“Yes, sir,” I replied quietly.

CHAPTER 2

Harbinger

I was twelve when I saw the messenger that brought the first tidings of plague from the east.

Strange to say, it left little impression on me at the time. It was a day like many other days. Sergeant Duril, my tutor for equestrian skills, had been putting me through drills with Sirlofty all morning. The gelding was my father’s pride and joy, and that summer was the first that I was given permission to practice maneuvers on him. Sirlofty himself was a well-schooled cavalla horse, needing no drill in battle kicks or fancy dressage, but I was green to such things, and learned as much from my mount as I did from Sergeant Duril. Any errors we made were most often blamed on my horsemanship, and justifiably so. A horseman must be one with his mount, anticipating every move of his beast and never clinging or lurching in his saddle.

But that day’s drill was not kicks or leaps. It involved unsaddling and unbridling the tall black horse, then demonstrating that I could still mount and ride him without a scrap of harness on him. He was a tall, lean horse with straight legs like iron bars and a stride that made his gallop feel like we were flying. Despite Sirlofty’s patience and willingness, my boy’s height made it a struggle for me to mount him from the ground, but Duril had insisted I practice it. Over and over and over again. “A horse soldier has got to be able to get on any horse that’s available to him, in any sort of circumstances, or he might as well admit he has the heart of a foot soldier. Do you want to walk down that hill and tell your da that his soldier son is going to enlist as a foot soldier rather than rise up to a commission in the cavalla? Because if you do, I’ll wait up here while you do it. Better that I not witness what he’d do to you.”

It was the usual rough chivying I received from the man, and I flatter myself that I handled it better than most lads of my years would have. He had arrived at my father’s door some three years ago, seeking employment in his declining years, and my father had been only too relieved to hire him on. Duril replaced a succession of unsatisfactory tutors, and we had taken to one another almost immediately. Sergeant Duril had finished out his many long years of honorable military service, and it had seemed only natural to him that when he retired he would come to live on my father’s lands and serve Lord Burvelle as well as he had served Colonel Burvelle. I think he enjoyed taking on the practical training of Nevare Burvelle, Colonel Burvelle’s second son, the soldier son born to follow his father’s example as a military officer.

The sergeant was a shriveled little man, with a face as dark and wrinkled as jerky. His clothing was worn to the point of comfort, holding the shape of a man who was most often in the saddle. Even when they were clean, his garments were always the color of dust. On his head he wore a battered leather hat with a floppy brim and a hatband decorated with Plains beads and animal fangs. His pale eyes always peered watchfully from under the brim of his hat. What hair he had left was a mixture of gray and brown. Half his left ear was missing and he had a nasty scar where it should have been. To make up for that lack, he carried a Kidona ear in a pouch on his belt. I’d only seen it once, but it was unmistakably an ear. “Took his for trying to take mine. It was a barbaric thing to do, but I was young, and I was angry, with blood running down the side of my neck when I did it. Later that evening, when the fighting was over, then I looked at what I’d done, and I was ashamed. Ashamed. But it was too late to put it back with his body and I couldn’t bring myself to just throw it away. I’ve kep’ it ever since to remind me of what war can do to a young man. And that’s why I’m showing it to you now,” he had told me. “Not so you can run tell your little sister and have your lady ma complain to the Colonel that I’m learning you wild ways, but so that you can think on that. Before we could teach the Plainspeople to be civilized, we had to teach them they couldn’t beat us in a fight. And we had to do that without getting down on their level. But when a man is fighting for his life, that’s a hard thing to remember. Especially when you’re a young man and out on your own, ’mong savages. Some of our lads, good honest lads when they left home, well, they wound up little better than the Plainspeople we fought against before we were through. A lot of them never went home. Not jus’ the ones who died, but the ones who couldn’t remember how to be civilized. They stayed out there, took Plains wives, some of ’em, and became part of what we’d gone out there to tame. Remember that, young Nevare. Hold on to who you are, when you’re a man grown and an officer like the Colonel.”