Chapter 14

The old muster-roll room sat at the end of the passage beyond the Captain’s chamber. Until the day before, it had held thirty years of the Guard’s rolls in crates stacked to the ceiling. Prince Corin had had them carried out overnight. What was left was a long, low room of bare stone with two narrow windows over the yard, a hearth that smoked slightly when the wind came from the north, and a heavy oak table that someone had found in a storeroom and scrubbed until it was almost pale.

It was not much. Frances liked it at once.

Everyone was already there when she came in at the ninth bell. Prince Corin was on his feet before the door had finished opening.

“Commander!”

Chairs scraped as the whole table stood.

“Captain,” Frances said, and nodded to him, and waved them all back down. “Please. Sit.”

They sat. Frances took the chair at the head of the table and looked down its length at the people Corin had gathered for her.

“Commander,” Corin said, “allow me to name the company. Sir Ulric, whom you know, is Senior Sergeant of Heavy Armor.” Ulric inclined his head. There was a faint bruise on his jaw that Frances did not remember giving him, and she suspected it had come from the barracks afterward. “Aldo Fletcher, Sergeant of the Bows.” The lean archer straightened. “Bram, Sergeant of the Spears.” The red-bearded man ducked his head. “Haldor, for the armory. Brother Edmund, who will keep the record.” Corin paused, and gestured to the old man at the far end of the table. “And this is Aelfric Halfhand, once Sergeant of the Spears. He stood in the line under Garrick the Ironfang fifty years past, when Eldrenmark came over the passes.”

The old man lifted his left hand in greeting. It had two fingers and a thumb. The other two fingers ended in a knot of old pale scar at the first knuckle.

“I have seventy-two years, my lady,” he said, in a voice that had spent half a century shouting over tavern noise. “And I have told the tale of the war in my tavern below to every man who would buy me a cup, and not one in ten believes a word of it.” He looked down the table at Prince Corin with frank amusement. “The Captain among them, until yesterday.”

Corin had the grace to look embarrassed.

“Well, I believe you,” Frances said. “That’s why you’re here.” She folded her hands on the table. “Thank you all for coming. I’ll set an agenda, but I want to say up front that I’m going to let the conversation wander wherever it needs to. If something important comes up, we follow it. There are three things I want to cover. First, how the army is organized. Second, Aelfric, I want to hear from you what went wrong in the last invasion. All of it, as bluntly as you like. And third, how equipment is standardized across the army, if it is.”

She turned to Corin. “Let’s start with the first. Prince Corin, how is the army here at Ironwatch organized, and how does that compare to the other castles?”

Corin had clearly prepared. He laid it out carefully, in order, the way he had laid out the numbers in the courtyard two days before: the knights paid by the Crown through the Baron, the levies drawn from the lands of Ironwatch, the three arms of shield, spear and bow.

But it was in the questions that the issues came out, and Frances asked a great many of them.

“Is the Ironwatch Guard organised into companies, a unit of perhaps one hundred soldiers?”

Corin hesitated. “There is no company, my lady. Not as such. There are the knights of the shield wall, and the levies of the shield wall, and the spears, and the bows.”

“And at the other castles?”

“Each Baron raises his own men,” Bram said, when Corin glanced at him. “And arms them, and fits them out, as he sees fit. Highcrag keeps more bows, for they hold the high ground below the pass. Seaguard keeps hardly any knights at all, I am told, for they look to the sea.”

“So the mix is different everywhere.”

“Every castle, my lady,” Corin said. “And the size of each part, and the training, and the quality of the men. Some barons drill their levies hard. Some do not drill them at all, save when the Crown requires it.”

“Is anything the same across all of them?”

There was a short silence while the table thought about it.

“The sergeants,” Ulric said at last. “That much is custom everywhere. One sergeant to every twenty knights, for they are trained men and need less watching. One sergeant to every ten levies, for they need a good deal more.” He said levies the way some teachers Frances had known said freshmen.

“And above the sergeants?”

“The Captain of the Guard of each castle,” said Corin. “And above him, when an army is raised, the Commander of the Armies.”

Frances sat back. “So the whole chain of command is Commander, Captain, sergeant, soldier. One army per castle. Nothing in between.”

