“I’m not surprised Bart turned her down,” Hesmucet said. “He really is enamored of his wife.”

“She-the blond girl-was quite miffed,” George said. “Marshal Bart’s wife would have been, had things gone otherwise. `Turned me down flat,’ the maid kept saying.”

“Let’s see if we can turn the traitors down flat,” Hesmucet said, and his second-in-command nodded agreement. Hesmucet wondered if George had tried to soothe the blond girl’s wounded feelings. Bold as he was, he lacked the nerve to ask.

Captain Gremio was still getting used to wearing epaulets on both shoulders. He’d spent the first two and a half years of the war as Captain Ormerod’s lieutenant in this company of crossbowmen recruited from in and around Karlsburg, the capital and chief town of Palmetto Province. But Ormerod had stopped a crossbow quarrel trying to stem the northerners’ rout at Proselytizers’ Rise, and so the company had been in Gremio’s hands ever since. He’d finally even got the rank that went with company command.

Not all the other officers in Colonel Florizel’s regiment approved of Gremio’s promotion. His lip curled. He had a long, thin, intelligent face-and a gift for making his lip curl and assuming other expressions at need: he was a reasonably successful barrister in Karlsburg.

His success in his chosen field kept his brother officers from making their sneers too open. But it also guaranteed that the sneers would be there. Almost all those putative brothers were noblemen, liege lords, owners of broad estates and overlords of serfs sometimes by the dozen, sometimes by the thousand. They looked down their noses at him because he made his living by his own wits and not from the sweat of blond brows.

He looked down his nose at them because they were, for the most part, blockheads of the purest ray serene. He also envied them because, in the society of the north, acquiring an estate full of hard-working serfs was the be-all and end-all. He was a hard-working curiosity. The nobles, in their opinion and his as well, were the salt of the earth.