Even when you weren’t fighting in a miasma of copper-iron blood and the unique scent of cut-open stomach, or marching past the week-old bloated bodies of dead livestock and smoldering burnt-out houses. Mostly war smelled of old stale sweat soaked into wool, unwashed feet and armpits and crotches, horses, and canola oil smeared on metal and leather and long since gone rancid. A big camp like this added the woodsmoke of campfires, salt pork and beans and tortillas cooking, the charcoal and scorched metal of the little wheeled forges the field farriers used, and latrine trenches. It was all the smell of her trade, the way manure was to a groom or dye-vats to a clothier or incense to a cleric.

Getting the expeditionary force detrained and ready to march had gone fairly smoothly, but she’d been at it all day. Too often dealing with various noble scions who insisted on quarreling over precedence and citing cases right back to the day Norman Arminger proclaimed himself Lord Protector, and who considered themselves too important to listen to anyone but the Grand Constable in person.

That was the drawback of calling out the arrière-ban, the full levy of the Association; you got everyone who had military obligations to the Crown, which meant mobilizing a lot of contumacious, well-and-high-born pricks who hated taking orders from anyone, even if their lives depended on it. Some of the great families had followed their medieval models all too seriously.

I haven’t had to kill any of them. Yet. Which is almost disappointing. Though it’s fun bringing home that the rules in the Schedule of Ranks really, really, really do apply to the ones who think they can’t possibly be expected to go on campaign without three pavilions, a chef and hot and cold running mistresses.

A very small bleak smile turned her lips; she had a long straight-nosed regular face, but at that moment it looked very like a predatory bird. She’d had any baggage found over the established maximum for a man’s status pitched off the barges on the Columbia or the railcars as they turned up later and left for the fish, the coyotes, the camp followers and anyone who had a use for a down mattress or six sets of court dress or a knock-down bathtub or a crate of Domaine Meriwether Cuvée Prestige ’15 with bottles of pickled oysters on the side. Excess servants had been shed with a little more ceremony, but not much.

The fingers of her left hand touched the twelve silver-inlaid notches on the hilt of her long sword, the metal smooth and cool against the callused skin. Nobody had argued much, however purple their faces turned.