Their victory smelled nothing like blood.
Kael knew this because the wind was wrong that evening — coming from the west, from the direction of the command pavilions on the hill — and it carried with it something that did not belong to the eastern section of the camp. Wood smoke from a real fire, not a cook fire. Something roasting. And beneath that, faint but unmistakable, the particular sweetness of wine being opened in quantity.
He stood outside the barracks and breathed it in and said nothing for a long time.
The eastern section smelled of mud and unwashed cloth and the particular staleness of men who had not slept properly in four days. The medical tent, forty feet away, smelled of things he was trying not to catalogue. Somewhere behind him someone was crying quietly and had been for an hour, and no one mentioned it because there was nothing to mention — it was simply the sound the evening made now, the way the valley had its own sound, the way every place develops its own sound once enough has happened in it.
From the hill, faintly: laughter.
Orren came to stand beside him. He had his arm wrapped — a deep bruise along the forearm from the second engagement, possibly a hairline fracture, the medical officer had been noncommittal — and he moved with the careful economy of someone managing pain without advertising it.
"Celebration dinner," Orren said, nodding toward the hill.
"Yes."
"Coalition command. Senior officers. Probably the noble observers as well."
"Yes."
Orren was quiet for a moment. "I've been thinking about the record book."
Kael had told him and Ysse that afternoon, in the careful low-voiced way you share information when you don't yet know who else is listening. Ysse had gone very still when he described his own name on the unlabeled list. Orren had asked three precise questions and then gone quiet in the way he went quiet when he was constructing something.
"The shorthand beside the names," Orren said now. "I've been trying to place it. I think it may be an administrative designation. Something used in planning documents rather than field documents."
"Planning documents."
"Pre-deployment planning. The kind written before soldiers are assigned. Before conscription, in some cases."
Kael looked at the hill. At the warm light coming from the pavilions. At the shapes moving behind the canvas walls, unhurried, well-fed, inhabiting an evening that bore no relationship to the evening happening forty feet from the medical tent.
They had been planned. Not recruited — planned. Selected from a list that existed before the recruitment officers walked through the Low Quarter.
The laughter drifted down again on the western wind.
He went inside before he decided to do something with the fury that would cost him more than the fury was worth.