Emerson · Stonemarch Depot, Mercer State
1723
The summer intake reached Stonemarch Depot on a rainy Tuesday and stood in formation in the yard for two hours and twenty minutes. Emerson counted. He didn’t know why, except that counting gave him something to do besides being cold. Four places down the line, a boy began to cry without making a sound. Emerson watched the barracks door and tried not to notice.
Rain found its way under his collar and whenever he shifted his weight water moved inside his boots. The yard smelled of churned mud and the rain drummed steadily on the roof of the building they were not yet allowed to enter. After the first hour, he stopped looking for a break in the clouds. There were three hundred of them. He had expected an army. This was hardly more people than lived on two streets in Felsberg. Some of the recruits looked younger than seventeen.
Sergeant Volt came out at last. He stood under the eaves and waited. “Sixty of you will not finish.”
He spoke so quietly that Emerson strained to hear him over the rain. “I don’t know which sixty, and neither do you. Anyone who thinks he does is already among them. Your kit’s inside. You have until the horn.”
He went back through the door. At first nobody moved because they were so used to standing still that permission to move felt like a trick. Then someone near the front broke ranks and the rest hurried after him. Kira had barely shifted her feet the whole time. As she passed the crying boy, she glanced at him.
“It’s the standing,” she said. “Nobody tells you it’s worse than the running.”
He dragged a sleeve across his face. “My feet have gone numb.”
“Mine too. Come on, before they find somewhere else for us to stand.”
She said it so casually. He followed her toward the door and by the time he reached it, he had stopped crying.
Stonemarch lay almost three hundred miles inland where the hill country climbed toward the foothills of the Ironspine. At night, wind came down off the peaks and found every gap between the barracks planks. It left the barracks as cold as a woodshed. The blankets smelled faintly of the men who slept under them before. The sergeants agreed that the summer intake was the worst they had seen in twenty years. Emerson suspected they made the same claim every season. He kept that opinion to himself.
Training lasted ten weeks. By the fourth day, he understood its pattern. Finishing one task only meant starting another. They ran until an instructor decided they had run enough and then the walk back to the barracks was treated as a problem the recruits had somehow created.
The morning horn sounded at the fifth hour. Cold followed him through most of the day. By late afternoon, exhaustion usually made it irrelevant. On the second morning a boy from the harbor district broke his wrist and was sent home before Emerson learned his name. By the second week, new blisters had formed over the places where the old ones split. He stopped examining his feet in the third week unless a stocking stuck to them. The food gave everyone something to complain about when the recruits were too tired to complain about the marches. They grumbled about the stew and when the stew improved, they found fault with the bread. Emerson ate whatever was placed in front of him.
Within a fortnight he could feel when a strap was about to fail. He could find his boots in the darkness without waking the man beside him. He expected training to hurt but he did not expect to enjoy it. Each morning the horn told him what to do and there was work he could finish even if more always followed it. Somewhere in the same ranks stood the two people he had grown up with. He belonged here.
He did not tell them. Brice would look at his blistered feet and ask which part of the experience Emerson mistook for happiness. Kira might’ve understood. That possibility unsettled him more.
So he worked. Other recruits could outrun him. A horseshoer’s son from Alderbrook could carry a load Emerson struggled to lift. What Emerson had was persistence. Whenever an instructor found something wrong, Emerson corrected it and began from the start. He was learning how often soldiers were expected to do exactly that.
The obstacle course ran along the eastern side of the depot. Where it turned back toward the barracks stood twelve feet of planked timber with a rope over the top and not a single foothold. A squad had to get over it together. The stronger recruits usually climbed first and helped the others over. Anyone foolish enough to clear the wall alone was sent back. The sergeants never explained why.
Kira reached the top first every time. Her own squad soon stopped remarking on it. Recruits from other squads still stared when she swung a leg over the planks before they began to climb. She was neither the strongest recruit nor the fastest. The horseshoer’s son could lift her with hardly any effort, and on the longer runs two girls from Iron Port regularly pulled ahead of her. It took Emerson until the second week to understand why.
Everyone else slowed on the approach. He did the same and shortened a step while he judged the jump. Kira kept running and caught the rope as she sprang. Her boot struck the planks hard enough to drive her upward before the timber could stop her. Then she reached the top and turned to see who needed a hand. By the end of the week, every recruit in the squad had taken Kira’s hand at least once. Being first gave her time to come back for whoever was last.
