The Thousand Names

Chapter Fourteen

WINTER

Folsom laid Bobby on the floor of Winter’s tent, carefully arranging the boy’s limbs as though settling him in a casket. The corporal looked half a corpse already, his face pale as milk, but his eyelids flickered and he gave a soft moan when his back touched the ground.

Graff, still powder-blackened and covered with grime, stripped off Bobby’s coat and tossed it in a corner. His shirt was shockingly white underneath, with stark gray rings on his cuffs where they’d protruded from his sleeves.

Winter looked down at the boy and bit her lip. Graff, Bobby had said. No one else. “Corporal Folsom?”

The big man was squatting by the boy’s side. He looked up.

“I need you to take an inventory of the company. Find out how many we had hit, then go to the cutters and try to track everyone down.”

Folsom looked down at Bobby again, then back at Winter. His thick features hardened, but he got to his feet and saluted.

“On your way out,” Winter said, “find a couple of men and have them sit outside the tent. No one comes in without my leave, understand?”

Folsom nodded again and ducked out of the tent. It was still broad daylight outside, and a brilliant lance of light from the flaps glowed by the entrance. That felt wrong, somehow. It should have been twilight.

Graff unbuttoned Bobby’s jacket, lifting it away carefully where it was soaked with gore. He tried raising the boy’s shoulder to get the sleeve off, but Bobby gave another groan, and Graff let him lie and turned to Winter.

“I don’t want to move him more than I have to. You got a nice sharp knife somewhere?”

She nodded and pawed through her pack until she found a heavy-hilted skinning knife, which she’d bought in Ashe-Katarion a lifetime ago because she’d liked the embroidery on the leather sheath. She handed it to Graff. “Anything else?”

“Water.” Graff looked at the mess on Bobby’s stomach and shook his head. “Though I warn you, I don’t think-”

“Water,” Winter repeated, and ducked out of the tent.

The camp outside was chaos, and it took her a few minutes to track down a brace of full kettles. By the time she returned, Graff had gotten Bobby’s jacket off by slicing open the sleeves and spreading them flat, and he was working on the undershirt where it was glued to the boy’s skin with sweat and dried blood. It reminded Winter uncomfortably of a hunter skinning a kill, carefully peeling back each layer to reveal the gory interior.

Also uncomfortable was the presence of Feor, who had crawled out of her bedroll and now sat cross-legged beside the sickbed, one arm still in a sling. Winter had forgotten the girl was there.

“Feor. .” She hesitated, biting her lip. She couldn’t very well send the girl outside, not now. Even the Khandarai in the army train would no doubt be keeping a very low profile until the excitement of battle had subsided. “You don’t have to watch this,” Winter finished lamely.

She ignored that. “Will he live?”

Winter glanced at Graff, still picking bits of linen away from the ragged hole in Bobby’s skin. “I don’t think so,” she said in Khandarai.

“Oh.” Feor shifted, drew knees to her chest and hugged them tight with her good arm, but she didn’t look away.

“Give me some water,” Graff said, without looking up. “Right here, where it’s bloody. But gently. Just trickle it.”

Winter hurried over with one of the kettles. Looking closely at the wound made her want to gag, and the smell was beginning to cut through the battle stink of sweat and powder. She forced her hands to remain steady and tipped a shallow stream from the kettle across the boy’s skin. Pink rivulets ran down Bobby’s sides and soaked into the inside of his jacket.

Graff’s mouth worked silently, as though chewing something stubborn.

“Right,” he said, not looking up. “Right. Get some clean linen and tear it into strips. I’ll get the rest of this shirt off.”

Winter nodded and went to her trunk. She sacrificed the cleaner of her two spare shirts, and the fabric tore with a sound like a distant volley of musketry. She’d laid out a half dozen uneven bandages when she heard Graff fall backward, followed by a great deal of swearing.

“Oh, fucking Brass Balls of the Beast!”

“What?” Winter’s heart clenched. She turned. “What happened?”

“Just look!” Graff said. “Look at-”

At first she thought he meant the wound, around which he’d wiped the skin clean, until there was only a ragged red hole just to the right of the boy’s navel. He’d unbuttoned Bobby’s shirt to pull away the last bits of clinging linen, and-

“Oh,” Winter said quietly. She looked down at Bobby’s face-a young, soft, feminine face, cheeks unmarred by stubble-and felt a hundred little moments click into place.

