A teddy-bear popped into her field of view. Nessilka winced, but it was only Blanchett.
“He wants to know when we’re attacking,” said the owner of the teddy-bear.
“Tell him dawn,” said the sergeant.
Blanchett, unlike much of the Nineteenth, wore a helmet. It was a complicated mass of fangy bone and spiky metal. He had taken it from a dead orc and it didn’t fit terribly well, but Blanchett almost never took it off, even to sleep.
You couldn’t really blame him. A few months back, the Mechanics Corps had been working on a design for a new showerhead. The resulting explosions had involved terrific loss of life on both sides, and Blanchett had taken a flying log upside the head.
A battle had been raging at the time, so nobody really noticed this, and had chalked him up as missing, presumed dead.
Two days later, covered in soot, with a knot on his head the size of an eagle’s egg, Blanchett had staggered into camp, clutching the teddy-bear. It was ragged and moth-eaten and was missing an eye, which gave it a permanent squint. As teddy-bears go, it would be difficult to find a more disreputable specimen. Nobody knew where he’d gotten it, and nobody was quite willing to ask.
The teddy-bear, so far as Nessilka could tell, was now the brains of the pair. Blanchett refused to answer any query that was not directed at the bear, and only spoke when translating for the bear. In battle, the bear rode on top of his helmet.
It had been a long war. By that point, everybody had just figured it was easier to go along, particularly since Blanchett seemed rather more intelligent and helpful these days, under the bear’s direction.
“He says okay,” said Blanchett.
Nessilka nodded. Blanchett made the teddy-bear salute and went off to get some sleep.
Weatherby stood up, tugging at his clothes, and said “Right, then! I’m—”
“Not tonight, Weatherby. There’s a battle tomorrow.”
Weatherby heaved a sigh. “Fine…”
“You can desert next week. That’ll be fun, won’t it?” Gods, thought Nessilka, listening to her own wheedling voice, these troops don’t need a sergeant, they need a babysitter.
“Wanna desert now…” Weatherby muttered, slouching off to his tent. He kicked sullenly at a rock. Nessilka stared up at the sky and counted to ten.
She finally looked down, and then around the Nineteenth. Algol and Murray, her corporals. Thumper and Weatherby and the twins. Blanchett and his teddy-bear. The half-dozen others who didn’t make trouble and just kept their heads down and tried to get through things. The great grim goblin gods only know who’d be alive after the battle tomorrow. All you could do was pray.
She wasn’t very good at it—her prayers tended to sound like “You! Up there! Pay attention and heaven help you if you don’t keep an eye on my boys!”—but as she had every night since becoming sergeant, Nessilka prayed.
SIX
The unicorn was gone, and the foal with her. Sings-to-Trees felt a moment of pure relief. The stall needed mucking out, but that was fine. He’d rather have mucked a dozen stalls than deal with a grumpy post-partum unicorn.
It was, all things considered, a glorious late spring morning. Birds sang in the trees and the air was that tantalizing temperature which was just warm enough so that it didn’t feel like anything, until a delicious cool breeze would flicker across your skin. The leaves had come in brilliant, blinding green, and glittering like hot stained glass when the sun lanced through them.
Sings-to-Trees went around the side of the ramshackle barn, found his shovel, and went to work on the stall. It was hot work, lifting each shovelful into the wooden wheelbarrow, and he was sweating by the time he wheeled the first load up to the garden. Unicorn dung was pretty safe fertilizer. Sometimes the magical creatures had pretty unusual things in their waste. He’d once nursed an injured peryton, a great grey stag with the wings of a heron and the carnivorous diet of a lion, for two weeks. He’d gone through a lot of chickens. Afterwards, he’d put the dung on his tomato plants, and they’d grown six feet practically overnight. He could have handled that, but the fruit grew tiny green antlers. He could probably have handled that, too, even after they shed their velvet and got unsettlingly sharp, but he started finding the tomatoes gored and dripping seeds in the morning. Then the nearby zucchini began showing up with scarred rinds and suspicious gouges. Eventually he was down to one big eight-point tomato buck, a vicious vegetable he suspected was plotting to kill him. He’d put on his cockatrice-handling gloves, and torn the whole patch out before things got out of hand.
He’d left that corner empty for a year, and then put in chard. Chard seemed pretty innocuous. Not a lot of mayhem available to chard. He didn’t actually like chard, but there were plenty of animals that came through that would. So far it hadn’t done anything suspicious. He shuddered to think what would have happened with potatoes.