Emerson asked her about the approach while they sat on the boot bench. His fingers were still shaking from the course. “How do you keep from slowing down?”
“Why would I slow down?”
“Because there’s a wall.”
She looked at him, then went back to her laces. “It’s there either way. Slowing down won’t make it shorter.”
“It gives you time to think.”
“About what?”
He could think of several answers. None of them would get him over the wall.
Kira pulled off a boot and set it under the bench. “You know where the rope is, Em.”
That was all the answer she had. He wanted some trick or technique for when his body seemed to pull back even after his mind had decided to move. He was still thinking about it long after his hands were steady enough to undo the knot.
Next time he would not slow before the wall.
He tried it the next morning. He kept his stride all the way in and sprang a step too soon. His fingers closed a hand’s width under the rope and the planks came at him. He struck them with his chest and both palms and slid down the timber into the mud. The rough boards took the skin off the heels of his hands on the way.
He jumped for the rope from a standstill and missed it again. In the end he reached up and took Kira’s hand like everyone else. His palms left two red smears across her wrist. The instructor waited until the last of the ninth squad dropped down the far side.
“Ninth squad! Back to the start. If you have time to talk at the wall you have time for another lap.”
Nobody spoke to him on the lap. At supper a recruit at the far end of the bench leaned out to find him. “Forger! My legs want a word with you.” The bench laughed.
Emerson held his spoon in the tips of his fingers so the handle would not touch his palms. He ate without answering.
Empty bunks became common in the third week. Nobody announced a departure. A blanket lay untouched when the horn sounded and by breakfast someone had taken it. The gap usually lasted until the next evening when another recruit shifted his belongings into the space. It happened eleven times that week. The sergeants still called them three hundred, the number they arrived with. Most of the recruits lost track of who was gone.
“Wexler,” Brice said after the fourth.
Emerson looked up from his boots. “What?”
“The lad whose bunk they cleared. Reddish hair, bad knee.” Brice turned the buckle he was polishing under the cloth. “He came from somewhere past Alderbrook.”
“I remember him.”
“Nobody said his name at breakfast.”
“Were we meant to say something?”
Brice stopped polishing. Emerson did not mean to sound careless but he heard it once the question was out.
“He was here Tuesday. Now he isn’t.” Brice looked toward the stripped bunk. “If we can’t remember a man’s name eighteen hours after he’s gone, I don’t much fancy our own chances of being remembered.”
Emerson searched for an answer and found nothing he wanted to say aloud. “Wexler,” he said at last.
Brice nodded and went back to the buckle.
By the end of the week Brice knew the name of every recruit in the squad. He could tell Emerson where each one came from, usually because he remembered a place mentioned in a story the recruit told him. He never set out to learn these things. A question about a badly darned stocking turned into a conversation about someone’s sister. Before the horn cut it short, Brice would know whether she was older and why the recruit had not written to her yet.
The ninth squad drew their muskets at the end of that week. Sergeant Harwin handed them out at the armory door and wrote each lock’s number beside their name in his book. He was a big man who never hurried and never let anyone else stop. The room behind him smelled of gun oil and cold iron. Emerson looked at the lock first. Someone had set it so close into the stock that he could not have slid a hair into the seam.
“Eight movements,” Harwin said. “You’ll learn them in order. Then you’ll do them until you can do them asleep.”
He called the count and the ninth squad followed it. On two they bit the end off a cartridge that wasn’t there. At the end of the count the flints came down along the line one after another, like hammers that could not find the beat. Sparks jumped into the empty pans and died.
“Sergeant,” Hobbs said. “When do we fire them?”
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“Powder is bought. Sweat is free.” Harwin walked on down the line. “One!”
“Who bought it?” Brice muttered.
“The first muster did, Schlaus. Out of their own pay.” Harwin had not raised his voice. “One!”
The trouble was the ramrod. It came out from under the barrel on the fifth count and went back on the seventh. Each time it ran through Emerson’s hand. The rope wall had taken the skin off the heels of his palms and the new skin had barely begun to close. By the fourth time through, the steel came back slick and red.
Harwin stopped in front of him. “Wipe that. Rust is difficult to remove.”
Emerson wiped it on his sleeve. After that the ramrod found the same place on every count. He made himself do it anyway.
In the afternoon Harwin hung straw sacks from a beam behind the armory and had them fix bayonets. “You’ll get one volley,” he said. “Then it’s close work.”
