The flap to Bertreau’s tent was thrown back again, and the major appeared. She was a slender woman in her mid-thirties with tired gray eyes. She wore the yellow uniform of the Fatrastan militia instead of the buckskins the Palo supplied, and had scarring all around the base of her neck – a story Taniel still hoped to get out of her some day.
“Heln!” she bellowed, fanning her face with her tricorn. “So bloody hot out here. Heln, send someone to fetch Two-shot, I…” she paused. “Oh. You’re here already. Good. Is that asshole gone?”
Taniel glanced the way the stranger had left. “Took off,” he said.
“Double-good.” Bertreau shook her head. “I don’t know where they dig these people up. Trappers make great scouts, but some of them spend years without talking to another person and it addles their wits.”
“And their manners,” Taniel said.
“Don’t get me started. Did you take the Kez camp?”
“We did. The boys are cleaning it up as we speak. We’re sending the prisoners to Gladeside with a Palo guard.”
“Good, good,” Bertreau said dismissively. “Glad it went quick.”
Taniel scowled. They’d been tracking the Kez for two weeks now, and all she had to say was ‘good’? He jerked his head toward where the messenger had disappeared into the cypress. “What news did we get?”
“News?” Bertreau asked. “Nothing. Asshole didn’t even bring us the post. We did get orders, however.”
It was Taniel’s turn to make a sour face. The bit about the post stung. Unlike the others, he wasn’t just a few hundred miles from where he’d grown up. He was an ocean away from home. It had been nearly a year, and he had no way of knowing if news had reached his fiancée or father that he’d joined the war.
“Orders?” he asked. “I was beginning to think there wasn’t anybody in charge of this war.”
Bertreau rolled her eyes at him and removed a worn envelope from her jacket pocket. The paper was brown and faded, curled on the edges from the humidity, and the broken seal was in the shape of a rose on white wax. “We’ve been out here a long time, but not that long. Governor Lindet is still in power. She’s calling herself Lady Chancellor now – not sure if I like the sound of that, but not much I can do about it.”
She coughed, hacked, then hawked a wad of phlegm onto the ground before examining the letter in her hand and continuing. “The Kez are making a move on Planth.”
Planth wasn’t a large city – maybe ten thousand people or so – but it was the biggest in the Basin and a fairly major trading post on the Tristan River. If you wanted to get to the northwest wilds where all the best hunting and trapping were, you had to go through Planth. It was easily accessible by road and rivers for the average settler or frontiersmen – less so to a fully-equipped army.
Even still, Taniel was less surprised by the news than he was by the timing. “They’ve left Planth alone so far. Why are they moving on it?”
“No idea,” Bertreau said. “Not sure about you, but in my experience orders rarely come with an explanation as to the motives of one’s enemies.”
Taniel felt his cheeks color. He liked Bertreau well enough, and he knew she liked him, but she also enjoyed reminding him how little real combat experience he had outside of hunting Kez through the Basin these last twelve months.
“When?” he asked.
“There’s an army coming up the Basin Highway at this very moment,” Bertreau said, consulting the letter. “They’re a week away from the city. Scouts say a full brigade. Maybe more.”
Five thousand infantry, probably accompanied by horse, three or four Privileged sorcerers, and auxiliaries. Last Taniel heard, Planth had a garrison of five hundred irregulars holed up in the old trader fort at the bend of the river. The fort was meant to fend off raids from hostile Palo, not a modern army with artillery and sorcery. It would be wiped out in a single afternoon.
He let out a low whistle. “Well,” he said, “there goes our source of provisions. I hope they’re evacuating Planth because there won’t be anything left by the end of next week. What are our orders? Pull deeper into the Basin?”
Bertreau snorted. “I wish,” she said, slapping the letter against her palm. “These orders call every able-bodied Fatrastan regiment in the region to the defense of Planth.”
Taniel felt his mouth hanging open. When the war began, the Fatrastan army would be hard-pressed to put together a whole brigade of real soldiers all together, and maybe three or four times that many in irregulars. Unless there were fifty companies just like his hiding out in the Basin, Planth didn’t stand a chance.
It was a damned foolish order.
He felt the elation of the afternoon’s victory disappear, leaving him with a nervous pit in his stomach. Based on the look on Bertreau’s face, she was thinking the same thing.
“What,” Bertreau said quietly, “are we supposed to do against an entire brigade of Kez soldiers?”
Taniel took the orders from Bertreau and looked them over. They were signed by Lady Chancellor Lindet herself, stressing the importance of not allowing the Kez army to reach Planth. “Proceed up the Basin Highway,” Taniel read aloud, “directly to Planth to aid in the city’s defense. Do not delay.”
Ka-poel tapped Taniel on the shoulder.
“What is it?” he asked.
She pointed to herself, then Taniel and Bertreau, and then held her fist above her head, face twisted, to mime a hangman’s noose.
“Yes,” Taniel agreed, “it sounds like it’s going to get us killed.”
Ka-poel cocked a half-smile at him and shook her head like he didn’t understand. She ran to Taniel’s hammock and came back a moment later with his sketchbook, flipping through the pages until she found the map he’d made of the Tristan Basin. She pointed at Planth, then at their current location, and finally at the Basin Highway.
She drew a line with her finger from their approximate position across to the road. The tapped the road twice, then bent and wrote the Palo word for “Kez” in the dirt.
“What’s she all on about?” Bertreau asked, angling her head to read the map. No one but Taniel ever seemed to catch on to Ka-poel’s silent speech, and even he had a hard time with it.
Taniel did some math in his head, based on where the orders claimed the Kez were currently located, along with the fact that the orders were already four days old. “She’s telling us where we are in relation to this army.”
“So?” Bertreau asked.
Taniel thought he knew what Ka-poel was getting at. She wasn’t afraid of getting killed – she was out for blood. “She’s saying we can avoid getting trapped inside Planth.”
“I’m not running away from an order,” Bertreau said.
“No, we wouldn’t run away. Look, we’re skirmishers. We’ll do no one any good behind the walls of the fort or holding the line outside the city. But we’re not all that far from the Kez army. Instead of going straight to Planth we head over and harass the Kez. It’ll slow them down and give Planth more time to prepare.”
Bertreau pursed her lips. “Not exactly following orders.”
“We’ll be following the spirit of them. And doing what we do best.”
A slow smile spread on Bertreau’s face. “We’ll strike from the shadows like ghosts.”
Taniel sat in the stern of his canoe, legs crossed, drawing in his sketchbook with a bit of charcoal he kept in his pocket for quiet moments. He drew Ka-poel, her head in profile, back silhouetted by rays of the early morning sun streaming through the mist. He wished he had colored charcoal so he could capture her fiery hair or the way her skin seemed to redden when she faced the sun.
It was early in the morning, just a day and a half after they’d received their orders, and the Ghost Irregulars waited for their scouts to report in.