“I don’t think it’s up to us to decide,” Theodor said. “And I’m not at all sure that simply instating our officers in government positions is ethical. It has a rather despotic taste, doesn’t it?”
“You’re right.” Kristos grimaced. “That does complicate things.”
I gazed out the window over the sloping field toward the main encampment. Who knew what those men were thinking? Surely they were shaken. The skirmishes had been small thus far, but men had died, and now Serafan curse magic cast a shadow over them, too. “What about new elections? I think this army needs a bit of optimism. And it needs to be unified. We have Red Caps and reluctant Reformists alongside one another. They need some kind of promise of what this country will look like.” I paused and tried to smile. “When we win.”
“When we win.” Theodor couldn’t help a small smile. “So we could hold new elections and form a Council of Country—our first.”
“Why, you could hold your elections tomorrow and have your council within two days,” Alba said, faintly amused, like a mother watching her children inventing the rules to a game.
“No, wait.” Kristos drummed his fingers on the big kitchen table. “Not tomorrow. Let me publish that we’re doing this. Any man enlisted for the duration of the war has a vote, provided he gets here by Threshing Market.”
“You’re having a market?” Alba asked.
“Galatine harvest festival,” I explained. “That gives you less than a month to get the word out,” I said to Kristos. “Is that enough?”
“It will have to be,” Kristos said.
The fierce tattoo of drums interrupted us. Sianh ran to the window, with Kristos jostling beside him. Drummers beat to assemble at the center of camp, and troops rushed to fall in, muskets in hand. I turned to Theodor, who was sliding his arm through his sword belt. He met my eyes and nodded, once. Whether a full-scale battle or a skirmish, we were ready.
18
FIG BURST THROUGH THE DOOR OF THE KITCHEN, THE ECHOES OF the drums amplifying his urgency. “Word from Hazelwhite village. A troop of horse under—oh, one of those Pommerly bastards you all talk so much about.”
“They’re not,” I said, unable to resist a bit of moral guidance despite my shaking hands, “actually bastards. Mind your language.”
“Sophie, report to the surgeon,” Sianh said. “Perhaps you can be of some use there. It is too unclear what is underway in Hazelwhite for anything else.”
I nodded. I knew that I needed to discover how my charms and curses might affect an active battle eventually, but that could wait. Something more familiar—health charms in fabric—waited for me at the field hospital. The surgeon and a complement of surgeon’s mates and nurses occupied a sagging marquee tent on the far end of the camp. Theodor had studied proper layout of a military camp with his tutors, along with botany and ornithology and fine penmanship and dozens of other subjects far less useful at the moment. The placement of the medical corps away from the main body of camp would, he ascertained, limit the spread of disease.
The head surgeon was a stout man, shorter than me, with a barrel chest and thick, competent hands.
“Don’t need more nurses,” he barked as I ducked under the drooping door flap. He had a wooden chest open in front of him and inventoried the supplies inside. “Ration quota’s full.”
“I’m not a nurse,” I said. “I won’t need rations, either.”
He looked up, still holding a bottle of some kind of cloudy tincture. “My apologies, you’re the prince’s—what exactly are you? Can’t keep up on wedding gossip.”
The honest lack of deference was refreshing. “I’m nobody,” I replied. “My name is Sophie.”
“Ha, Sophie Nobody—but your last name is either Balstrade or Westland and either has quite a bit of cachet around here.”
“It’s Balstrade. For now.” I paused—who knew when I might formally marry Theodor? Not now, that was for certain.
“Don’t really mind either way, they’re both honest fellows.” He shrugged. “I’m Hamish Oglethorpe.”
“I’m sorry.” I reacted to his comically awkward name before thinking, but to my relief Hamish burst out laughing.
“It’s true, my parents were cruel old skunks. But why are you here, if not to apply for the nurses’ corps?”
“No interest there,” I said, “but if you’ve heard gossip at all, you probably know that I cast charms. For health, if it’s needed.”
“I’d heard that,” he said, noncommittal. “I’d heard you were coming with wagons full of charmed gunpowder or some such, too, going to make this war an easy win. But here we are, ready to fight a battle, perhaps, the old-fashioned way.” I thought for a moment he was serious, that he blamed me, but then he winked.
“Give me some credit—the uniforms are charmed. Not the gunpowder,” I said with a faint laugh. “We weren’t sure how that would turn out.”
“Ah, might blast out of the guns and turn into roses, pepper the opposing forces with perfume, is that it?” He chuckled and put a few bottles back in his trunk, then pulled a few others out.
“One never does know,” I said. “I can, however, with your permission, lay a health charm on—oh, the bandages would be best.”
“My permission? You may be nobody, so you say, but you outrank me.”
I hesitated. I had the authority of the men in command who had sent me, if nothing else. “No, this is your surgery. Your surgical theater,” I amended.
He choked on a phlegmy laugh. “Ha! Like the fine university! Except mine is built of canvas that reeks of old cheese.”
He wasn’t wrong. “Do I have your permission?”
“You have it and more. My stock is there,” he said, pointing to a stack of linen, and I put out of my mind thoughts of torn flesh and blood.
“Do you need anything in particular?” Hamish asked, but I was already pulling charm from the ether, smoothing it into the fibers of a bandage.
“Someone will have to roll these back up again,” I murmured. “I’ll do it when I’m finished.” I fell into the quiet rhythm of charming, so much like sewing yet different, my materials not physical but ether itself. The gold thrummed in the fibers of the linen, the warp and weft infused with charm magic as I pressed it into the fabric.
Working took most of my concentration, so when I had finished I was not surprised to see that one regiment had marched on Hazelwhite—the First, the only regiment already completely outfitted in gray uniform coats. One of the nurses had rerolled all the bandages. “Now what?” I asked Hamish.
“Ah, that’s the worst part of this job. We wait.”
A thick purple dusk had fallen while I’d worked, tucking shadows into every corner of Hamish’s tent and rapidly dropping the temperature outside. A cool dew spread across the grass; it would be frost before long, I thought, and after that—after that, winter, and an army to feed on meager rations. I didn’t harbor much hope that we would conclude this war quickly.