Crossroads and Other Tales of Valdemar

“You know how this works, Treyvan. If you need supplies, you can’t stop mid-spell to go fetch them. You get caught up in your magic and you know it. You don’t get fed enough, you get cranky. And if you got hurt yourself, who would see to you?” Pena nodded firmly, slapped her tail once on the pavestones for emphasis, and pulled her hood and glass goggles on as they were handed to her by another hertasi scampering by. “Now just pay attention to where you fly and give me a smooth ride, understand?”

Hallock Stavern, leaning on a greenwood stick that was either a too-short crutch or a too-long cane, glared at the clerk in the tent with him, and stabbed a finger on the papers and palimpsests heaped on a table that was obviously once a door. It still had the handle and hinges. “Now you listen to me, I want answers, son, and I want them now. Is help coming from anywhere for the gryphon? Anyone, anywhere? I’ve got the rank to push you into Karse in your shorts if you so much as—”

The clerk held up a hand, looked up at the officer, and snapped completely. “No, you listen to me, you overbearing bastard. The dispatches were sent and there is nothing new from Haven. Nothing. Nothing. You understand? Look at this.” He slammed his ink-stained hands on the stacks of documents. “This is what I have to deal with. Every bleeding soul in this camp, and three other camps, want messages, and they’re all demanding them of me. Send me to Karse naked if you want. Please! It will get me out of here, but until you get twenty more clerks to replace me, you will damned well wait like everyone else! Sir!”

Hallock rocked back slowly. He narrowed his eyes and crossed his arms, as the clerk sat down. After a long moment he replied, “I should damn well promote you for talking to me like that, son.”

“There’s no need to wish a curse on me, sir,” the clerk replied. “I know what the gryphon did for you. We all do. But no news is no news. When I know something, there’ll be a runner sent for you.”

Hallock frowned but had to accept it. “I’ll be making the rounds of wounded, then. But I’ll come back. Good luck.”

The clerk didn’t even look up as he resumed scrawling notes on teetering piles of papers. “Same to you, sir.”

Hallock caught himself rubbing at the wide scar on his forehead, then hobbled his way out into the mess of the encampment. Woods had been cleared on either side of the main trade road, which had become the main thoroughfare of a tent city—well, a city designed by a drunken mob, maybe. There were no straight lines to get anywhere, and tents clustered around every tree that was too heavy to clear cut. Ropework between those trees appeared to have been done by myopic giant spiders during fits of seizures, and anything from canvas to blankets had been strung up as shelter. The poor tinder gained from the smaller felled trees made the cook fires underneath the canopies smoke and struggle for life. The main local source for firewood was a nondescript sort of scrubby, scrawny bush with annoying short thorns. It grew all over for miles, except for a former Changecircle at the edge of the camp. No one wanted to even set foot on that Circle, even though it was set perfectly atop a circular mound that probably had the best drainage, and view, of any of this mud-ridden swamp.

The most orderly part of the whole encampment was on either side of the wide road to the river’s edge, where the grain mill was. The miller moved in with a family in town, and volunteered his home as a command post. Most of the officer corps had settled into the mill tower, which was the tallest building for many miles around. The rooms above the grindstones served as operation planning rooms for security reasons. In truth, it was mainly because the rooms were warm, dry, and had fireplaces—some comfort despite the incessant grind of the millstones.

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?”

The obvious answer came right on cue. “Well as can be expected, sir.” A couple of others chuckled—no matter what region you were from or what Valdemaran dialect you spoke, some answers are utterly predictable. Things sobered up quickly as she spoke her mind. “Whole thing’s been a bit of a toss, honestly. It’s not a proper deployment, we say, ’cause we’re moving against, well, our own really. Ain’t a one of us feels right bein’ here ’cause of moving on fellow Valdemarans. We ought not be fightin’ our own.” The senior enlisted man nearby coughed, discreetly trying to wave the corporal down from making some kind of blunder. She gave him a rude gesture with a few fingers. “ ’Ey, it’s true. We talked ’bout it an’ that’s how we all lean. First’s got the right t’ know how we feel, even if we are stuck as gimps.” She looked back to Hallock. “Might be a black mark on m’record to say all that, sir, but just the same, I’d as soon not get promoted in the Guard over fightin’ my own countrymen.”

Hallock leaned a little less on his stick and eyed everyone there who’d meet his gaze. “It’s not exactly treasonous to say this kind of thing, but it bends some regs. Someone with less ribbon than me might bust down hard on you over what you just said. So why tell me this, of all people?”

Hallock felt himself unexpectedly moved from the words that followed. Right here were all of his country’s virtues summed up in a few minutes of hesitant confession. The corporal spoke up first.