Two-Edged Blade

The door behind him was wide open, and she rose shakily to her feet, to stumble out of it.

The guardsman took her arm to help her—she had no doubt that if he wanted to, he could have picked her up like a loaf of bread and carried her off, but he limited his aid to only what was necessary. They stopped at the room at the end of the long, stone corridor, and he took her weapons from the guard stationed inside and gave them to her with his own hands. As she buckled Need back on, she felt a hundred times better. The remaining pain vanished. That Healer had been good—but Need was better.

She was still numb with surprise, though, as the guardsman led her up the stairs to the wooden building above the jail cells and opened the door, for her to walk out. Rudi spoke for me—and the stableboy— and the Guild? Is this more of Need’s magic, or is it something I’ve done? And if it’s me, what on earth did I do to make them speak for me?

But that surprise was nothing to the one waiting for her outside the prison gates.

There was a crowd waiting there; a crowd wearing the silver and gray tabards she used to sport, with a device of crossed lighting-bolts on the sleeve. A crowd that cheered the moment she came stumbling out into the sunlight, squinting against the sudden glare.

“What?” she stuttered. “Wh-what?”

Someone took her arm; she turned at a flash of familiar golden hair. Shallan stood right at her elbow, grinning like a fool.

“You sure do get yourself in messes, don’t you, Captain?” she said.

Several hours later, she finally had a glimmer of the story, but only after putting together all the bits and pieces of it that had been flung at her during the long ride back to the Skybolts’ winter quarters.

And it took a good meal, a sleep from dawn to dawn, and another good meal before she was ready to try to make sense of it all.

She called a half-dozen of her old friends together in the outer room of the Captain’s quarters. That, she still had trouble with. She didn’t feel like a Captain. And no matter how often someone called her that, she kept looking over her shoulder to see who they were talking to.

She ordered hot tea all around from the orderly, feeling very uneasy about doing so, even though the one- armed twenty-year veteran who had served Lerryn seemed equally content to serve her. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” she said, as the others nursed their mugs in hands that looked fully as thin as hers. “When I walked, you lot kept Ardana from sending her hounds after me. Then you called a vote?”

“It’s an old law, part of the oldest part of the Code that goes right back to the Oathbreaking ceremony,” Tre said solemnly. “Nobody uses it much, but nobody’s ever revoked it. What it ‘mounts to, is any Company that’s lost more’n half its officers an’ a third of the rest can call the Captaincy to vote from the ranks. Me an’ Shallan, we’d been talkin’ ‘bout that since you’d got hurt. Lot of the rest was thinkin’ it was a good notion, but nobody wanted t’ start it.” He took a sip of his tea, and smiled ruefully. “Not even me.”

“But when you walked like that, an’ Ardana was gonna haul you back in chains for takin’ your rights, well, it made everybody mad.” Shallan ran her hands through her short hair, and scratched at a new scar. “So since we knew everybody’d been told about vote-right, we started hollerin’ for it. Next thing you know, Ardana’s out. Out of Captain, and out of the Company.”

Tre took up the thread again. “So we needed a Captain, and the only person ev’body could agree on was you.”

“Blessed Agnira.” She covered her face with both hands. “This isn’t something I’m ready for—”

But who is? asked a little voice in the back of her mind.

The Guild representative that had come with them spoke for the first time. “Neither Tre nor Kynan are trained in tactics, logistics, and supply the way you are, Kerowyn. Their expertise stops at groups larger than a squad. And neither of them care for mages.”

Which is a definite liability, she though, reluctantly. One thing this Company needs badly is a couple of competent hedge-wizards.

“How do you know I’ll be any better?” she asked, dropping her hands.”

“You can’t be worse,” Shallan replied emphatically.

“You’ve seen for yourself how vulnerable a Company is to bad leadership,” the Guildsman said solemnly. “We think that judging by your past performance, you would step down rather than cause the Company harm.”

She stared at his impassive face; he was cut of the same cloth as the Arbitrators, if a great deal younger. You know I would, she thought at him, as if he could hear her. These are my friends, my family. It would be hell on earth to spend the rest of my life leading them into