Chapter 1

Prince Corin Solmar stood on the river wall long after the boat had gone.

He watched the square sail grow small against the grey water, and then smaller, until the Silverrun bent away between the fields and took it out of sight altogether. Below him, the little crowd at the river gate had already begun to break apart. The Baron and Lady Merilynne were walking back toward the keep, their son trailing behind. The mages went off in a cluster, still talking.

Ironwatch will be ready for you when you return, Commander. I give you my word.

He had meant it at the gangplank. Standing alone now, with the wind coming cold off the river, he found that he meant it a great deal more.

The Council met at the sixteenth bell.

Three chairs stood empty at the table: the Commander’s at its head, Edmund’s, and Marguerite’s. Corin had come in early, and he sat for a moment looking at the empty chair at the head of the table before he took his own place to the right of it. He did not think it fitting to sit in hers. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.

The others came in one by one. Benjamin was first, of course, with his wax tablet. Lucien and Giovanni came together, still arguing gently about something in the codex. Haldor came with soot still on his hands. Magnus came last, and took his place at the far end, and folded his hands.

It was Benjamin who said what all of them were thinking.

“My lord,” he said carefully, “with the Commander gone to Aldricspire, and Brother Edmund with her ... is it your wish that we should meet still?”

“It is,” Corin said. “Every day, at the sixteenth bell, for one bell and no more. And it shall begin on time.” He looked around the table. “The Commander built this Council so that each of us would know what the others were about. That need did not leave on the river this morning.”

Lucien smiled faintly. “She will be pleased to hear it, my lord.”

“She will hear it,” Corin said, “when she sees what we have done.”

Benjamin looked down at the empty place where Edmund usually sat, and then, with the air of a man taking up a burden he had not expected, drew his tablet a little nearer and began to write.

That night Corin lay awake in his chamber above the guardhouse, and turned over in his mind the first words the Commander had ever spoken to the Guard.

You, the Guard of Ironwatch, will be the core of the defense of this realm. Everything else will be built around you.

He had heard it, that afternoon in the courtyard, as any captain would hear it: as praise, and as a promise of glory. Ironwatch would stand in the front of the line. Ironwatch would take the first blow and give the hardest one back. He had felt his own chest swell at it, and he had seen five hundred others swell with him.

He understood now that he had heard it wrongly.

She had not meant that Ironwatch would do the fighting. Ironwatch was five hundred men. Against a hundred thousand, five hundred men were nothing at all. She had meant that Ironwatch would carry the standard for a new way of making war. Ironwatch would be the first to bear the new weapons, and prove them. Ironwatch would be the first to organize itself in the new way, into the companies and the chains of command she had laid out on Edmund’s chart. Ironwatch would be the first to learn the new strategy and the new tactics, and to master them.

And above all of it, every man of the Guard would need to show such skill at arms that no one in the realm could doubt what he saw. It was not enough for Ironwatch to be good. When the captains and sergeants of the other castles came here, and they would have to come here, they would need to see that the least man in the Guard of Ironwatch was better than the best man they had brought with them. Only then would they listen. Only then would they be willing to change.

Corin lay in the dark and looked at that for a long time.

It was, he thought, a very great deal to promise.

But he had promised it.

The first meeting of the military staff was held the next morning, at the ninth bell, in the old muster-roll room.

Corin had come early again. He stood at the narrow window and looked down into the yard, where the shield wall was already at drill, and listened to them come in behind him. There was Sir Ulric, Senior Sergeant of Heavy Infantry. There were Aldo Fletcher, Sergeant of the Bows, and Bram, Sergeant of the Spears. And there were the three he had added himself: Haldor, Head of Military Weapons; Magnus, for the Oracles; and Giovanni, the healer, who looked faintly curious to find himself in a room full of soldiers.

When they were all seated, Corin turned from the window and set a wax tablet on the table in front of him.

“Before we begin,” he said, “there is an agenda.”

