She sipped again at her wine; carefully, it wouldn’t do to have a head in the morning. But wine was the only thing that kept the dreams away.

She resolutely turned her mind away from those dreams. Not because they were unpleasant; quite the contrary, they were too pleasant. Seductively so. The trouble was, they featured Eldan, and he was a subject she was determined to forget.

He can’t have forgiven me for sending the Guild up to collect that ransom instead of going myself. Either that, or else by now he’s completely forgotten me, assuming he’s even still alive.

She’d dreamed of him often ... far too often for her own comfort. The dreams had come frequently, in those first years, when she was unsure in her command, and unhappy—and lonely. Sometimes in those night-visions they hadn’t done more than talk, and she’d come away with answers she desperately needed.

But sometimes, especially lately, they’d done a great deal more than talk. Since she was half-convinced that her dreams were simply fantasies conjured up by her sleeping mind, those dreams were a cruel reflection on her current state of isolation, and while those incorporeal rolls in the hay might be what she wanted, they didn’t make waking up any easier of a morning.

She told herself, over and over, that her self-imposed loneliness didn’t matter. Look at what she had built in the past few years! Most male mercenaries never made Captain, most male Captains had not achieved their rank until well into their late forties. That it had cost her little more than hard work, sleepless nights, and a lack of amorous company was hardly something to complain about. And she knew very well the reasons why she needed to keep herself free from amorous entanglements. Tarma had explained that aspect of command to her in intimate detail, with plenty of examples of what not to do.

A Captain of a Company did not take lovers from the ranks; that was the quickest way in the world for suspicions of favoritism to start—and that let in factionalism and divisiveness. A Captain always remained the Captain, even among old friends.

The hired charms of the camp-followers were not at all to Kero’s taste—and her peers either regarded her (rightly) as possible competition, or at best, a rival and equal power. But there was more to it than that, though most of Kero’s peers would have laughed (if uneasily) if she’d told them her chief reason. It was asking for trouble to take someone into your bed with whom you might well find yourself crossing swords one day. You never know who’s going to be hired to come up against you. Having someone on the other side who had that kind of knowledge of me—in no way am I going to take that kind of risk.