Chapter 11: Hold the Hill

At dawn he was already dressed and sitting on the trunk with a cup of tea gone cold in his hands.

I woke with his coat over me and the lamp burned out.

"Something is in my mouth," he said, without looking up. "I know what it is. It won't come."

I sat up and pulled the blanket around me.

"Somebody told you not to say."

"I can't tell you that either," he said.

"Then you just did."

He almost smiled.

I told him about the Collar, the ledger and the Renewal, and he listened with his jaw set.

When I finished he stood and went to the tent flap and stood there.

"I can't take you out of the fort," he said. "Desertion is an order I can't break. Neither can anyone sworn."

"I'm not sworn," I said.

"Then you could go. But you'd run alone, with the Marshal's hounds on your trail, and every Collar in the kingdom would find you in a week."

"So I stay," I said.

"We find another way before tomorrow night."

His voice was grim and steady, and he said we.

I held onto that, all through the hours before noon.

The Ninth played the Fourth for the Ridge Flag that afternoon.

It was an old fort game, Sergeant Tolley explained, with wooden swords and a flag on a hill and nobody supposed to get hurt.

"Somebody always gets hurt," she said. "We're all just pretending we don't know that."

The Fourth Company's captain was a handsome, sleek man with a lot of white teeth.

He walked the line of my squad, looking us over.

"Corporal Morcant commands," Sergeant Tolley told him blandly. "Alderby carries the horn."

"The boy with the stick?"

"The boy with the crutch," said Wick, "and a very loud horn."

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