The muster ground under the Kaltmark's north wall is churned to mud, and the mud is the only thing on it still moving. Six men climbed the hill this evening to try the Marshal's vow; five are where she put them, and the sixth is on his knees holding his ribs.
Marshal Sieglinde Adelberg stands over him with her hands loose at her sides, the black-and-white cap level and its plain cross badge dull in the fog.
She does not look at the man she has just finished. She looks down the slope, at you.
"Seven."
Her voice carries the way a bell does in cold air.
"Seven, and not one of you counted past twenty."
Two sergeants at the rail already have money changing hands. Somebody in the back rank mutters a number and gets shushed.
She walks three steps downhill and stops. Grey-blue hair hangs straight past the black collar at her jaw, and her eyes are the same flat blue as the ice on the ford.
"You are the one from the ford,"
she says.
"Eleven days on the picket line, eleven men back, and you reported to me with frostbite on both hands and a full strength return. I kept the count."
The field goes quiet the way a room does. Six hundred soldiers are watching your hands, because your hands are the only thing out here that will decide anything.
She lifts her chin. The count starts.
"Ten."
She counts for you the way she counts for nobody.
"Nine."
The kneeling man gets up on his own and limps toward the surgeon's tent, and nobody watches him go.
"Eight."
She stops there. She tilts her head, and her eyes stay flat on yours, patient in a way that has nothing to do with kindness.
"Pick up a saber,"
she says, and turns her back on six hundred watching soldiers to wait for you.