“Fuck me,” Graff said. “He-”

“She,” Winter said.

“She,” he repeated dully. “I can’t-I mean-”

“Come on,” Winter said. “This can’t be the first pair of breasts you’ve seen up close.”

“What? But. .”

“Later,” Winter said firmly. “Now. Do what you can.”

Graff looked up at her, and she tried to put all the calm she could muster into her gaze. He swallowed, nodded, and bent over his patient.

• • •

Some time later, Graff sat back. Sweat trickled across his forehead, and he wiped it away absentmindedly, leaving a smear of red under his bangs.

“It’s no good,” he said. “The ball’s still in there somewhere, but if I go groping around trying to find it I’m just going to make things worse.”

Winter looked down at Bobby’s face. His-her-mouth worked silently, but her eyes were tightly shut, as though in a dream from which she couldn’t escape.

“If we were to take her to a cutter. .,” Graff began.

“Would it make a difference?”

“No,” he admitted. “Probably not. There’s too much bleeding, and h- She’s already running a fever.”

“Any idea how. . long?”

“A few hours at best,” he said.

“Will she wake up?”

Graff gave a weary shrug. “I’m no doctor, just a corporal who picked up a little stitching and sawing. Though I doubt even a doctor could tell you.”

Winter nodded. “You’d better go, then.”

“What?” He looked up at her. “Go where?”

“Someone in the rest of the company must need your help. Folsom, if no one else.”

“But-” Graff gestured helplessly at the girl on the floor.

“I’ll stay with her,” Winter said. “Someone should.”

He turned away, but Winter caught a fleeting glimpse of relief in his face. She tried not to hold it against him.

“I’ll check back in,” he said, retreating. “Later. And you can come and find me if he-I mean, when she-”

“I will.” Winter ushered him to the exit. When the tent flap had fallen closed, she stared at it wearily for a few moments, then turned around and sat down beside Bobby.

Graff had covered the wound with makeshift bandages, though the blood was already soaking through. Winter kept her eyes on the girl’s face. It was tight and drawn with pain, her boy-short hair clingy and matted with sweat. Winter smoothed it absently with one hand.

“No cutters,” she murmured. “Well, of course not.”

She hadn’t even thought about that possibility herself. This girl planned better than I ever did. The breasts that had so disturbed Graff were only slight swells, and Winter wondered how old Bobby really was.

I wish she’d told me. A fantasy, of course. Winter knew as well as anyone that a secret spoken aloud, even once, was a secret lost. But I would have asked her so many things. How she made it through recruitment. Where she came from. Why she came to Khandar. It was singularly cruel, she thought, to discover that she wasn’t alone just hours before she would be alone again.

Winter was surprised to find that she was crying. She closed her eyes against the tears, but they welled regardless, trickling down her cheeks and pattering onto Bobby’s jacket. One drop touched the corner of her mouth, and she licked automatically, tasting the salt and the acrid tang of sweat and powder.

“Winter.” Feor was leaning forward, peering at Bobby.

“You don’t need to gape at her,” Winter said.

“Her,” Feor muttered, as though tasting the word. “A girl.” And then something else, low and fast, that Winter didn’t understand.

“In fact,” Winter said, “I should cover her up. Somebody might burst in here, and I’ll be damned if-”

“I can help her,” Feor blurted.

Winter froze. A spark of hope, the tiniest ember, ignited briefly in her chest, though she felt stupid for encouraging it. But the priestesses of Monument Hill did collect all sorts of esoteric knowledge, didn’t they? Was it possible Feor had some strange powder, some recipe, something-

She quashed her sudden enthusiasm and said, “You might have said something earlier.”

“Earlier I did not know the corporal was a woman,” Feor said. “Obv-scar-iot will not bind to a man.”

Winter hadn’t understood the burst of archaic Khandarai. “What is it you want to do?”

“I can bind her to my naath,” Feor said, so quiet she was almost inaudible.

“Ah.” The ember of hope flickered and died. “Magic. You mean you can help her spiritually.” Winter tried to keep her tone level-Feor looked so serious, and she didn’t want to trample on the girl’s beliefs-but she couldn’t help but a twist on the last word.

“It’s not-”

“Look,” Winter said, “if you want to. . to say a prayer, or what have you, I’m not going to object. But I’m not sure Bobby would want you to. She was a Free Church man-woman-like the rest of us.”

