Bloodforged by Nathan Long

him, but he inclined his head politely and turned his horse after his fellows. ‘The mess is for troopers only, but if you will consent to wait in my tent, I will bring you something.’
    Ulrika hid a smirk. In his tent, was it? Bread for bed, then? Fair enough. At least it made it easier for her to get away. ‘I thank you, sir. You are most kind.’
    They followed his company through the camp, at this hour silent and still, most of the soldiers asleep in their tents. Only a few lonely sentries watched their passage down the central avenue to a roped-off enclosure with the red and gold standard of the Gryphon Legion rising at the front.
    As the troopers entered and trotted through the ranks of tents to a stable area at the back, Chesnekov slowed to a stop before a tent.
    ‘Wait inside,’ he said as he handed her down. ‘I’ll return shortly.’
    ‘I will,’ she said. ‘And thank you again–’ But he was already cantering after the others.
    She saluted him, smiling wryly, and turned to leave the camp, but then paused, looking down at her leather jerkin and shirt. She couldn’t walk through Praag covered in blood. She stretched her senses towards his tent. There was no one inside it. She ducked through the flap and looked around in the darkness. A cot sat on either side, with battered trunks at their feet and bits of gear and horse tack scattered everywhere.
    Ulrika crossed to the cot that smelled like Chesnekov and opened the trunk. A second uniform and a neatly folded pile of civilian clothes lay within it. Ulrika pulled out a voluminous white shirt and held it up. Perfect. She quickly shucked her coat, jacket and blood-soaked shirt. There was a washbasin on a stand between the two cots. She filled it from the jug, washed her leathers, face and hair until the water no longer turned pink, then put on the new shirt.
    She cocked an ear as she reassembled the rest of her costume, listening to see if the lancer was coming back. He was not. She sighed. The poor fool would return with bread and sausage and something hot to drink, expecting an amorous trade, and she would be gone. Ah well, at least he could eat the sausage. She turned to the tent flap, then stopped. If she had made the decision that thieves were predators, and therefore permissible prey, she could not allow herself to be a thief, even if it was only something as trivial as a shirt.
    She took out one of the silver coins she had collected from the bandits she had met in her travels, and flipped it onto the pillow of Chesnekov’s cot. It would more than pay for another shirt, and would keep her on the path of honour, which was more important.
    She bowed to the empty cot. ‘Thank you, Petr Ilanovich Chesnekov,’ she murmured. ‘You have done me a great service. May you win glory for your name, and peace for Kislev.’
    And with that, she turned and walked out of the tent.

CHAPTER NINE
    OLD FRIENDS
    It was well after midnight, but though the ruins of the Novygrad were quiet, and the soldiers in the camp asleep in their cots, much of the rest of Praag seemed wide awake. As she wandered through the Merchant Quarter, people spilled into the street from taverns ablaze with lamplight and loud with manic laughter and singing. Young men argued philosophy on the corners while rich merchants and their wives rolled by in open carriages, bundled in furs and surrounded by well-armed escorts, and mercenaries from all over the Old World swaggered the streets, calling out to harlots, and women who only dressed like harlots.
    But side by side with all the frivolity were scenes of abject misery, and painful contrasts assaulted Ulrika everywhere she looked. In high windows, noble men and women, their faces hidden behind elaborate masks of enamel, gold and velvet, stuffed their faces with imported delicacies, while in the alleys below them, starving refugees, displaced by the devastation of the horde’s passage, huddled in makeshift tents, making meals of rats and