Page 97 of Into the West

Briada joined them at that moment. In the wake of the attack of the Red Forest, he had learned that she and her cousins had held almost a quarter of the wall against the Forest with a handful of the Guard, using a fire-and-retreat tactic atop the parapets, at a less-demanding tempo. In the wake of that, he’d appointed her the head of the Guard, and somewhat to his bemusement, no one had argued with him. “Baron,” she said, and threw him a modified salute.

“Captain,” he replied. “Something I need to know?”

“Inventory is done,” she told him. “As I’m sure you guessed, we haven’t got many Poomer canisters left. Fifty-nine, to be precise. Nice stock of other equipment, though, and on my own initiative I’ve got ballistas and ammunition positioned every three lengths along the wall.” She paused, waiting for his approval or disapproval.

“Better on the wall than in storage,” he said. “Provisions for weather?”

“They were all kits in crates, and came with waterproofed coverings,” she told him. “They’ll be fine. Whoever packed them up and sent them on to us knew what they were doing.”

That would have been the Dolls, when they were looting the Imperial supplies for us, he thought, with a twinge of sadness. He missed Rose. And Ivy. And—he realized he missed every one he’d known by a name. Be wise in the ways of names was one of magic’s most basic and purest of rules. When anything is made distinctive, it is made more than simply mortal.

“Carry on, Captain,” he told her. “You have a hundred times the military experience that I have—probably fifty times the actual military experience of anyone here. I depend on your judgment. If you don’t, I’ll use my spooky magical powers on you. They get more powerful every time I hear about them.”

She snorted. “Put me on the spot, why don’t you? All right, I’ll do my best to get us readied for anything I can think of. But I’m not a trained strategist—”

Sai barked a humorless laugh. “Imperial strategy seems to consist of throwing bodies at the enemy until they are either defeated or so buried in piles of bodies that they can’t move. Don’t do that. You’ll do fine.”

Briada sketched an entirely mocking salute at Sai. “Whatever you say, crazy old man.”

He shook his fist at her. She laughed. “Are those new eyebrows?” she said, and went on her way.

“There were times in the past year when it’s felt like I was inventing new hells, Sai,” Kordas admitted. “Felt like I was being batted around between every power that could get a grab on me for a moment. Mostly, though, we did all right. Better than I would have expected. We’re at our best when we’re cooperative.”

“Or in your case, not cooperative so much as ‘Oh! Is it time for me to do more than any fifty of you, then fall over in wearying self-doubt? I’ll be right there!’ Hah, I know you, Kordas!” Sai was giving him a hard time, sure, but the tone of the last part was leaning heavily toward affection. “We’ve been with you a long time, and I can’t speak for the others, but if it was up to me, and you’d been a lout, I’d have replaced you with a puppet regime centered on my comforts. So never forget, you’ve got that to be thankful for.”

Kordas had to laugh at that. “Funny you’d say that. Feeling like a puppet has been in the back of my head a long time now. It’s a weird kind of doubt that comes with—” He paused to pick the right phrase. “—being in charge, but not being a tyrant? People don’t think I’m a tyrant. I don’t think I’m a tyrant. But with that comes doubt. Tyrants don’t have doubts. But oh, do I. When the Plan went into motion, I thought for about the first few weeks I could run it all, but the doubt got to be too much. I reached out, and was given help. I found myself connected to things I hadn’t fully grasped, and all of the time it was getting more complex. To cope with that I suppressed a lot, I borrowed from other priorities, I—admit, I neglected so many things. But I didn’t want to. I had to. And I can’t get that time back. I need to meet my kids,” he laughed, but unenthusiastically. “I owe them at least a year.”

“Oh, at least a year. And a pony for each of them. Take them on patrols,” Ponu added, joining them to slowly, carefully sit down on an open chair.

“Hah! Not a bad idea. I can include them in duties I once thought were mine alone,” Kordas answered, trying to stay serious.

“‘Alone, alooone.’ Well, you needed the solitude for truly good brooding,” Jonaton chimed in, picking up a chair to join them. “I’ve seen it. Top-quality, romance-poetry brooding.” Kordas faked an illusory fireball at him while overacting his affrontery, and Jonaton mocked diving away in fear.

“It felt essential to give these people my all. So I thought, if I saved everyone, I saved my family too. And if I didn’t try to save everyone, I wouldn’t be who my family believed me to be. They believed in me, so I believed I could be what they wanted. Which turned out pretty well. You can’t imagine how lucky I feel in this moment.”

“Imagine how lucky we feel that we aren’t family,” Wis cackled, before sitting with them in his own folding chair.

“It’s worth more thought, though, you think? I think the really amazing part is that, even when my world fell out from under me so many times this year, I got the feeling that every one of you would try to catch me if you could, and that is something I never thought I’d feel so intensely as I have the past few months.” Kordas looked to each of them, and out to the magic lecture where the rest of the Six, or Seven, or maybe Eight, were. His expression was joyful.

“Oh! Oh, hey, got to go!” Ponu said after four heartbeats, and got up.

“Look, I was having a perfect wistful moment there and you’re just going to spoil it?” Kordas gasped.

“Bah! They’re doing something different,” Sai said, perking up. “I need to see this.” And with that, he trotted off to the group of mixed mages and parked himself where he had a good view of the magical proceedings without getting in anyone’s way. Everyone left, as part of the gag, but Kordas did wind up watching them on his own.

Well, I’m not getting anything accomplished here. Time to move on. He felt a little jealous of Sai. But perhaps he could get lessons from Sai later. Slow ones. The Tayledras mages knew these spells in their bones, and they moved a bit too fast for him to follow.

Being a mage is not your primary job, he reminded himself. This is no different than riding a circuit of the Duchy to see how things are going. The only difference is that everyone is crammed together in one place, and I don’t have to ride.

Well, next on his list should be checking with Isla, who was in charge of all the common supplies. He’d have liked to appoint someone else, because he felt unsure about asking her to continue the role she’d taken in the convoy, but she was good at it, she didn’t seem to mind doing it, and he knew he could trust her. Of all the things that needed doing, keeping accurate accounts of the supplies was probably the most important.

He found her, as he had expected, down in the hertasi tunnels, checking food out with the cooks. His old Seneschal was in charge of the same task at the gardens, since the poor fellow had such fierce claustrophobia that as soon as he’d been coaxed down there during the Forest attack, he’d fainted dead away.

“. . . and when are we a-going to get a proper watermill?” one woman was asking querulously, her arms around a basket containing a share of wheat. Kordas’s analytical side immediately recognized it as enough for bread for ten people. “I’m mortal weary of grinding grain.”

“You and everyone else, good dame,” Isla replied, her even tone betraying none of the irritation she was surely feeling, given her phrasing. “It won’t be until spring at the earliest. Just be glad we saved one barge of millstones, or it would be years before we could build one.”

The woman went away, grumbling under her breath. Isla closed her eyes; he knew that look. She was counting to twenty to cool her temper.