out some hill bandit nests,” she replied. “And some friends of mine and I got into a little trouble, which is how we learned bandits were in the area.”