“It is not a prayer,” Feor said patiently. “Prayers are requests to the Heavens and the gods above and around us. A naath is an invocation, a command. It will be obeyed.”

“All right,” Winter said. “Go ahead, if you think it will do any good.”

Feor sat in silence for a moment, her good hand clenched on her injured arm. She looked-frail, somehow, and Winter felt guilty for her harsh tone. She moved carefully around the sickbed and put a hand on the girl’s shoulder in what she hoped was a comforting way.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to. . it’s just hard.” She looked down at Bobby and then dragged her eyes away, but too late. The tears returned. She rubbed bitterly at her face with the heel of her palm.

“You don’t understand,” Feor whispered.

Winter closed her eyes. “You’re right. I probably don’t.”

“It would be heresy,” Feor said. Winter was astonished to feel the girl shaking like an autumn leaf under her hand. “The blackest, most wrong kind of heresy. To bind obv-scar-iot to her-not a Chosen of Heaven, not even of the true faith! Mother would never forgive me. My whole life would be as nothing. Useless.”

Feor was crying now, too. She leaned into Winter, who slipped an arm around her automatically. The girl’s slim body was convulsed by sobs.

“I’m sorry,” Winter repeated. “I didn’t understand what you were offering.” In Vordan it had been a hundred years since the Priests of the Black had hunted noncomformists with the torturer’s knife, and a century of Free Church tolerance had taken the sting out of accusations of heresy. The Redeemer pyres in Ashe-Katarion could attest to the fact that the Khandarai took their religion more seriously.

Feor looked up, eyes still shining, and drew a long breath. She put on a determined expression. “Of course not. How could you?”

“I’m sure that Bobby”-Winter forced herself to look at the corporal’s pained, twisted face-“I’m sure she’d appreciate anything you could do.”

“She might not. The binding can be unpredictable, even for those who have prepared for it all their lives. She might curse us both afterward.”

“Afterward?” Winter looked down into Feor’s serious face. “You really think she’d live?”

“Oh, yes.” A faint smile crossed the girl’s lips. “Obv-scar-iot will not be stopped by such a trivial injury.”

“What does that mean, obv-scar-iot?” From the pained look on Feor’s face, Winter knew she’d botched the pronunciation.

“It is the name of my naath.” This at least Winter understood. Naath meant “spell” or “sorcery”-literally “a thing which is read” or “reading.” “It means,” Feor went on, “something like ‘magic for the creation of a Guardian.’ Or so I was taught.”

“And it will”-Winter hesitated-“heal her?”

Feor nodded. “But. .”

“But?”

The girl took another long breath and wiped her eyes. “I am naathem. It is given to me to bind the naath, but once bound it cannot be undone until the bound one’s death. Nor can I bind another until that time. I may only be able to perform the binding once in my lifetime.” She paused. “You saved my life. You and the others, but it was you who sheltered me when you might have. .” Feor stopped, swallowed, and went on. “I have no way to repay you other than this.”

“Feor,” Winter said, “you don’t have to-”

“I want to.” The girl pursed her lips. “It is only that. .”

She trailed off, very quietly. Winter stared at her, and after a long pause she spoke aloud.

“. . I meant it for you.”

“Me? But-” Tired and befuddled as she was, Winter leapt to the appropriate conclusion very quickly. Obv-scar-iot will not bind to a man. She thought about denial, but one look at Feor’s face made it clear there was no point. Winter swallowed hard and slowly removed her arm from the girl’s shoulders. “How long have you known?”

“For some time.”

“And how. .”

Feor shrugged. “I am naathem.”

Magic. “But you didn’t know about Bobby?”

“I spent only a little time with her. I would have known, eventually.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Why should I?” Feor said. “You obviously wished it to be a secret. Knowing that I knew the truth would only have made you uncomfortable. And I worried. .” Her cheeks went scarlet. “I worried that if you knew I had found out, you might not let me go.”

Winter had to smile at that. “Really?”

“Only at first,” Feor said. “Before I truly knew you.”

Well, it could be worse. The first person to find out doesn’t speak any Vordanai. Winter shook her head. “God above. It’s been a long time since anyone knew.”

Feor nodded seriously. “I thought, if you were wounded in battle, I could at least do this for you. Save your life, perhaps, as you saved mine.”

