[ Fenn ]
Bryce gave me the recruits because Bryce gave me everything that required patience, and patience was the one skill I had that the rest of the garrison didn't.
I walked them through the basics on the first morning. The charter system — governor, city guard, garrison, two chains of command. I explained it clearly. I explained it simply. Torvald asked eleven questions in fifteen minutes, nine of which were relevant and two of which were about the food at the market.
"Focus," I said.
"I AM focused. But also I saw a stall that was selling something on a stick and I need to know what that something is."
"It's lamb."
"Lamb on a STICK, Fenn. That's innovation. That's a leap forward for mankind. The garrison serves meat on a PLATE like animals."
"Torvald."
"Focusing."
The small one — Marten — was actually listening. He had the quality that Hallam had mentioned in her notes — not brilliance, not sharpness, but absorption. He took things in. Slowly, steadily, the way sponges took in water. You couldn't see it happening, but by the end, the sponge was full.
"The nobles," he said, when I got to the third layer of governance. "How does the system handle them when they break the law?"
"Complaint chain. Garrison or city guard files a report. Report goes to the city guard commander — Captain Orden. Orden forwards to the governor. Governor forwards to the provincial Justice Bureau. Bureau reviews, decides, acts."
"How long?"
"Months. Sometimes longer."
"That seems—"
"Slow. Yes. It's designed that way. The empire doesn't trust fast decisions about nobles because fast decisions have historically led to civil wars."
Dek was processing this with the quiet intensity that I'd started to recognise as his thinking face — which looked identical to his bored face, which looked identical to his angry face, which made Dek's emotional state a persistent mystery to everyone except, presumably, his grandmother.
"What if the Bureau decides a noble needs to be… dealt with?" Dek asked.
"Then the Civil Military handles it."
"The grey cloaks."
I looked at him. "You know about them?"
"My grandmother told me stories."
"Your grandmother was well-informed."
"My grandmother was terrifying. The grey cloaks were the only thing she said scared her, and she once fought a bear with kitchen equipment."
I wasn't sure whether the grandmother was real or mythological at this point, but the information was accurate regardless. The Civil Military existed. The grey cloaks existed. And the fact that a fourteen-year-old's grandmother had told him about them meant that the Civil Military's reputation had done its job — reaching the places that official channels didn't, living in the stories that grandmothers told children in kitchens in the eastern provinces.
"Has one ever come here?" Marten asked.
"Not yet."
Kess said nothing during this entire briefing. She stood at the back of the group and watched me with the steady, focused attention of someone who already knew everything I was saying and was simply confirming it against her existing information.
That one worried me. Not in the way that Torvald worried me — Torvald's problems were loud and solvable. Kess's quiet was the kind that contained things, and contained things had a way of emerging at inconvenient moments.
But that was Hallam's problem. I had a week. I'd show them the city, explain the system, and send them back to the desert with enough knowledge to understand what they'd seen and not enough to be dangerous.
"Questions?" I said.
Torvald raised his hand.
"About the governance system," I clarified.
His hand went down.
"About anything EXCEPT food."
His hand stayed down. But his eyes moved toward the market, where the lamb-on-a-stick stall was visible through the compound gate, and I knew — with the certainty of a woman who had managed soldiers for three years — that Torvald would be at that stall within the hour, official duties notwithstanding.
I sighed. This was going to be a long week.