He wants to come back but he won’t ask.\u00a0 He would do any work you gave him.<\/em><\/p>\nWhat work could he give a blind man, when they might be in combat any time?\u00a0\u00a0 Yes, he had hired a half-blind captain but the man still had one eye.\u00a0 Stammel…Arcolin squeezed his eyes against the thought of telling Stammel he must leave the Company.\u00a0 At least he must take Stammel back north, back to the Stronghold, to safety.\u00a0 He called Burek into his tent and showed him the letters.<\/p>\n
“Blind!” Burek said.\u00a0 “I thought he would live or die, and if he lived, recover.”<\/p>\n
“It is…hard to imagine,” Arcolin said.\u00a0 “Hard for us all; you knew him only a short while, but for many of us–”<\/p>\n
“You will pension him, surely.”<\/p>\n
“I will think,” Arcolin said.\u00a0 “Go find Devlin, and send him to me.”\u00a0 Devlin, who had been Stammel’s corporal so long before the disruptions of Siniava’s war promoted him.<\/p>\n
“You have word,” Devlin said, as he came into the tent.<\/p>\n
“He’s alive, but blind,” Arcolin said.\u00a0 Devlin looked stunned, the way he himself felt.\u00a0\u00a0 “He can walk; he can even drill, after a fashion.\u00a0 He threw a yeoman in an unarmed fighting drill.\u00a0 The Marshal pressured the Council to give him a small pension, if he wants to stay there, and will find him a room in someone’s house.”<\/p>\n
“No,” Devlin said.\u00a0 “No, that can’t be.”<\/p>\n
“I’m sorry,” Arcolin said.\u00a0 “But it’s true.”<\/p>\n
“That’s not what I meant, sir.\u00a0 I understand: he’s blind.\u00a0 But he can’t–he will die–if he’s penned up in some spare room, alone, without us.\u00a0 Sir, you have to bring him here.\u00a0 He can walk; he can march with us.\u00a0 If he can drill, he’ll get stronger.\u00a0 He knows so much–he can teach me, and Ar\u00f1e and Jenits and the rest…”<\/p>\n
“But if we’re in combat–he can’t fight–”<\/p>\n
“He can at least be with us,” Devlin said.\u00a0 “I know that’s what he’d want–he probably won’t ask you–but it’s what he wants.\u00a0 What he needs.\u00a0 And we need him.\u00a0 If he’d lost a leg or something, if he couldn’t keep up–but you say he can–”<\/p>\n
“I say the Marshal says he’s well enough to move out of the grange, but–ours is a hard life for men with sight.”<\/p>\n
“And the life he knows,” Devlin said.<\/p>\n
“The Duke,” Arcolin began; Devlin interrupted him.<\/p>\n
“It’s not Phelan’s company any more, sir, but yours.\u00a0 Maybe you think Kieri Phelan would have sent him back north, but you can do what you want.”<\/p>\n
He wanted Stammel back, but he wanted the Stammel who no longer existed, the Stammel who had not lost his sight because Arcolin agreed to a civilian’s request.\u00a0 But he wanted Stammel back, here, to talk to, to steady the troops.<\/p>\n
“They’ll need horses,” he said.\u00a0 “Let me think–Stammel should have my ambler; he’s steady and a smooth ride.\u00a0 He won’t have ridden in awhile.\u00a0 Ar\u00f1e or Doggal can ride the fast one I left up there.\u00a0 And four more.\u00a0 We don’t have four spares, unless we don’t move and send the wagon teams…or switch out mules…”<\/p>\n
“I’ll take care of that, sir,” Devlin said.\u00a0 “Thank you, sir!”<\/p>\n
Arcolin wrote out the orders for Ar\u00f1e.\u00a0 He wanted to go himself, but the cohort could not afford to lose another senior person; the courier could take the orders back.\u00a0 He wrote a letter of thanks to Marshal Harak and one each for the Captains of Tir and Falk.<\/p>\n
Only a few days later, a small party of horse travelers proved to be the missing six, all wearing absurd floppy straw hats over their helmets.\u00a0 Arcolin thought Stammel looked perfectly normal at first, and wondered if he had regained his sight, but then he saw Suli, riding beside him, touch his arm and take the rein of the horse.<\/p>\n
………………………………………….<\/p>\n
So Stammel returns to the\u00a0 Company.\u00a0\u00a0 But that’s not the whole story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Since the previous snippet was supposed to be posted Monday (but, fooled by DST, I sent it after midnight) here’s the snippet that *should* come today. I’ve previously posted a snippet that comes shortly before this one, about Stammel’s first experience in unarmed combat drill after his blinding.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Those who haven’t read the earlier snippet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,81,115],"tags":[22,106,28],"class_list":["post-1102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contents","category-kings-of-the-north","category-snippet","tag-characters","tag-contents","tag-snippet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1102"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1103,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102\/revisions\/1103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}