The Boy Who Heard the Order
They left the shrine while the moon was still high.
Thomas could walk now, though every breath pulled against the bandage Kellan had made from the white strap of his ruined uniform. Owen rode part of the way on a handcart rescued from the village path. Sena moved ahead like a shadow. Kellan carried the clay vessel at his hip and a musket taken from the dead across his back.
Near the old signal trench above the ford, they found Sergeant Matthew Harker.
Harker had been one of Ashbourne’s loudest men, a broad-shouldered veteran who laughed when Thomas was humiliated by the wagons. Now he lay pinned beneath a shattered axle, one leg ruined, his coat black with blood.
He saw Thomas first and gave a cracked, humorless grin.
"So the traitor’s son survived."
Thomas almost kept walking.
Then he saw the wound and stopped.
Kellan watched without comment as Thomas crouched and checked the man’s pulse.
"You help me," Harker muttered, "after all that?"
Thomas looked at the splintered axle, then at the man’s face. "I’m deciding whether I help myself later if I don’t."
Together, Thomas and Kellan levered the axle aside. Harker screamed once, then bit it back until blood ran fresh from his gums.
Sena gave him poppy bark for the pain.
As the drug took the edge off, Harker’s bravado thinned.
"I heard the order in the command tent," he said at last, staring up into the smoke-shredded sky. "Ashbourne told Bell the ridge had to be cleared because surveyors found ore under the chapel stones. Bell asked about the families. Ashbourne said newspapers need martyrs, and martyrs are easiest to count when they cannot contradict the report." He closed his eyes. "I laughed. Christ help me, I laughed."
Owen began to cry quietly on the handcart.
Harker turned his head toward the sound. "The boy was there. He heard enough. I told him to forget it if he wanted to keep his rations."
Thomas held the sergeant’s shoulder to keep him from rolling into shock.
"Why tell us now?" he asked.
Harker’s mouth trembled. "Because I saw a little girl’s shoe in the crater where our fourth shell landed. Because I have spent twenty years obeying men with polished boots, and none of them are down here in the mud with me." He swallowed hard. "And because that big bastard carrying water to his enemy shamed me worse than any officer ever could."
Kellan said nothing.
He only handed Harker the clay vessel.
May you like
The sergeant drank with shaking hands.
Then he whispered, "Take it to the tribunal tent at Dunmere Crossing. The provost marshal is there by sunrise. If Ashbourne reaches him first, he’ll make a hero’s speech and bury the rest."