Kira went first. She drove the point in up to the socket and twisted it free. The sack was still swinging when she stepped back into line. When Emerson’s turn came, the stock slid in his wet grip. He drove the point and the butt jarred back into his palm so hard that he nearly let go.
That night he lay with his hands open on the blanket so nothing would touch them.
Their first night exercise came in the fourth week. The instructors sent them onto the eastern slopes with one lantern for every four recruits. They were given a compass bearing and told to reach a marker post six miles out before dawn. The ground would have been easy enough by daylight. In the dark, a patch of shadow might be firm earth or a drop deep enough to break a leg. Lantern light caught the wet grass just ahead and made everything beyond it harder to judge. The smell of crushed stems rose from under their boots and somewhere below them water ran over stone.
Two squads lost their way within forty minutes. One spent the rest of the night almost a mile east of where its recruits thought they were and discovered the mistake at dawn. The ninth squad reached the marker eleven minutes early. Afterward, when anyone asked how they managed it, the answer usually dissolved into an argument over who let the lanterns die.
Emerson knew. He had counted from the gate. He counted how many of his marching paces covered the measured stretch beside the barracks. The slopes made his stride less reliable but he still kept a rough count of the ground behind them. Counting gave his mind something to do, just as it had during those two hours and twenty minutes in the rain.
By the third mile their last lantern burned dry. Emerson tried to keep a small flame alive in his palm. It gave them enough light to read the compass. But whenever he shifted his attention to his footing, it dwindled. Before long, he could either keep it lit or watch where he stepped. They stopped to check the bearing. Someone insisted they must be close to the marker by now. Someone else wanted to turn back toward a low ridge they passed earlier.
“We’ve nearly half the distance left,” Emerson said.
“How do you know?”
He explained the count. Kira held the compass close to his flame while he checked it.
“That way,” she said, pointing across the slope.
They followed her for the next stretch. At each halt, Emerson made enough light to read the needle and worked out how far they still had to go. He counted between halts. His count could not make the ground any easier but it gave them a reason to hold their bearing when the dark made the distance feel endless.
It did not feel like taking command. The others simply waited for him to finish and started walking when he did. At the marker post, Volt wrote something down. He offered no explanation and Emerson knew better than to ask for one.
On the way back, Kira walked beside him. “You counted the whole way?”
“From the gate.”
“You might have mentioned it.”
“I did. You were telling someone to lift the lantern.”
She considered that. “I thought you were talking to yourself.”
“I usually know what I’m saying.”
“Then say it louder next time.”
She stayed beside him for a while before moving up the line to see what was holding the others back. Emerson watched her go. From Kira, that was as much praise as he knew how to ask for.
Later that week Brice returned from the washhouse with someone Emerson had seen around the barracks but never spoken to. Brice guided him toward the mess bench with the confidence of a man bringing home a friend everyone else had somehow neglected. “This is Caleb, from Wellspring. He’ll tell you about it once he’s done explaining what the cooks have against bread.”
“Nobody bakes it this badly by accident,” Caleb said in a country voice slower and rounder than any in Felsberg.
He was broad through the shoulders and about Emerson’s height. Damp blond hair clung around his temples from the washhouse. “I’ve seen a man make bad bread on purpose. Even that was better.”
Emerson slid along the bench to make room. “Why would anyone do that?”
“My uncle was making a point to my aunt.”
“Did she take it?”
“She made him eat the loaf.”
Emerson laughed. Brice grinned and showed the chipped front tooth from a fall at nine. Over the years he told four stories about that fall. Caleb seemed the sort of person who would notice the inconsistencies and argue about them long after everyone else stopped.
Caleb had come to Stonemarch with friends of his own. Reiner sat down at the end of the bench and made it creak. He was an enormous, brown-haired boy who acknowledged Kira with a nod. She nodded back. Apparently that was sufficient introduction for both of them.
Marta arrived a moment later and stole the empty place beside Caleb. She was small. Her auburn hair was cut bluntly at the jaw and kept falling across her eyes no matter how often she shoved it aside. On the course, she moved quickly enough to escape most of the instructors’ attention. At the mess bench, she made up for all that restraint. She borrowed Caleb’s knife without asking and cut into her ration.
She talked fast and loud enough for the next bench to hear. “Six sergeants, and every bastard finds a new way to waste our time. The one on the western yard made us clean the mud off the shovels before we went back to digging.”
“Did you ask him why?” Brice said.
“I’m still here, aren’t I?”
Emerson laughed before he could stop himself. She had the worst mouth he had heard at the depot and it did not take the rest of the intake long to agree.