He had been turning the word over in his head since the night before. It was a small, plain, foreign thing, and it had seemed faintly ridiculous to him the first time the Commander had used it. He had since sat through a dozen of her meetings, and watched each one end on time with everything decided that needed deciding, and he had stopped thinking it ridiculous. It was simply a good tool, like a well-balanced spear. A man did not need to understand where a thing came from to see that it worked.

Sir Ulric’s eyebrows had gone up. “An agenda, my lord?”

“A list of what we shall speak of, in order,” Corin said. “It is the Commander’s custom. I find it a good one, and I mean to keep it.” He laid a finger on the tablet. “There are three matters this morning. The first is the defense in depth, and what it shall ask of each of you. The second is training. The third is weapons, and what Haldor shall need from us.”

Nobody objected. Bram, Corin noticed, sat a little straighter.

“Defense in depth,” Corin said. He looked around the table, face by face. “The Commander has told us what it is meant to do. To slow the invader, to wear him down, and to make him bleed for every mile he marches before he ever comes within sight of a castle wall. She did not tell us how it was to be fought. That, I think, she has left to us.”

He leaned forward and set both hands flat on the table.

“Imagine,” he said, “a small company. Fifty spearmen and a hundred archers. Scouts so we know where to attack. No more. Maybe smaller. And they move fast. Very fast. They come upon the enemy at dusk, quietly, unseen, when his army has already made camp and his men are at their cookfires. They do not seek his soldiers. They seek his supply: his wagons, his grain, his beasts. Our archers loose ten arrows apiece into his dreks, and drivers, and cooks. Maybe fire arrows into the stores. And then, before his men are able to respond, we are gone. We disengage, we set traps as we retreat, and then we run, and we lose not a single Valdorian soldier in the doing of it.” He paused. “And we do this once in a week, or twice, or three times, and never twice in the same place.”

There was a short silence.

“I do not know,” Corin went on, more quietly, “that this is the way we shall fight. But I believe it is nearer to what the Commander meant by defense in depth than anything we have ever done.”

Sir Ulric was frowning. “My lord, you have left no part in it at all for the heavy infantry.”

“I have not,” Corin said. He looked at Ulric steadily. “Tell me, Sir Ulric. How fast and how far can your men run in chain? I do not mean walk briskly. I mean run.”

Ulric opened his mouth, and closed it again.

“The war game the Commander laid out has us fighting in phases,” Corin said. “Your knights shall have their part, and it shall be a great one, at the passes and at the walls and when we strike the besiegers from the rear. But not here. Not in the first phase. The first phase is raids, swift as lightning, and for those I see need of a troop of bows and spears only. Men who can run in their gambesons. Men who can run for hours.” He turned to Haldor. “And we shall have the dreks, in their new collars, waiting with carts at a safe distance to carry them away when the work is done.”

Haldor grunted, and it was the approving one. “They will need the new gambesons, my lord. The old ones would not stop a thrown stone. And the new are light enough to run in.”

“Then they shall have them first,” Corin said.

Aldo Fletcher had been listening with his narrowed eyes gone narrower still, the way they did when he was judging a distance. “Ten arrows apiece, my lord. A hundred archers. That is a thousand arrows in the space of a minute or two, and then a thousand more the next time, and the time after that.” He shook his head slowly. “We have never in our lives shot so many arrows that were not at the butts.”

“That is why the Commander wants war arrows by the millions,” Corin said. “And why Haldor and Osric are building jigs to make them.”

“And the spears?” Bram asked. “If the archers do the shooting, my lord, what are my men for?”

“To keep the archers alive,” Corin said. “If the enemy is quicker to his feet than we hope, it is your spears that hold him off while the bows withdraw. Your men are the shield of the company. Without them, the archers cannot retreat without harm.”

Bram nodded slowly. He looked, Corin thought, like a man who had just been told for the first time in his life that his men were necessary rather than merely present.

At the end of the table, Magnus stirred.

“There is a further thing in your favor, my lord,” he said, “though you may not have marked it. The enemy will bring Oracles, as we have ours. A great army on the march is a great thing, and decided, and we shall see it coming. But a raid by a few hundred men, decided at dusk by a captain in the field, and in a different place each time...” He spread his hands slightly. “That is small, and undecided until the last. Their Oracles will see such a thing poorly, if they see it at all.”

