Chapter 9 – Part 10

“Our sixth serious insubordination in a week,” the major said, slapping the report down on the battered wooden table in the command tent. The table wasn’t the only piece of furniture that wasn’t the most luxurious. The Reachers had no intention of making the tent where their most senior officers met easily identifiable.

They were many miles from the border, and some serious money had been paid for the services of a certain notorious Medani hunter of changelings to limit the spying against them but still they took such precautions.

“It’s close to winter,” snarled a half-elf. She’d lived with shifters most of her life in a remote area of the Reaches, and their habits had rubbed off on her. “They need to return to their tribes, their people, to hunt, to provide. Aundair is bloodied, and our people need not stay here. So tempers are short.”

“They’re soldiers,” snorted a white-haired Warden of the Wood. A druid and a warrior, he carried a bastard sword on his hip. He held the hilt in one hand, and stroked a wolf with the other. “They ought to do what they are told. Begin flogging the insubordinate ones.”

“You sound Deneith,” grumbled another human. He’d jumped up in rank quickly over the past year, mostly due to not dying. It was commonly thought he’d been promoted past his competence. “Send them home and they’ll be back in spring to fight twice as hard. Try to hold them, and they’ll rebel. They cared not for Aundair’s demands, they’ll not care for ours.”

“Ridiculous coddling,” snapped the white-haired man.

“Morale is a weapon!” the half-elf woman spat out, gnashing her teeth.

“We need to do something,” the major said, sitting in a creaky chair. “Either let them go or attack across the border. They can’t sit and do nothing for long.”

“Weather won’t allow it,” muttered a half-orc druid. “More rain, more sleet. Hard to get across the river.”

“We let them go home, we have to pay them, and nobody knows what will turn up in that wagon,” sighed a man with an eye patch. He hardly talked at these meetings, and when he did, he worried over money or food. “We need someone to calculate what we’ll pay them if we disband for the winter, and if we have it.”

“The tension is becoming racial,” the major said. “Some of the shifters feel that the Deneith humans look down on them.”

“They don’t?” snorted a shifter woman holding a longbow.

“If we go across,” the half-elven woman said. “Will the blue coats go with us?”

The conversation stopped, and their eyes turned towards the provisional commander. He was young, and he was a druid of only middling power, but he was a tactical genius. As such he’d been raised in rank to general, and been given command over the growing army near Varna. It was now the largest single concentration of Reacher troops, more than triple the size of the next largest. Originally conceived as a blacking force, it was being rethought following surprise victories that blunted the Aundairian advance.

“Breland will defend our borders, but not advance,” the provisional commander told them. Several of the officers present cursed, and the half-elven woman spat. “Given that they’ve had incidents of our own going rogue and attacking them despite the current truce between our nations, I suspect that they’ve no desire to be caught between our forces and Aundair. Aundair isn’t ready to attack us, not yet. We hurt them, and they’re tied up with Thrane so badly that they can’t come again. So for now, between Aundair’s reluctance and Brelish bolstering, we are safe.”

“We send them home then?” the major asked. “Or we take the initiative and attack?”

“According to Brelish intelligence, Karrns have sent undead to bolster the border between us and Aundair,” the provisional commander said. He pursed his lips. “I see no reason to wait the time it will take to pass this matter onto the high command, let’s start letting them go. Do it in phases, not everyone at once. That way we can stay on top of the accounting –” He directed a wry grin at the man with the eye patch. “- and we can remobilize if we need to.”

“How do we organize it?” the white-haired Warden asked.

“I’d talk to the middle officers, get rid of the troublesome first,” the provisional commander said. “Then the hardship cases, the folk with the farthest to go, and kin to provide for. Keep Deneith, and keep the cavalry. In general go for about a sixth of our force in weekly spacings, keeping the last sixth through the winter.”

“A sixth is Deneith and our full-time force,” the major noted.

The provisional commander nodded. “Yes. Everyone goes home.”