The room was as crowded as any Ashawala’i clan house. A family so big suggested prosperity in spite of hard times: a large and fertile farm, carefully managed and not destroyed yet by taxes. The room was filled with industry. On the big work table many projects progressed: socks being knitted, tools being repaired, writing and other necessary skills being taught, bread being kneaded and shirts being seamed. Only the youngest and oldest were not working, and they were being watched and cared for instead.
At last, Emil, having done his guest’s duty of exchanging news, said to Zanja across the room, “Are you getting warm? Perhaps some tea … ?” At least the elders were gracious enough to exclaim at their own rudeness once it was pointed out to them, and Emil escorted Zanja around the room, introducing her not as Zanja na’Tarwein but as Zanja Paladin. He knew everyone’s name. Zanja constructed frail conversations out of the flimsy materials at hand: she admired babies and handiwork and what she had been able to see of the farm itself, and assured one stranger after another that she was delighted and honored to have wound up in South Hill. Emil said to her afterwards, “That was an impressive exhibition of good manners. You must be exhausted now.”
“How many of these households do you have to visit?”
“Only ten or so right now. By autumn’s end, though, I’ll have visited them all. It’s a foolish man who forgets that every loyalty is personal.”
Zanja vaguely remembered having read something like that in Warfare. Though Emil frequently quoted the guidebook, and always with apparent seriousness, she already knew that while he did what he had to, it was not always without cynicism. Now, his performance was not for her, but for Annis, who had just come into the small sitting room with a tea tray.
“My parents want to know if you’ll bide the night,” she said.
Emil shook his head. “I want to be at Willis’s house tonight, but I’m thinking I might leave Zanja here with you. If you would fetch Daye and Linde and a keg of gunpowder, we’ll meet at Midway Barn in three day’s time.”
“She can lie in my bed,” Annis said sullenly, and poured the tea. “Unless there’s someone else you’d rather bed with,” she added to Zanja.
“I beg your pardon, but I’m a stranger in this land and there’s much I don’t understand.” Zanja expected she’d be saying these words, or words like them, rather frequently this season.
Emil seemed amused, and said to Annis, “The members of your family are afraid to talk to Zanja, but they’d sleep with her?”
Annis shrugged. “That’s what I hear. Like you said, it’s been a dull winter.”
Emil shook his head. “It’s not just a matter of sleeping,” he explained to Zanja.
Zanja said, “My good manners have a limit.”
Annis broke into a laugh and nearly spilled the tea. “Sleep with me, then,” she said. “And I do mean sleep.”
Zanja’s first sight of South Hill Company was in a giant rebuilt barn on an abandoned farmstead with buildings fallen in on themselves and the fields long since returned to forest. She and Annis had followed a meandering course across the countryside, gathering companions and gear as they went. Among those who joined them was Linde, a middle‑aged man who Annis said was heart‑bonded to a man also in the company and Daye, a gray‑haired grandmother, one of Emil’s three lieutenants. Annis had been distant, offering grudging information only when Zanja asked for it, but Daye promptly set to teaching Zanja the lay of the land, the riverbanks and foot trails and hidey‑holes where a hunted person could simply disappear.
Midway Barn was brightly illuminated by lanterns hanging from the rafters. The fifty people gathered there were uniformly pale‑skinned, brown‑haired, and stockily built. They seemed as featureless to Zanja as stones that lie stubbornly in a field. Her companions of the last two days having melted into the undistinguished brown, the only dye color their clothing makers seemed to know, Zanja felt herself painfully exposed and solitary. She started across the barn towards the cauldron bubbling upon a makeshift hearth, where Emil perched upon his camp stool with one leg stretched stiffly out before him. She cut a swath of silence with her passing, and had not taken ten steps before a stocky, muscular man confronted her, demanding to know her name and business.
“Sir, I am Zanja, newly come to this company.”
He looked her up and down. “You are no Paladin.”
“Among my people I was a katrim, which is like a Paladin.”
“What you are among your people matters not,” the man declared.
“That is true,” Zanja said, “since my people are all dead.” She waited, cautious, wondering if the entire company would greet her with such hostility. But the others had fallen quiet, seeming content to listen while this belligerent man conducted the challenge and satisfied their curiosity.
The man turned and cried bitterly, “Emil, we are all kin in this company!”
Zanja heard Emil’s quiet voice reply with supernatural mildness, “I am flattered to be counted among your kin, Willis. No doubt Zanja looks forward to the day that you accord her the same courtesy.”
Zanja brought herself to say with a sincerity she hoped no one would realize was false, “Yes, sir, very much.” But the belligerent man turned his back on her, ignoring the hand she offered. He squatted down among his cronies, who clustered around him like wolves greeting their leader. So Zanja learned, all in one moment, who her enemies were to be.
By the time the stew was ready, Daye had taken Zanja on a circuit of the barn, and told her the names and families of everyone present. She left her with Annis, while she and the other lieutenants, the belligerent man among them, conferred in a cluster around Emil, with their steaming porringers in their hands. “Willis is one of Emil’s lieutenants?” Zanja asked.
“Willis, Perry, and Daye. The three of them started the company in the year of the fall, and we didn’t get Emil until a year later. Until he showed up, Willis thought he would be the company commander forever. He and Emil get along now, but they didn’t always.”
Zanja glanced at Annis, astonished because up until now Annis had scarcely spoken a complete sentence to her.
Annis said, “Willis doesn’t like outsiders. But we aren’t all like him.”
“Of course you’re not,” Zanja replied, thinking that it was possible Willis’s hostility might do her more good than harm, in the end.
Annis took her over to the stewpot to fill her porringer, and then they joined a circle that had formed to share a bread loaf and butter pot. Zanja exercised the good manners Emil had so ironically admired some days ago, and the people she ate with gradually began to gain some definition. They noticed and discussed her battle scars, and they told her how Paladins fought primarily by ambush, avoiding confrontations that put the more numerous and heavily armed Sainnites at an advantage. She admitted she would have to learn to use the distance weapons, the pistol and the crossbow.
The increasing sobriety of the lieutenants’ conference muted the surrounding conversations after a while, and when Emil finally stood up from his camp stool, the company, already watchful, immediately fell silent to hear his words.
“It’s spring again,” Emil said. “And amazing though it seems even to me, this is my fifteenth year commanding South Hill Company. When I first arrived, I said to you that I was astounded and humbled to find myself in command, and fifteen years later, that at least has not changed. We’ve learned some hard lessons together in the meantime, and this year, I’m afraid, we have some even harder lessons to learn.