Chapter 8: The News

He was late, and he was late because he had walked the long way home — out along the wall and down through the lamplighters’ quarter and twice round the little square with the dry fountain — because he had wanted to come in with his face arranged, and it had taken some walking to arrange it.

It did him no good. Vinda knew before he had his coat off.

“What’s happened.” Not a question. She was across the hall and reading him the way she read a room, and whatever she found there made her change her whole manner in an instant — not alarmed, but gathered, decisive, the way she went when something needed managing. “No. Don’t tell me standing in the draught. Come and sit. Girl — the Aldwick red, the one in the corner of the rack, and two glasses, and then leave us.” And she had him by the hand and onto the long couch and down beside her, close, her shoulder warm against his, before he’d got a word out; and the wine came and was poured and the girl went; and only then, settled and held and a good glass in his hand, was he allowed to be unhappy.

“I went to Reldan,” he said. “Today. I pushed for it. I thought — the Wandit business, the club, the way things have been going — I thought it was time, and I went and I asked him plainly when the step was coming.”

“And?”

“And he said not yet.” He turned the glass. “Not yet, Hunsen. In time. Keep at it. All the things they say when they mean no.” It came out of him then, the whole sour freight of the afternoon, the long walk’s worth of it — how he’d earned it twice over, how men with half his record and none of his field-time had gone up ahead of him, how it was always not yet for the man who’d come up from nothing and never not yet for the smooth sons with the right grandfathers, how he was good enough to untangle their messes and save their necks and plan their wars and never quite good enough for the next braid on the sleeve. Vinda let it run. She knew to let it run. She made the small sounds that meant go on, and turned her thumb in slow circles on the back of his hand, and let him empty it out.

“He did say one thing.” Merko frowned. “Said I should be better with my men. Closer. Know their names, their troubles, that sort of thing. As if that’s — as if a soldier wants his major weeping over his sweetheart troubles instead of keeping him alive.” He waved it off. “I don’t know what the man wants.”

“Mm,” said Vinda — a small, level sound, not the warm agreement he’d been fishing for, though he was too far into his own grievance to mark the difference. “But.”

“But.” And here, despite himself, the afternoon began to turn, because there was genuinely a better part and telling it lifted him. “But it isn’t all bad. Not by a long way. There’s the club.” He sat up a little. “I was there last night — I didn’t say, you were asleep — and Vinda, it’s a room. Tarrin was there, and old Voss, and the Sennel brothers, men who actually move things, and they don’t treat me like the fisherman’s boy who got lucky at Wandit. They listen. We were three hours over the spring campaign — the eastern push, how to supply it, where the lines should go — and I talked, and they listened, properly, took it up, argued it through with me like I was worth arguing with.” The warmth of it was all over him now. “And here’s the thing — the way I’d run it, the way I put it to them, it would be better for the men. The ordinary soldier. Less of him marched to nothing over bad ground because some duke’s nephew liked the look of a hill. I came up through the ranks, near enough; I know what it costs the man at the bottom when the man at the top’s a fool. I can make that better. That’s worth something. That’s worth more than a braid, when you come to it.”