“But if you use this naath now, on Bobby, you won’t be able to help me next time,” Winter said.

Feor nodded, looking miserable.

“Do it,” Winter said. “I’ll just have to survive on my own.”

She wasn’t quite sure when she’d started taking the whole idea seriously. Something about Feor’s quiet faith was infectious. It’s the least I can do to play along, if it helps console her. It was hard to remember that behind her temple-trained facade of seriousness Feor was still half a child.

“I will,” Feor said, and then, “I will!” as though arguing with an invisible presence. The half-light filtering through the blue canvas made her gray skin look like marble. She turned to Winter. “I’ll need a bowl of water.”

“I’m not sure I’ve got a bowl,” Winter said. “Will a kettle do?”

Feor pried the top off the kettle, peered inside, and nodded. She looked up again appraisingly, and then turned to the tent flap.

“I need you to make absolutely certain I am not interrupted. Do not allow anyone to pull me away from her, you understand? No matter what.”

“I don’t think anyone’s likely to come bursting in here-,” Winter began.

“No matter what,” Feor insisted. “Even if it’s the. . the King of Vordan himself. It cannot be allowed. It is not just her life at risk, but mine, and. . other things.”

“Right. If His Majesty turns up, I’ll tell him to cool his heels.” Winter caught the full force of Feor’s glare and raised her hands. “I understand!”

“Afterward,” Feor said, more calmly, “I will probably sleep. It may be some time before I awaken. Do not fear for me.”

“Got it,” Winter said. “Anything else?”

Feor shifted uneasily. “This will be like. . lighting a beacon, in some ways. The sorcerer who rides with your army cannot help but see it. He may investigate.”

Winter thought about protesting, but the girl’s conviction that the Vordanai were led by a wizard seemed unshakable. She simply nodded, and sat down halfway between Bobby’s pallet and the tent flap, ready to intercept any incoming sorcerers or kings. This seemed to placate Feor, who picked up the kettle with some difficulty with her good hand and placed it beside Bobby’s head. She closed her eyes, dipped her fingers into the water, and waited.

It was some time before Winter realized she had begun to speak. The girl’s lips barely moved, and the sound was just the breathiest whisper on the still, parched air. But it went on and on, a sibilant, muttered litany just below the threshold of understanding. Something in the air shifted, as if in response to the sound. The flimsy canvas walls of the tent still surrounded them, but the quality of the space had changed, until Winter had to fight the impression that they were in a vast stone hall. She felt as though any noise she made would echo for hours.

She’d seen the Khandarai at prayer before, and it had seemed ordinary enough. A little exotic, all those gods with fanciful names and painted statues, but fundamentally no different from the services offered by any village priest back in Vordan. “Keep me safe from harm and disease, protect my family, let me live and prosper.” The homilies were different, but the lessons were the same, too-respect your superiors, live orderly lives, honor the gods. The only major difference Winter had been able to observe was that the Khandarai had priestesses as well as priests, and they got to wear better costumes.

This was nothing like those services. The archaic form of Khandarai used in religious ritual was grammatically complex and difficult to speak, but still basically comprehensible. As Feor’s voice slowly rose, Winter began to catch her words, but they sounded like no language she had ever heard. She wasn’t certain if there were words at all. Certainly the girl didn’t pause in her recitation, even to breathe. Each syllable flowed into the next in an unbroken stream of gibberish, and yet. .

And yet, oddly, Winter felt as though she could almost understand. That there was meaning there, so clear that it lurked just below the surface, nearly comprehensible, slightly out of reach. As though-the thought crept in, ridiculous but still true-it wanted to be understood, wanted her to reach out and grasp it, like plunging her hand into an icy stream. .

Feor raised her hand from the kettle. It ought to have been dripping wet, but the water clung to the surface of her skin, as though she’d dipped her hand in translucent tar. The tent had grown shadowed around her, the full light of day fading into twilight, and in the semidarkness motes of light darted and spun around her fingers.

Without ever halting in her recitation, the girl leaned forward and touched the tip of her index finger to Bobby’s eyelids, each in turn. Winter had to stifle a gasp. Where Feor’s wet finger had been, Bobby’s skin glowed, a shifting miasma of color that wavered from brilliant blue to sickly green and back again, like paint swirling in a bucket. She paused, still speaking quietly, and studied the effect. Then, carefully, she started to draw.

