The Heroes

cracked bowl onto his face and rubbed it with a cloth, started pulling yesterday’s trousers on.
    ‘You’ll still be early,’ she said, leaning back on her elbows and watching him dress.
    ‘I have to be twice as early. You know I do.’
    ‘You looked so peaceful. I didn’t have the heart to wake you.’
    ‘I’m supposed to be helping coordinate the attack.’
    ‘I suppose someone has to.’
    He froze for a moment with his shirt over his head, then pulled it down. ‘Perhaps … you should stay at your father’s headquarters today, up on the fell. Most of the other wives have already headed back to Uffrith.’
    ‘If we could only pack Meed off along with the rest of the clothes-obsessed old women, perhaps we’d have a chance of victory.’
    Hal soldiered on. ‘There’s only you and Aliz dan Brint, now, and I worry about you—’
    He was painfully transparent. ‘You worry that I’ll make a scene with your incompetent commanding officer, you mean.’
    ‘That too. Where’s my—’
    She kicked his sword rattling across the boards and he had to stoop to retrieve it. ‘It’s a shame, that a man like you should have to take orders from a man like Meed.’
    ‘The world is full of shameful things. That’s a long way from the worst.’
    ‘Something really should be done about him.’
    Hal was still busy fumbling with his sword-belt. ‘There’s nothing to be done but to make the best of it.’
    ‘Well … someone could mention the mess he’s making to the king.’
    ‘You may not be aware of this, but my father and the king had a minor falling out. I don’t stand very high in his Majesty’s favour.’
    ‘Your good friend Colonel Brint does.’
    Hal looked up sharply. ‘Fin. That’s low.’
    ‘Who cares how high it is if it helps you get what you deserve?’
    ‘
I
care,’ he snapped, dragging the buckle closed. ‘You get on by doing the right thing. By hard work, and loyalty, and doing as you’re told. You don’t get on by … by …’
    ‘By what?’
    ‘Whatever it is you’re doing.’
    She felt a sudden, powerful urge to hurt him. She wanted to say she could easily have married a man with a father who wasn’t the most infamous traitor of his generation. She wanted to point out he only had the place he had now through her father’s patronage and her constant wheedling, and that left to his own devices he’d have been demonstrating hard work and loyalty as a poor lieutenant in a provincial regiment. She wanted to tell him he was a good man, but the world was not the way good people thought it was. Fortunately, he got in first.
    ‘Fin, I’m sorry. I know you want what’s best for us. I know you’ve done a lot for me already. I don’t deserve you. Just … let me do things my way. Please. Just promise me you won’t do anything … rash.’
    ‘I promise.’ She’d make sure whatever she did was well thought out. That or she’d just break her promise. She didn’t take them terribly seriously.
    He smiled, somewhat relieved, and bent to kiss her. She returned it halfheartedly, but then, when she felt his shoulders slump, remembered he’d be in danger today, and she pinched his cheek and shook it about. ‘I love you.’ That was why she had come up here, no? Why she was sloggingthrough the mud along with the soldiers? To be with him. To support him. To steer him in the right direction. The Fates knew, he needed it.
    ‘I love you more,’ he said.
    ‘It’s not a competition.’
    ‘No?’ And he went out, pulling on his jacket. She loved Hal. Really she did. But if she waited for him to get what they deserved through honesty and good nature she’d be waiting until the sky fell in.
    And she did not plan to live out her days as some colonel’s wife.
    Corporal Tunny had long ago acquired a reputation as the fiercest sleeper in his Majesty’s army. He could sleep on anything, in any situation, and wake in an instant ready for action or, better still, to avoid it. He’d slept through the whole assault at Ulrioch in the lead trench fifty strides from the breach, then woken just in time to hop between the corpses as the fighting petered out and snatch as fine a share of the booty as anyone who actually drew steel that day.
    So a patch of waterlogged forest in the midst of a spotty drizzle with nothing but a smelly oilskin over his head was good as a feather bed to him. His recruits weren’t anywhere near so tough in the eyelids, though. Tunny snapped awake in the chill gloom