But he was also old enough to be her grandfather, and the battlefield was no place for him. He might find himself tempted beyond endurance to engage in one little fray—and that would be the end of him.

The wine flask set just within her reach looked very inviting, with water forming little crystal beads along its sides, and the cot beyond the folding table beckoned as well. She hadn’t yet availed herself of either. She stretched, as Warrl had taught her; slow, and easy, a fiber at a time. A vertebra in her neck popped, and her right shoulder-joint, and some of the strain in her neck eased. Either I’m getting old, or the damp is getting to me. Maybe both.

The lamp set up a puff of smoke, and she waved it away, coughing, as she reached for the wine flask. And despite her earlier vow to throw herself off a cliff if she had to look at another list, she glanced at the tally sheet. And smiled. She could smile, still, before the battle, before she actually had to send anyone out on the lines, to kill and be killed. If only I never had to send them out to fight in anything but the kind of bloodless contests we had last year. Then I could be entirely content.

But a year like the last, where all they had to do was show themselves, was the exception rather than the usual, and she well knew it.

Still the tally sheet was impressive. Not bad, if I do say so myself. It had been ten years since she’d been made Captain, and there had been no serious complaints from any Skybolt or from their clients or the Guild in all that time. And from the beaten force that had come up from Seejay, tails between their legs, she had built the foundations for a specialist-Company that now tallied twice the number Lerryn had commanded.

And in many ways, it was four Companies, not one, each with its own pair of Lieutenants. For some reason that she could not fathom, shared command had always worked well for the Skybolts, though no one else could ever succeed with it. The largest group was the light cavalry; next came the horse-archers. Those two groups made up two-thirds of their forces. The remaining third was divided equally between the scouts and the true specialists.

Those specialists included messengers, on the fastest beasts Kero’s Shin‘a’in cousins would sell her; experts in sabotage; and the nonfighters—two full Healers, and their four assistants, and three mages and their six apprentices. The chief of those mages, and the jewel Kero frequently gloated over, was White Winds Master-class mage Quenten, a mercurial, lean and incurably cheerful carrot-top sent as a Journeyman straight to the Skybolts by Kero’s uncle.