Wherever her finger passed, it left those eerie, glowing traceries. The pattern she built up, line by careful line, started from Bobby’s eyes and spread across her face, down her neck, out across her shoulders. It was abstract, asymmetric, a complex map that ran over the girl’s skin with a geometrical exactitude, as though the design took the contours of her body into account. The lines thickened, thinned, began and ended, but never crossed or touched, no matter how close Feor drew them.

Feor passed her hand along Bobby’s arms, the underside of her chin, her collarbone, her slight breasts. Winter wasn’t sure if the tent had darkened further or the pattern had gotten brighter, but everything was fading away except for the glow of the lines and the rising sound of Feor’s voice. Every syllable echoed as if she were speaking from the pulpit of a grand cathedral. Even Bobby’s skin vanished, leaving only the pattern, a glowing web hovering in the void. Once again, Winter had the odd feeling that there was order there, an understanding that beckoned to her beneath the apparent chaos.

Finally, with great solemnity, Feor turned Bobby’s right hand over and pressed it to her own. Light bloomed between their palms, and when Feor took her hand away the blaze from Bobby’s skin outshone even the rest of the pattern. Her recitation rose to a crescendo, the sound of her voice crashing around them like waves against a rocky shore, and almost lost in the rising roar were a few words that Winter recognized.

“-obv-scar-iot!” Feor’s eyes glowed with reflected light from the thing she had drawn. All the sound vanished at once, as though someone had dropped a velvet rug across the tent, and the light on Bobby’s skin flared so bright it was painful to look at. Winter tasted blood in her mouth where she’d bitten her lip.

And then, apparently, it was over. The light disappeared, and for the first time since she’d begun to recite Feor was silent. For a moment Winter thought they were still in darkness, but as her eyes adjusted she realized it was only the dim half-light of the tent in daytime. Bobby lay still on her pallet, and Feor sat equally still beside her. For a long while, nothing moved.

Eventually, Winter could no longer restrain herself.

“Saints and fucking martyrs!” she exploded, the sound of her own voice alien in her ears. “Brass Balls of the Beast, Karis Almighty on a fucking crutch. Holy. .” She ran out of breath, and by the time she’d gotten her wind back her composure had at least partially returned. “Feor? What happened? Was that-did it work?”

The girl didn’t respond. Winter shuffled forward on hands and knees. “Feor?”

Hesitantly, she prodded Feor’s shoulder. The girl toppled over, nerveless and boneless, falling across her broken arm and lying in a tangle on the floor like a discarded puppet.

• • •

Winter dragged Feor to her bedroll and laid her out, trying not to jostle her wounded arm. Her eyes were screwed shut, and her breathing was so shallow that Winter had to bend across her face to be certain it hadn’t stopped entirely.

As for Bobby, Winter couldn’t tell if anything had changed one way or the other. She’d peeked under the bandages, but there was so much blood that she couldn’t see much, and she didn’t dare investigate. The corporal’s face had relaxed a little, at least, and her breathing seemed steadier. Winter covered her with a blanket up to the neck and worried.

The tent suddenly seemed stifling. With a quick glance at her two sleeping companions, Winter slipped out through the flap. She was surprised to find Folsom standing just outside, stiff as a sentry. He saluted grimly and looked at her with questioning eyes. Winter sighed.

“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “Graff says he’s not going to make it.” She’d almost said she. “I’m hoping he’s too stubborn for that. We’ve done everything we can.”

Folsom nodded. He cleared his throat and proffered a folded sheet of paper, which Winter took curiously. Only when she opened it did she remember the errand she’d sent him on to get him out of the tent. In his broad, neat hand was a list of names, most of which Winter barely recognized. Beside each was the notation “dead,” “missing,” or “wounded,” with the last bearing additional notes on whether recovery was expected. Winter folded the paper again and noticed that the list continued onto the back of the page.

“Thank you, Corporal,” she said. “You can go. Get some rest.”

Folsom nodded and lumbered off. Winter cast about for something to sit on and found an empty hardtack box, which she dragged in front of her tent. She would have liked to sleep herself, but she felt too keyed up for it, full of the nervous, manic energy that comes with the promise of a vicious price the next day. Besides, it was only midafternoon.

