By the Sword (45 page)

She smoothed back her soaked hair with both hands, and smiled slightly at the younger woman. Shallan patted her shoulder encouragingly, and led the way.

 

Kero stared up at the stained and mildew-spotted canvas overhead. It wasn't
her
tent, but it was waterproof, and Shallan and Relli had gotten the mildew stink out of it somehow. She was happy just to be lying down, and dry, and warm. Granted that the bedroll was looted from who knew where, smelled of horse, and had seen better days; that didn't matter. Dry and warm counted for a lot right now.

The interview with Ardana had not proved the ordeal Kero feared it might be.
Except that she ignored half of what I said about the Karsites, where Lerryn would have had me in there till I fell over, taking notes.
That was disturbing; more disturbing was that Ardana really didn't seem interested in the things she
had
asked about. It was as if she was going through the motions, as if she had some other opponent in mind than the Karsites.

But just about everyone had deduced from Hellsbane's condition what Kero's must be like; when Ardana let her go, they'd sent Shallan over to bring her to the mess tent-but
then
they sat her down and got her fed, and didn't ask too many questions. Then someone had brought in a spare shirt, and someone else produced breeches and socks, and a third party a heavy woolen sweater—

They'd stripped her to the skin right there in the mess tent, amid a lot of laughter and rude jokes about how it would be more fun to bed her sword than her, right now.

“So change that!” she'd retorted. “You can all start buying me steaks!” Meanwhile she had been pulling on the first warm, dry clothing she'd had in a week.

Then they ran her over to Shallan's tent under a pilfered tarp, so she wouldn't get wet again. It had all been a demonstration of caring that had left her a little breathless.

Maybe that was why she was having trouble falling asleep.

I was right,
she thought, staring at the mottled ceiling, listening to the rain drum on it.
I
was right to come back.
This is where I belong. I could never fit in with Eldan, with his friends, no more than I could have with Daren and the Court. I'd have only made both of us miserable trying.

Her eyes burned; she sniffed, and rubbed them with her sleeve, glad that Shallan and Relli were off somewhere else. Probably in the mess tent; they were both passable fletchers, and the Skybolts had lost a lot of arrows....

A lot of other things, too. Kero thankfully shifted her thoughts to the general troubles. The Company was in trouble. Equipment lost, officers decimated, about a third of the roster gone and another third on the wounded list—and Menmellith had declined to pay them more than half their fee, on the grounds that they hadn't stopped the “bandits,” and they hadn't come up with real proof that they were operating with more than the Karsite blessing. The Guild, when appealed to, had reluctantly ruled in Menmellith's favor.

There were a lot of people she was going to miss. And right on the top of the list was Eldan.

Her throat closed again, and she choked down a sob.
I love him, and it would never have worked. I love him, and I'm never going to see him again. He probably thinks I deserted him under fire or something.

She'd been hoping for some kind of message from him when she reached the camp; he knew what her Company was, and messages moved swiftly through the aegis of the Guild. But there had been nothing.

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 Shallan, 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?” Kero 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 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 bip-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 “resupply” 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.

We should have defaulted,
Kero thought angrily, cursing under her breath as the metal scales on Shallan's armor came off in her hands.
We should have defaulted anyway. Anything is better than this. The Guild would back us, once they heard about the “supplies. ”

The “war” had turned out to be waged
within
a House; two factions of the same merchants' guild. Kero wasn't sure what it was about—mines, or some other kind of raw material, she thought—and she wasn't sure she cared. Neither side gave a rat's ass about the welfare of the troops they'd hired—the Skybolts were just so many warm, weapon-wielding bodies to them, and if they thought about it at all, they probably assumed that the Company members
welcomed
a certain number of losses, as it made for fewer to split the pay at the end.

Kero had been made the officer over the scouts, and that made it all the worse for her.
She
was the one who had to take Ardana's stupid orders—distilled from the even stupider orders of their employers—and try and make something of them that stood any kind of chance of working.

Kero dug into her kit for some of the half-cured horse-hide that was all they had been able to salvage from those poor, slaughtered nags, and laboriously patched it into the back of Shallan's mail-coat. Then she stitched the scales that had come off back into
that,
cursing when the holes broke where they'd rusted through.

Fewer and fewer of her friends came back after each foray; she'd managed to keep most of the scouts alive, but as for the rest—

It was pretty demoralizing. Ardana didn't
have
any strategy worth the name. The merchants dictated, and she followed their orders, directing the Skybolts—skirmishers all—to fight like a Company of light cavalry. They'd been cut down to two-thirds normal strength by the Menmellith affair—now they were down to half of that. Mostly wounded, thank the gods, and not dead—but definitely out of the action.

She shook the corselet and growled under her breath. Like the situation with her command, it was so tempting to just do what she could and leave the rest to the gods—but—
Damned if I'm going to leave my friend half-protected.
She cut the stitching on the faulty scales, took a rock from her hearth to use as a hammer, a bit of wood to use as an anvil and a nail for a awl, and punched new holes below the old ones,
then
stitched them back on.

If she'd gone with Eldan—the thought occurred a dozen times a day, and it didn't hurt any the less for repetition.