The Price Of Command

Then Geyr turned the basket upside-down on the table—

And she felt her mouth dropping open in shock.

A pile—a tiny mountain of white. Pale sandstone pebbles trickled down off the top with a gentle clicking sound. She spread the pebbles out on the table with a shaking hand. No dark pebbles, none at all.

They’d stay, fighting beside the Valdemar folk. No dissenting votes.

She looked up at them, searched each face she could see, and found nothing there but determination. “You’re mad,” she said, flatly. “You’re all of you mad. We haven’t a chance if we stay.”

Shallan stood up, awkwardly, as if she’d been appointed as spokesperson for the entire Company. “We don’t think so, beggin’ your pardon, Captain. ’Sides, what’s the odds of a merc livin’ long enough to collect his pension from the Guild, eh? We all got to talking about this last night. General feeling is, these people here deserve help. Merc’s likely to go down any time—but if we got a choice in goin’ down, I’d rather do it for somebody that deserves a hand, than in fightin’ for some pig-merchant workin’ out a fight over territory with some other hog, an’ doin’ it with my sword an’ my life.”

There was a murmur of agreement from the rest, and an “Aye, that!” or two from the veterans old enough in service to remember Ardana and the Seejay debacle.

Kero rose slowly to her feet, and to Shallan’s immense surprise, embraced her. She kept one arm around her old friend, as she scanned their faces again, this time with her eyes burning with the effort of holding back tears. “You’re all fools, thank the gods,” she said huskily. “Every one of you. As much fools as me—if you’d voted me out, I’d have stayed myself. All right, Skybolts. We stay. And tomorrow, we show Ancar what it means to take on the finest Company in the Guild!”

The cheers could probably have been heard in Haven.

And no one would ever guess, she thought, with a mixture of pride and sorrow, that they’re cheering their own deaths. Poor, brave fools.

This will probably be our last battle. It’s ten to one it’ll be mine. May the gods help us all.

Daren stared into the stranger’s flat, dead eyes, and asked in frustration, “So what am I supposed to do with you?”

The tent was hot and felt stuffy, yet every time Daren looked at this man, he got a chill down the back of his neck. Better dead, he’d have been better off dead. Poor bastard.

“Lead us, m’lor’,” replied the nameless man, who until a year ago had been a simple fanner, with no cares of who ruled and who did not. “Lead us. We got nothin’, now. Our families is dead, or as good as. Our homes is gone. Our fields is weeds an’ wild things. Lead us.”

“Thrice-dead Horneth,” Daren muttered under his breath. Lead them, he says. Farmers on horseback. Whatever cavalry skills they had vanished when the mage controlling them died. And here I am, with a horde of undisciplined, half-mad farmers with no memory of what to do with swords and lances.

And yet—they were half-mad, and had nothing to lose. Ancar had stolen everything from them, including their names, for none of them remembered exactly who he was. All they had left were the memories of what had been done to them, and to their loved ones, memories so hedged about in rage that nothing the mages could do would erase them, and so those memories had been blocked off until Daren had given the fateful, desperate command to the earth—put everything back the way it was.

Some things, of course, were impossible; the dead could not be brought back to life, nor memories that had been destroyed be regained. But the troops’ minds had been given back to them, and the land was already beginning to heal, free of Ancar’s bondage.

“Professionals are predictable,” ran one of Tarma’s proverbs. “But the world is full of amateurs.” So long as he kept his troops out of their way, where was the harm in taking these men with him and unleashing them on Ancar’s forces?

“Let me think about this,” he temporized, “I’m not sure I have the right to lead you. You’re not my people, and frankly, you may not like my orders. If I don’t have any real hold over you, you could decide to strike out on your own, and then where would my plans be?”

“But—” the man began, when he was interrupted by the arrival of Quenten. The mage was excited, his red hair going in all directions, and he made matters worse by running his hand through it every few moments.

“My lord, we intercepted a mage-message from Ancar’s commander a few moments ago,” he said. “We —”

Then he noticed the nameless man sitting there, and shut his mouth with a snap.