Free The Shadow of Elysium (Shadow Campaigns) by Django Wexler Page A

practice among the troops he commanded, as a demonstration of their affection for their strange commander. “They tried a narrow swing around the hamlet, and ran into us. So what’s next?”
    Jane shrugged. “You’re the soldier.”
    Winter grimaced, but it was true, in a sense. While there were times when she still felt like a fraud—it was hard not to, when everyone but a select few thought she was a man—it was hard to deny that she had more military experience than anyone else in the Girls’ Own, with the possible exception of her ex-corporals Graff and Folsom. For that matter, she had more combat experience than almost anyone in Janus’ Army of the East, which was an awkward conglomeration of old Royal Army troops and scratch battalions of revolutionary volunteers.
    Jane’s experience was of a different sort. They’d been lovers, long ago, at Mrs. Wilmore’s Prison for Young Ladies, before Jane had been dragged away into involuntary marriage to a brutal farmer and Winter had escaped to join the army. While Winter had spent three years in Khandar, lying low, Jane had escaped from servitude, freed the rest of the girls from the Prison, and brought them to Vordan City. There they’d fought criminal, tax farmers, and anyone else who got in their way, forming the core of the Leatherbacks and striving to provide a rough justice to the Docks. When Winter and Jane had been reunited in the chaos of the revolution—with a helping hand, Winter guessed, from Janus bet Vhalnich—Jane’s girls joined the fight to save the city from Orlanko.
    Now they made up almost half the Girls’ Own, and Jane herself had accepted an officer’s rank, but she didn’t pretend to know anything much about tactics. Winter scratched a rough line in the earth with the toe of her boot. “If I were them, I’d feel us out to the right. If they’ve got another couple of battalions, they could throw one against us here and push another one down the road to get behind us.”
    “And if we run for it, they can surround the town,” Jane said. She looked to the south, where only the occasional hedge broke the endless, open country. A lone wood-topped hill, miles distant, loomed like a distant gray monolith. “If they get us with horsemen in the open . . .”
    Winter nodded. Jane might not have had a military education, but she had good instincts. The Girls’ Own were brave, dedicated troops, but they didn’t have the training to form square and stand off cavalry in the open. The volunteers that made up most of the rest of the force Janus had left to blunt the League advance were the same. They had only one regiment of “Royals”—professional soldiers of the old Royal Army—and a retreat under those circumstances could easily become a rout.
    “I’ll send Bobby to Colonel de Ferre,” Winter said. “If he brings up the reserve before they get here, we can give them another nasty surprise. They’ve got to get sick of banging their heads against this wall eventually.”
    Jane nodded and got to her feet. “I’ll get some of the girls out past the smoke to give us a bit of warning.”
    Winter stood a bit more slowly, her legs already aching. Her throat felt suddenly thick, in a way that had nothing to do with having spent the morning shouting at the top of her lungs.
    “Be careful,” she said.
    Jane smiled, her familiar, mischievous smile, and gave a slapdash salute. Winter fought a sudden impulse to wrap her arms around her. Instead she nodded, stiffly, and watched Jane stride back toward the front line.
    A passionate embrace between the commander of a battalion and his chief subordinate might have been a bit unorthodox, by old army standards, but Winter wasn’t sure it would have made a difference if she’d given in to the temptation. Caution was an old, ingrained habit, though, and she tried to impress the importance of it on Jane. They lived in a weird fog of half-truths and lies—the fact that Captain Ihernglass was