She pulled the hoofpick out of her belt, and began cleaning the packed muck out of it with studious care. There was a lot of gravel around here, and Kero did not intend to find herself with a lamed horse because of a moment’s carelessness. Shallan had already lost the use of her remount that way.

“I could really get to hate Menmellith,” she told Hellsbane conversationally. The gray flicked her ears back with every evidence of intelligent interest. “I can see why Jad let them hare off and become a client-state. There’s nothing here but sheep, rocks, and bone-headed shepherds. Certainly nothing worth keeping. Why Karse keeps trying to invade them, I’ll never know.” She thought for a moment, then added, “Unless it’s just one more example of how crazy the Karsites are.”

She finished with the right forehoof, and moved back to the hind. “Stand,” she repeated, with a little more force this time, as some noise from the next camp over made Hellsbane roll her eyes and fidget. She straightened long enough to see what all the fuss was.

A small forest of poles was marching straight for the picket lines, and horses up and down the line were starting to stamp and look nervous.

Blessed Agnira—pikemen again? That’s Joffrey’s Wolflings! What fool sent pikemen to drill next to picketed horses? Don’t they know how much battle-trained horses hate pikes? They’re going to have the whole line spooked in a minute! She was just about to head them off, by intercepting them and launching into a powerful flood of abuse, when someone beat her to it.

“Alt, damn yer ‘ides! I said right march, not bleedin’ left!”

The line came to an abrupt and picture-perfect halt. The Wolfling’s pike-sergeant strode around the back of the (now stationary) formation, face red as a sunset, veins bulging out on his forehead. “Jecrena’s bleedin’ arse, ” he bellowed, “ye’d think ye was a lot o’ plowboys, not perfeshnal sojers!” From there his tirade went into extreme sexual and scatological detail as to the habits and probable ancestry of his charges. Kero leaned against Hellsbane’s rump, listening in astonished admiration. His language was colorful, original, and quite entertaining. She’d been with the Skybolts for quite a few years now, and had never quite heard anything like it.

I should be taking notes, she thought, watching the sergeant get his men turned back in the right direction. The horses were definitely calming down, now that the pikes were going the other way. You never hear anything like that around our camp.

But that was at least in part because horseback skirmishers didn’t drill the way pike and line swordsmen did. No sergeants, for one thing.