Ryder was promoted in a courtyard whose banners did not stir, on a morning whose silence he should have been reading as a warning. He had wanted the rank for ten years and had imagined the ceremony in dozens of versions, and none of those versions had felt quite like this one. Captain Darius pinned the rank to him. Major Raven, who attended decisions and not ceremonies, was present for it.
His first command was not in the field of war. He was given a platoon and sent to establish stability in a sector of Shadowglade Forest. He understood quickly that stability, in Raven's vocabulary, was a word for situations that were already, quietly, unstable. He was right. Within days he had dead birds without cause, a river too perfect for a forest that had emptied around it, and footprints inside his perimeter that began and ended in the middle of nowhere. Within weeks he had two empty soldiers on cots in his medical tent — Hollis, and then a second — and a borrowed word coming out of the first.
He measured. He doubled watches. He paired men for latrine trips and wrote it into the log. He did not drink the water. He held the perimeter in good order until Raven joined him, and then he marched with Raven into the deeper green and saw the clearing that should not have existed, and the soldier who walked into it, and the half-smile a borrowed face made under a stranger's control. He saw, on the road to Darklume, the cloaked figure with the small green light at chest height, and he understood at last that he was tracking a man.
He is still measuring. It is the only weapon he has not yet been ordered to put down.