Corin looked at him for a moment. Then he smiled.

“Then that is one more reason to fight so,” he said. “Thank you, Magnus.”

He drew the tablet toward him and made a note.

“Aldo, Bram. When we are done here, you will stay, and we shall sit with Giovanni and talk of how our men may be trained to run and not tire. For that is what we shall need of them above all else.” He turned to the end of the table. “Which brings me to you, Giovanni. And I confess I must ask: why, in the name of every buried god, did the Commander bid me speak of this with a healer?”

Giovanni smiled, the slow, pleased smile of a man who had been waiting for precisely that question.

“Because the Commander taught us a new way of quickly building endurance, my lord,” he said. “A way used by the athletes of her own world. It works like this.”

He leaned forward, and for once there was no codex in his hands, only his own enthusiasm.

“When a man lives high in the mountains, the air there is thin, and his body learns to draw more from it than a lowlander’s ever could. His blood grows rich. His breath lasts. Bring such a man down into ordinary air, and he may run or fight a great while longer than any man around him.” He tapped the table. “Lucien can make the air within his Study Pocket as thin as a mountaintop. The Commander slept in it, and ate in it, and rested in it, for two months of pocket time. She trained in ordinary air, and she slept in thin. And every day I laid a working upon her to encourage what her body was already striving to do.” He sat back. “You saw the result in the courtyard, my lord. Sir Gareth broke at four minutes. She did not.”

He let that settle before he went on, more quietly.

“It is not gentle, my lord. Your soldiers must train in the Training Pocket until they drop from exhaustion, until their arms can no longer lift a bow or a spear and their legs give way beneath them. And then they die. And then they sleep in the thin air of the Study Pocket, where their bodies will sicken for days before they mend. But with the working I have devised, perhaps twenty such rounds would suffice. After that, they would outlast any man in Valdoria.”

There was a silence around the table. Sir Ulric, Corin noticed, had gone very still.

“The Commander did this?” Corin asked.

When Giovanni answered, his voice was not quite steady.

“My lord, the Commander entered the Training Pocket and died. And then she entered again, and died again. She did this more than three thousand times, and I was at her side to mend her after every one of them. Her will is made of iron.” He paused. “Iron. Your men can bear to die twenty or thirty times.”

No one spoke. Sir Ulric had gone pale.

At last Corin said, “Can it be done for a hundred and fifty men?”

Giovanni considered the question with the care of a man who meant to answer it honestly.

“The pockets make it possible, my lord. A man may train for days and rest for days, and outside the pocket scarcely a minute will have passed. So we may send groups of men through one after another, a great many in a single day. The working itself is cheap. But I cannot do it alone. We shall need more healers, and we shall need food, a full day’s food for every day a man spends resting within the pocket.” He spread his hands. “At the Commander’s bidding, I have already written to the lead healer at other castles. They will send me healers, and if you can see to the food, then hundreds of men in a normal day may be managed. If sequenced correctly, that would be equivalent to twenty rounds between pockets, so after one day of normal time, your men will last longer than any other men in Valdoria. Start with your sergeants. Teach the teachers first.”

“Then we begin with the sergeants,” Corin said, and wrote it down.

The river boat carried them south through the morning, the current doing most of the work and the six oarsmen doing the rest, in a long, easy rhythm that Frances found almost hypnotic after a while. Someone had rigged a canvas awning over the middle of the boat, and beneath it the four of them sat among the chests: Frances, Marguerite, Edmund with his satchel on his knees, and Sir Godwin, who had finally consented to sit down after the first hour, and who now watched the passing banks with the patience of a man who had made this journey many times before.

The fields of the Heartfields slid by on either side, green and flat and well tended. Every so often they passed a village, or a landing with a cart drawn up beside it, and once a long, low barge going the other way, heavy with something under tarpaulins, its crew raising their hands in greeting as the two boats passed.

Frances watched it go, and found her mind turning, as it had more than once in the last few days, to the man who had built all of this.