Cadet Lieutenant Bailey’s words saddened me. My mind wandered briefly. I recalled my own brief glimpse of a wind wizard on the river during my journey to Old Thares. He had held his small sail wide to catch the wind he had summoned. His little craft had moved swiftly against the current. The sight had been both moving and mystical to me. Yet I also recalled with wrenching regret how it had ended. Some drunken fools on our riverboat had shot his sail full of holes. The iron shot they had used had disrupted the wizard’s spell as well. He’d been flung off his little vessel into the river. I believed he had drowned there, victim of the young noblemen’s jest.

“Lead can kill a man, but it takes cold iron to defeat magic.” My instructor’s words jolted me from my daydream.

“That our superior civilization replaces the primitive order of the Plainsmen is a part of the natural order,” he lectured. “And lest you feel too superior, be mindful that we Gernians have been victims of advanced technology ourselves. When Landsing made their discovery that allowed their cannon and long guns to shoot farther and more accurately than ours, they were able to defeat us and take from us our seacoast provinces. Much as we resent that, it was natural that once they had achieved a military technology that was superior to our own, they would take what they wished from us. Keep that in mind, cadets. We are entering an age of technology.

“The same principle applies to our conquest of the Plains. Shooting lead bullets at Plains warriors, we were able to maintain our borders by force of arms, but we could not expand them. It was only when some forward-thinking man realized that iron shot would destroy their magic as well as cause injury that we were able to push back their boundaries and impose our will on them. The disadvantages of iron shot, that it cannot be as easily reclaimed and remanufactured in the field as lead ball can, were offset by the military advantage it gave us in defeating their warriors.