Her mind kept going back to what she’d witnessed in the tent, but her thoughts skipped off the surface of it, like a rock bouncing across the thick crust of an icy lake. When she closed her eyes she could still see that tracery of blue-green fire hanging in the darkness like an unfathomably complex equation. It seemed. . unnatural somehow that after witnessing that she could emerge into the sunlight and see the camp spread out around her as though nothing had changed, stacked arms and hardtack boxes, the distant sounds of horses and shouting men. She would have been less surprised to find that the tent flap had opened onto a fairy-tale kingdom full of dragons and talking animals.

Feor. . Her mind shied away again, but she forced it back. She’s the real thing. A wizard, or a naathem, or whatever you want to call it. It wasn’t that she hadn’t believed in such things, exactly. After all, the Wisdoms preached regularly against the evils of wizardry and the vile practice of congress with demons. One whole order of the Sworn Church, the Priests of the Black, had once dedicated their lives to rooting out the arcane in all its forms, though they hadn’t existed for more than a century. Still, everyone knew magic existed, somewhere.

That was the point, really. Wizards and demons were something that happened to someone else, in some faraway country, or else deep in the past where they belonged, with the saints and knights in shining armor.

On the other hand, I suppose that for most people Khandar is a faraway country. Most Vordanai would not be at all surprised to hear about magic in such a distant land, so why should she, having gone there, be surprised to find it?

Another thought occurred to her-as far as the Church was concerned, what had happened in the tent was nothing less than the work of a demon, the unholy spawn of the vilest pits of hell. Feor herself had said it was heresy, although presumably judged by different lights. Winter had never been a particularly religious person, but she’d absorbed enough in her years at Mrs. Wilmore’s that the idea made her uncomfortable. She quashed that feeling irritably.

If it works. . She almost didn’t dare think about that. If it works, I don’t care if Feor is some fiend from the black pits. If I can talk to Bobby. . The need hung in her chest like a painful lump. Something had changed, she realized. Before the revelation of the corporal’s gender, he’d been a friend and comrade-in-arms. Now she was something else-a co-conspirator, possibly-and the possibility had knocked a scab off a part of Winter’s heart that she’d long ago closed off. The thought that there might be someone who shared her secret was exhilarating and terrifying, both at once.

“They’re leaving the wagons.”

Winter almost fell off the box. She’d been so wrapped up in her own thoughts she hadn’t noticed that anyone else was nearby. Looking up, she found herself sharing her impromptu bench with a young Vordanai woman in trousers and a loose wool blouse. Her hair was pulled up tight, which gave her a severe air, but she smiled at Winter’s obvious discomfiture.

“I’m sorry. I startled you.”

“I was just. .” Winter shook her head, not quite trusting her voice.

“It’s understandable,” the woman said, and for one mad moment Winter thought she knew everything-her secret, the magic, everything. Then she went on. “The battle seems to take everyone in different ways afterward. Some men want to dance and sing, or go whoring and drinking, whereas some just want to. . sit.” She gave a little sigh. “It was terrifying enough at the bottom of the hill. I can only imagine what it must have been like to actually go up it.”

Winter nodded, feeling a bit at sea. She sought for something concrete to focus on. “What did you mean about the wagons?”

“They’re leaving them behind. Look.”

The woman pointed. The First’s tents were near the edge of the camp, and Winter had a view of what had been the regimental drill field the previous day. Men were forming up there now, carrying heavy packs as if for a long march, but the horse lines beyond remained undisturbed and the wagons were still unhitched.

She blinked. “What’s going on? Are we marching?”

“The Second and Fourth battalions are. They had the easiest time of it in the battle, the colonel said, so they get to go fight in the next one.”

“The next battle?”

“The colonel is all in a lather to go assist Captain d’Ivoire. We’re behind schedule, apparently.”

Winter could well believe that, given the delays they’d suffered on their approach. “What about us?”

“First Battalion?” the woman said, and when Winter nodded she continued. “Taking a well-earned rest, I should think. First and Third are staying behind with the trains and the wounded.” She looked down at herself and smiled ruefully. “And other impedimenta.”

Winter put on a vague smile of her own, at a loss how to proceed. The woman regarded her thoughtfully.

“What’s your name, Sergeant?” she said after a moment.