“At least someone understands.” Marta pointed the borrowed knife toward him.
Caleb calmly pushed the blade away from Emerson’s face. “Try not to threaten the new acquaintances until they’ve finished eating.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You knew each other before coming here?” Emerson asked Caleb.
“Same street. Reiner’s mother taught us to read. Marta’s mother taught us to swear. We’ve seldom been at a loss for words.”
“My mother taught you nothing.”
“Education takes many forms.”
Brice nearly choked on his drink.
Reiner had taken Caleb’s bread and was inspecting it. He pressed one thumb on the center and the dough collapsed. “The middle’s raw.”
“We were discussing that before you sat down,” Caleb told him.
Reiner shrugged. He was right. Emerson was learning that Reiner’s remarks were usually right and usually arrived too late to be any use. Reiner’s father was a Ward of the Joyce fjords who had come over the bay as a young man, and Caleb said no Ward had ever hurried a sentence. Reiner showed Kira the dough. Kira nodded.
“Raw.”
Caleb closed his eyes. “I’m surrounded by scholars.”
“We came together too,” Emerson said. “From Felsberg.”
“We noticed.” Caleb tore a smaller piece from the crust and glanced around the mess hall. “There must be nine little companies of friends in this intake, most of them the size of ours. Everyone’s frightened, so they find somebody from home and stand close.”
He said it lightly, then ate the bread with sincere disappointment. “Still terrible.”
Brice laughed. Emerson looked along the bench. Kira was listening while Marta complained about the sergeants again and Reiner continued eating unbothered. Brice had known Caleb a few days and already spoke to him as though they’d known each other for years. There were still weeks left at Stonemarch. Emerson wondered how many little groups like theirs had arrived together and how many would leave that way after training.
By the end of the fourth week, Sergeant Volt wanted to know why the ninth squad always had its kit ready first. Eighteen days had passed without a single missing item marked against them. Other squads misplaced straps or abandoned mess tins after meals. The ninth had begun checking before anyone ordered it to. It was because of Brice.
One morning, while the barracks still sat half-dark around them, he noticed the recruit beside him searching under his bunk. “What’ve you lost?”
“My spare strap.”
Brice crouched without being asked. They found it twisted beneath the bedframe.
The next morning, Brice glanced at the same recruit before formation. “You have everything today?”
The recruit checked. He did.
A few days later, Brice asked someone else. Soon the question no longer belonged to him. It moved from bunk to bunk while the squad dressed.
One morning, a recruit at the far end of the room called back through the noise. “Brice! You checked yours?”
Brice paused with one boot half-laced. He looked around at the men inspecting their own kit and then down at his. “No.”
Someone laughed.
“Then get on with it.”
Brice shook his head. “I create one useful habit and immediately become its first victim.”
The room laughed with him. But everyone checked.
Volt noticed. Emerson saw him look twice at two recruits who had arrived at Stonemarch hating each other and now seemed to get along. The feud began over something neither man could explain properly anymore. By the third week, nobody cared. Brice did.
Not about the argument itself. About the recruits. He listened to one until the anger ran out and something more embarrassing emerged beneath it. Then he listened to the other. Whatever Brice told them afterward worked. Within days the two could sit at the same table. Volt noticed that too.
Brice still finished near the rear of the longer runs. At the wall, he was usually the one staring up at Kira’s outstretched hand. He hated that more than he admitted.
“Again,” he muttered one morning after failing to catch the rope.
Kira leaned over the top. “You planning to live down there?”
“Considering it.”
“Poor choice of housing.”
“Very affordable.”
She reached down and Brice took her hand. Later, he joked about it.
According to the sergeants’ marks, Brice was the weakest of the three from Felsberg. Emerson knew because he kept track of how far behind Brice finished on the runs. He also knew how much longer the wall took Brice than it took him. Brice was usually the first to point out his own mistakes.
“Lost twenty seconds today.”
“You also helped Hobbs over the trench,” Emerson said.
Brice shrugged. “He was stuck.”
“That cost you time.”
“He was still stuck.” Then Brice went back to cleaning mud from his boots.
That was the part Emerson did not understand. Brice did not count the recruit who came looking for him after receiving a letter from home or the arguments that ended differently because he happened to be sitting nearby. He believed the sergeants’ marks so wholeheartedly that Emerson believed them too. So when the ninth squad began moving more quickly than the others, nobody thought to recognize it.
Not even Brice.