Everyone hated Gettys. He’d had a wife once; she’d run off with a soldier, and when he left her, she’d turned to whoring. I could probably buy her for less than what I’d paid for my bath and haircut, if I fancied heartless sluts.

I’d soon discover that I hated Gettys, too, he predicted. He asked me where I was from and accepted a mumbled answer from me as he scraped busily at my throat. While he was cleaning his blade, I told him that I’d brought Lieutenant Hitch back to Gettys after he’d had a run-in with a wildcat. “Hitch, eh? I’d probably have helped the cat myself,” he told me, and then went on with a long tale of a very complicated brawl in a tavern in which Hitch had distinguished himself by ending up fighting both of the men who had originally been combatants. He seemed to find it very amusing.

“So. You’ll be heading back home now,” he asked me when he’d finished and offered me a towel to wipe my face on.

“Actually, I thought I’d try to see Colonel Haren and enlist,” I told him. He took that as a knee-slapping joke. He was still roaring with laughter when I handed his towel back to him and took my leave.

The sentries on the gate likewise found it amusing. Getting entry to the fort was not as easy without Hitch, I discovered. After they had dismissed my first request as a joke, I reminded them that they had admitted me in Hitch’s company only a couple of hours ago. “Oh, yes. Now that you mention it, I remember your great big…horse!” one exclaimed. After several more jests of that subtlety, they consented to let me pass. I reentered Gettys and went directly to Colonel Haren’s headquarters.

Colonel Haren’s headquarters were constructed entirely of sawn lumber and once had been painted. Flakes of green paint clung to the weathered timber. The splintery planks that made up its porch were uneven and warping away from one another.

The slum that had sprung up around the fort, the lethargic air of the sickly soldiery, and this final evidence of a commander without ambition filled me with trepidation. Did I want to enlist with such a regiment, under such a command? The rumors I had heard about Farleyton Regiment came back to haunt me: once a top outfit, now fallen on hard times. Desertion and dereliction of duty were rampant here.

What other regiment would take someone like me?

I ascended the two steps, crossed the rough porch, and entered. A sergeant in a faded uniform sat behind the desk. The walls of the room were lined with wooden shelves jumbled with books and stacks of paper at all angles.

A gun rack in the corner held two long guns and an empty stock. An unsheathed sword kept them company. The sergeant had taken a saber cut down the face in some distant past. It had healed into a fine seam that pulled down at his left eye and the corner of his mouth. His eyes were a very pale blue, so pale that at first I wondered if he were blinded by cataracts. Gray hair in a wild fringe stuck out around his bald pate. As I entered, he looked up from some bit of sewing. When he set it aside on the corner of his desk to greet me, I saw he was darning a black sock with white yarn.