Salamanca. It was easy to recall everything because it had been at Salamanca. The scalding sun of July, the dust and smoke—it seemed dreamlike now in the wet chill of an English autumn. Trev had been a new prisoner, brought in under Geordie Hixson's guard, both of them still panting from exertion and heat in the British cavalry officer's tent. Geordie had started to say something about sending Trev to the rear, but the words were interrupted by a new barrage of shelling from the dead ground to the west, exploding so close that a handful of spent shot pelted against the canvas. A pair of aides and a sentinel ran out to discover the range, leaving the tent empty but for Geordie and his commanding officer, both of them bent over the map in grim discussion of the reconnaissance.

Trev hadn't known the field officer's name or given a damn. He'd just been relieved and ashamed and sick of starving; sick of the sound of artillery and what he had become. He wasn't even concerned about the guns so close; it had seemed no more than a pretty irony to be killed by French cannon a bare half hour after his surrender. When Wellington's wounded courier had staggered in, covered in blood and black soot, with orders to attack immediately into the teeth of the unseen battery, Trev had barely taken note of the dying man's words. The courier had expired almost at his feet, but all he'd felt was that numb wonder at how the poor bastard had managed to make it so far after being shot in the chest.

He remembered a brief silence from the guns, and the blood from the courier's mouth. Then Geordie's officer had ordered the body carried back outside and laid by the man's horse.

The strangeness of that order had not penetrated Trev's mind. It was only Geordie's protest and expres sion of shock that had even caused him to look up at the field officer. Into that same challenging, pale-eyed stare he had met yesterday.

Trev remembered Sturgeon.

Trev and Geordie had carried the corpse, left it as if the courier had fallen from his saddle. As if the orders to attack the battery had never arrived.

When they returned, Geordie stood at attention, staring expectantly at his commanding officer. The guns thundered again, and Sturgeon ordered him to call for the tent to be repositioned behind the knoll. Geordie stood still and then requested permission to speak. Sturgeon snapped at him to shut up and strike the tent. The young aides galloped in a few minutes afterward from their reconnoiter, cursed at the courier's death wounds, and hauled the body into the shade of a tree while the tent was struck.