“Winter, ma’am,” Winter said, feeling suddenly formal. “Winter Ihernglass. And it’s lieutenant, actually.” She hadn’t yet bothered to track down a lieutenant’s stripe to replace the pips on her shoulders.

“Lieutenant,” the woman said. “Excuse me.” She extended her hand, and Winter took it and shook cautiously. “I’m Jennifer Alhundt.”

The handshake lasted perhaps an instant longer than it should have. In that instant, Winter got the queerest feeling that there was some thing emerging from this woman’s skin, some invisible fluid or gas that raced up Winter’s arm and wrapped itself around her, sinking by degrees through her uniform and then through her skin to embed itself in her flesh. Goose bumps rose along her arms, and she let go a bit too hastily.

“Is this you?” Jen said, jerking her head.

Winter, suppressing a shiver, forced herself to focus. “What?”

“Your tent,” Jen said patiently. “Behind us.”

“Oh. Yes. Why?”

Jen shrugged. “Just curious. I’m always amazed at the conditions in which you soldiers manage to survive. Four men to a little tent, for years at a time. I’ve got one to myself and I’m still not going to regret leaving it behind when this is over, I don’t mind telling you.”

“It was better when we were in camp by the city,” Winter said. “We had time to-spread out a little.”

“You’re Old Colonials, then?” Jen said.

Winter nodded. “They brought some of us in to teach the recruits a few things.”

“Interesting. Is it working?”

Winter thought of the folded paper Folsom had brought her. “No,” she said. “Not really.”

For some reason that made Jen smile. She stood up, brushing off the seat of her trousers.

“Well, Sergeant Ihernglass-sorry, Lieutenant Ihernglass-I’m sorry to have imposed on your time. I’m sure you have better things to do.”

“Not really, ma’am. Except maybe sleep.”

“That’s awfully important,” Jen said. “I’ll leave you to it. Thank you for the bit of company.”

Winter nodded, and Jen strode off.

I wonder who she is? There had been no Vordanai women among the Old Colonials, so she had to have come over with the colonel. Some civilian functionary? A mistress?

Winter shrugged and turned back to her tent. There were more important things to worry about.

• • •

Drying blood had stuck the bandages solidly to Bobby’s skin, even once Winter had untied the knots.

She really ought to have called Graff back, but he was probably asleep somewhere. And Winter wasn’t sure what she’d find, but the fewer people who knew about Feor’s-about Feor, the better. She glanced over her shoulder to confirm that the Khandarai girl was still sleeping.

Bobby was sleeping, too, and looking considerably less drawn than she had when Winter had left her. Whatever Feor had done was having some positive effect. Winter brought one of the kettles and a supply of fresh bandages to the side of the sickbed and poured a trickle of lukewarm water across the stiff, scarlet-soaked cloth. Once it had loosened a bit, she peeled the ruined linen away, leaving behind a mess of caked-on gore. She soaked a fresh cloth and went to work cleaning the blood away, trying not to touch the wound itself.

Only-something was wrong. With some perplexity, and then increasing excitement, Winter worked the cloth across the spot where the gory hole had been and found nothing but smooth skin under her fingers. She poured another stream from the kettle and wiped it away, then sat staring.

The injury was gone, but not without a trace. An irregular patch of skin, vaguely star-shaped, was changed. It was white-not the pale, ugly color of a scar or the sickly white of a fish’s belly, but the pure, brilliant white of marble. Winter imagined it even had a bit of sparkle to it, the way some marble did, as if someone had replaced that patch of Bobby’s skin with a perfect replica grafted from a statue. Winter touched it, carefully, half expecting to feel the cool hardness of stone, but it gave under her finger just like ordinary skin.

It worked. She sat back, letting out a long breath, her shoulders shaking from released tension. Whatever Feor did, it worked. A little patch of oddly-colored skin was a small price to pay. Winter looked from one girl to the other, still half in shock. It really worked.

She was suddenly unutterably tired. Leaving the dirty bandages on the floor, she fetched one of her own shirts and pulled it onto Bobby’s limp form, struggling with the sleeves and the buttons. Fortunately, the girl’s bust was modest even by Winter’s standards. The shirt alone would probably be cover enough for the casual eye. Graff knows, but that doesn’t mean everyone has to.

Winter covered Bobby with a blanket, checked Feor one more time, and then flopped onto her own bedroll. She was asleep in an instant and didn’t dream at all, not even of Jane.