You’ve already met Poldin M’dierra, the nephew of Aesil M’dierra, commander of Golden Company.\u00a0\u00a0 Aesil is presently the only woman running a mercenary company in Paksworld, and she’s very good at it.\u00a0\u00a0 Poldin, her nephew, came to her with the usual starry-eyed romantic-idealistic notions about being a mercenary, despite having known Aesil all his life.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He’s learned a lot, since he came–he’s spent time with Fox Company, he’s now familiar with most parts of Valdaire, he rides better, he’s learning some fighting skills.\u00a0 But he’s still a boy at the age where boys shoot up fast and sometimes do foolish things.<\/p>\n
This snippet may or may not be a spoiler, depending on whether the 2000+ words I wrote today actually do fit in the final book, or just some of them, or (worst case) none of them.<\/p>\n
Who: Poldin M’dierra, mounted on\u00a0 his aunt’s favorite charger, which he’s been allowed to ride across Valdaire to Fox Company’s winter quarters, to deliver a message.<\/p>\n
Where: Fox Company training fields<\/p>\n
The stallion was jigging before Poldin even got lined up, and would not walk composedly along the line.\u00a0 Poldin missed the first rag ball, knocked off the second, and when he lifted the reins slightly, the horse charged forward, straight along the line but so fast that Poldin missed all but two of the balls and almost fell off when the horse skidded to a halt, wheeled, and charged back down the line full tilt.\u00a0 On the wrong side of the line.\u00a0 Poldin reached across and caught two more balls, then concentrated on stopping his mount, this time managing a straight stop.<\/p>\n
No one said anything.\u00a0 No one laughed.\u00a0 Captain Burek rode over, close enough to speak quietly.\u00a0 “I gather you didn’t plan that.”<\/p>\n
…………………………………………<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You’ve already met Poldin M’dierra, the nephew of Aesil M’dierra, commander of Golden Company.\u00a0\u00a0 Aesil is presently the only woman running a mercenary company in Paksworld, and she’s very good at it.\u00a0\u00a0 Poldin, her nephew, came to her with the usual starry-eyed romantic-idealistic notions about being a mercenary, despite having known Aesil all his life.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[115],"tags":[28],"class_list":["post-1652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-snippet","tag-snippet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1652"}],"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=1652"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1653,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1652\/revisions\/1653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}