I advanced to him, desperately holding out Hitch’s recommendation. “Sir, you’re my last hope,” I said bluntly. “If you will not take me, I do not know how I will fulfill the good god’s destiny for me. I beg you to consider me.

Use me in any capacity. I will take the humblest assignment. All I wish to be able to say is that I serve my king as a soldier.”

He seemed surprised at my vehemence. He took the piece of paper I offered him, and while he read it, either slowly or several times, I considered the offer I’d just made him. Did I mean it? Could I humble myself to serve in any capacity? Was it still so essential to my pride that I be able to call myself a soldier? A few short days ago, I’d been willing to put all that behind me and begin a new life as an innkeeper in a ghost town. Yet here I stood with my pride abandoned and my heart beating like a drum as I hoped by all I held holy that the eccentric man before me would accept me into his dispirited, sloppy regiment. He looked up at last from the piece of paper. Then he leaned forward carefully and set it on the flames of the fire. My heart sank. As he straightened up, he said, “You seem to have made a good impression on my scout. Few people manage to do that. Myself included.”

“Sir,” I said, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.

He leaned back in his chair and breathed out through his nose. His wriggled his feet, one slippered and one bare, on the hassock before him.

“It’s not easy to keep men at this post. A lot of them die of the plague.

Those that survive are sickly, and often die of something else. Some desert.

Others prove unsatisfactory in an extreme enough way that I am forced to dismiss them. Even so, I try to hold to a certain standard for choosing those who will serve under me. Under ordinary circumstances, I would not choose you. I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate on why.”

“Sir,” I managed to say again, keeping my tone even.

He did not look at me, but only at his own feet. He touched their toes together. “But the circumstances are not ordinary.” He cleared his throat.

“My scout makes few requests of me. I make many of him. Most of them, he fulfills for me. I am inclined to grant him this request.” As I caught my breath in hope, he finally turned his head to look at me. “How do you feel about cemeteries?” he asked me. He asked in a pleasant and engaging way, as if he had asked a little girl her favorite color at a tea party.

“Cemeteries, sir?”

“We have one here at Gettys. Two, actually. The old one is just outside the walls of the fort. That one doesn’t concern me. It’s the new one, an hour’s ride from here, that is the problem. When plague first struck here, several years ago, my predecessor had a new cemetery established some distance from the fort. Because of the smell of all the dead bodies, don’t you know?