“Just so, my lady.”

“How does that work when more than one castle fights together?”

Edmund, who had been writing steadily, looked up from his tablet. “The records of the last war speak to that, my lady. Garrick the Ironfang commanded the men of three castles. He did not make them one army. He commanded them as three separate blocks, each under its own Captain, standing side by side.”

“I see.” Frances made a note in her own head, underlined twice. “What about specialists? Scouts, for a start. Who goes out ahead of the army to find the enemy?”

The sergeants looked at one another.

“When there is need, my lady,” Bram said slowly, “the Captain may send a few men forward. Whoever is quick on his feet.”

“So there’s no group of scouts. Trained for it, doing it all the time.”

“No, my lady.”

“Engineers? People who build bridges, dig ditches, repair carts and wagons in the field, build siege engines?”

“There are carpenters with the baggage,” Haldor said. “And a wainwright or two, if a castle can spare them. The trebuchets are built by whoever the Baron sends when there is a siege.”

“Supply? Who’s responsible for feeding the army on the march?”

“Each castle feeds its own, my lady,” Corin said. “And when the stores run short, the men forage.”

“Messengers? Signals? How does the Commander get an order to a Captain on the other side of the field?”

“A runner,” said Bram. “Each army keeps one or two.”

“One or two.” Frances let that sit for a moment. “For a whole army.”

Prince Corin looked down at the table. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and a little rueful, the voice of a man who had just heard his own life’s work described aloud and found it smaller than he had thought.

“I will say it plainly, my lady, since you are already thinking it. There is no such thing as an army of Valdoria, save when one is called. There are castles.”

“Aye,” said Aelfric Halfhand from the end of the table. “And when they are called, God help them. Garrick had a thousand men, my lady, and no one knew who was to stand beside whom until the morning of the battle.” He snorted. “And often not even then.”

“With respect,” Ulric said, with not much respect at all, “the shield wall knew where it stood. The knights always know their place in the line. It is the levies who wander.”

Frances watched Aldo Fletcher’s jaw tighten, and Bram’s ears go faintly red, and said nothing yet. She had noticed already that seven of every ten men in that courtyard were levies. She had also noticed that the senior sergeant of the knights spoke of them as though they were luggage.

“Hold that thought, Sir Ulric,” she said. “We’re going to come back to it.” She turned. “Aelfric. You were there. What went wrong?”

The old man leaned back in his chair. He had, Frances judged, reached the age where a man no longer cares whose feelings he hurts, and he had been waiting fifty years for someone with authority to ask him this question.

“All of it, my lady,” he said. “Shall I begin with the bows?”

“Please.”

“The archers and the spears were never made to work together. Not properly. We spears were set to guard the archers, and that was right, for an archer cannot hold off a man with a sword while he draws. But no one told us how. We were told where to stand, and the archers were told when to loose, and that was the whole of our orders.” He spread his maimed hand on the table. “Neither of us was well protected. Our gambesons were thin. No shields, for our spears need both hands and the archers likewise. The knights of the shield wall had good mail, and good shields, and good helms, and they came through it well. The archers and the spears died like flies. Like flies, my lady.”

“Because it was the heavy armor that took the day,” Ulric said.

“It was the heavy armor that walked away,” Aelfric said flatly. “That is a different thing.”

“Sir Ulric,” Bram said, “the spears held the flank at the ford, when the shield wall—”

“The shield wall held the center, which is the battle—”

“And who covered the bows, while the shield wall—”

“Enough.” Frances did not raise her voice much, but the table went quiet. “Everybody here is proud of their own men. Good. You should be. But I’m not here to decide which arm is the most important. I’m here to find out what went wrong so it doesn’t happen again.” She nodded to the old man. “Go on, Aelfric.”

Aelfric did not look in the least bit chastened. If anything, he looked pleased to have caused trouble.

“Then I will say this, my lady, and Sir Ulric may glower at me as he likes. The nobility love heavy armor. It is what they wear. It is what they pay for. It is what the songs are about. And so heavy armor is held to be the best of the army, and the spears and the bows are held to be the rest of it. We were told where to go. The archers were told when to shoot. And then we were left to it.” His voice dropped a little. “When the battle came apart into a brawl, as battles do, the archers were either dead or standing there with empty quivers and nothing in their hands. At least we spears had a spear to hold. We lived more often than they did.”

