Crossroads and Other Tales of Valdemar

Hallock should technically be in there now, but the drone of the mill gave him a headache. So did the thick concentration of junior officers arguing tactics, where they tried to justify staying inside where they were “needed.” Most of the staff at the mill mean well, but they didn’t seem to understand: an army can not be administrated—it must be led. After the southern border wars, the turmoil of the Storms and the strife the Changecircles brought, one leader after another retired from service. Few command veterans had stayed in field service after all of that. Stavern’s First, his commander of the Sixteenth Regiment, had been the most experienced field commander the Guard could send northward at the time. He knew the protocols as the woman’s subordinate, but he hadn’t known her well. She’d fallen when Hallock had. The morning that he’d been cut loose from the Healer’s tent and the yellow ribbon removed from it, he heard the horns sounding the mourning notes. She had been buried already.

And here he was.

A new stripe tacked on the sleeve.

A new ribbon under the badge.

Brevet promotion. First of the Sixteenth, Captain Hallock Stavern.

A senior officer, maybe, but still one of the regulars in his heart.

Filthy and unpleasant as the cantonment was, at least here he was with the Guard. He hadn’t gained his previous rank by nepotism or bribery, he’d gained it by genuinely believing in what the Guard could be, and his soldiers knew. Just the fact that he was in the muck, waving off occasional offers for help, and took his time checking in on the units didn’t go unnoticed. If he had to plod along on a crutch to see to the soldiers’ well-being, rather than pass by in a driven carriage, then that’s how it would be done, and the mill be damned.

He stopped in at one of the larger tents, an open-front, thirty-pole affair where cots and poorly strung hammocks were every one filled with the wounded. The most open section of the ill-set compound tent held a score of uniformed women and men with boiling pots of water, sorting rough buckets of more-or-less straight wood. Six of those in the hammocks were unconscious, but two were snoring, so that was a good sign. The ones awake were, healthily, complaining of officers and strategies. These twenty-some souls were the barely ambulatory Guard soldiers who were left over from most of the northern clashes. As was the Valdemaran tradition, if they weren’t fit to ride or march, they had been put to work. Those that still had full use of their hands were engaged in basic fletching. All Guards that were rated for field combat knew how to make arrows, bolts, and spears of several types, of whatever native materials could be scrounged.

Supply trains were on the way from the south, and a wagon or two arrived every few candlemarks during the day. Proper, larger tents were being unloaded even now by a mix of the Guard and the local, but now largely unemployed, populace. Harvest crews would never come, so the large households that depended on them for their crops now faced hardship. The stalks and rushes from the grain harvests wouldn’t be collected, and peddlers who sold the baskets and other wares made from them would have no goods, and so on down the line.

The locals were being compensated for their goods and work, but a government chit didn’t change the fact that so soon after the terrors of the Storms, when hope was building up again, their livelihoods had been smashed.

Still, where there is life there is hope, he thought as he looked around the convalescents’ tent. And here I am alive to see it. And I’ll see Haven again and walk its streets again with Genni.

“First. Sir.” The senior officer of the tent gave him a salute with her one unbandaged hand. Even that was unexpected; most decorum went out with the slop in places like this. “Good t’see y’back with us,” she said, and it didn’t take a genius to read the subtext.

“Thanks, Corporal. You being seen to well here?”