He was quiet a moment.

“The march was worse than the battle. The army went no faster than the dreks would pull the carts, and they are surly, slow beasts at the best of times. And no faster than the heavy armor could walk in a day, carrying their mail. We crawled to that battle, my lady. A man could have walked to the passes in half the time.”

“Tell me about the carts,” Frances said.

Aelfric barked a laugh. “The carts. Every castle brought its own, built by its own wainwright, and no two of them alike. When a wheel broke on a Highcrag cart, a Stonegate wheel would not fit it. When an axle cracked, there was one wainwright for the whole baggage, and he could not be everywhere. We left carts on the road with their loads still in them, because there was no mending them and no other cart with room to spare.”

He held up his two fingers and his thumb, and counted on them.

“The bows were all of a slightly different size, castle to castle, for each bowyer made them his own way. The arrows of one castle would not always fly true from the bows of another. Then the rain came, two days of it, and the bowstrings gave out, and the archers had not been given enough spare strings. A man with a wet string and no spare is a man with a stick. And they carried thirty arrows each, my lady. Thirty. They loosed them in the first part of the morning, and there was no one to bring them more, and when someone finally went to the carts, the carts had not enough either.” His mouth twisted. “And then they had nothing at all. No sword, no axe, no knife fit for fighting. They stood behind us and waited for us to keep them alive.”

“Were they given any protection at all?” Frances asked quietly.

“Whatever they bought for themselves. Which for a levy is very little. A thin gambeson that would not turn a blow. No shield. No helm, most of them. Any stray arrow from the other side would take a man down.” Aelfric shook his head. “I buried a good many of them, my lady. Archers, mostly. They were good lads.”

Frances looked down the table, and saw Aldo Fletcher.

The archer had gone very still. He had been listening to all of it with a face that grew steadily more drawn, and she understood, watching him, that he had never once led his men into anything larger than a skirmish. Every word of this was new to him. He was hearing, for the first time, exactly what would happen to every man he had trained, and he was hearing it from someone who had seen it.

“Aldo,” Frances said.

He looked up.

“We are going to deal with this,” she said. “Every bit of it. You will never go into battle without support. Enough replacement arrows that work across castles, replacement bowstrings, protection, and a second weapon. I promise you that.”

Aldo Fletcher held her eyes for a long moment, and then nodded once. He did not say anything. He did not need to. Frances had seen that look before, on the faces of students she had gone to bat for when nobody else would, and she knew what it meant. Whatever she asked of Aldo Fletcher from this day on, he would do.

“Third item,” she said, turning back to the table. “Standardization. Haldor. Does Ironwatch have any common pattern for equipment? Swords, spearheads, arrows, rivets, anything? A rule that says every arrow made here is this long and this heavy, so it fits every bow?”

Haldor scratched his beard. “Within my own forge, my lady, I make things as I make them, and my apprentices make them as I have taught them, so there is a sameness to it. But no rule. Nothing written down.” He frowned. “And between castles, I confess I have never given it a thought. I answer for the arms of Ironwatch. What the smiths of Highcrag or Seaguard do is their own affair.”

“So a Highcrag spearhead might not fit an Ironwatch spear shaft.”

“It might not,” Haldor admitted. “The socket would be cast to whatever shaft Highcrag cuts.”

“It did not,” said Aelfric. “I saw it. And their rivets would not suit our mail, and our bowstrings would not suit their bows.”

Frances let out a long breath through her nose.

She looked around the table at them. The prince who had just discovered there was no army. The proud knight, the archer who had gone pale, the spearman bristling, the armorer frowning, the monk writing furiously, and the old man with half a hand, who had waited fifty years to say all this and was enjoying himself enormously.

“Let me give you some background,” she said. “So you understand where I’m coming from.”

She leaned forward.

“I was raised in a country of three hundred and thirty million people. It kept a standing army of seven hundred and fifty thousand, and another two hundred and fifty thousand trained reserves. If it needed to grow quickly, it had a system, the same everywhere, for taking ordinary people off the street, training them, and putting them in the field in under six months.”