"We soldiers have all got to stick together. All the Queen's Lords will have us for dinner, elsewise."

The comment reached him just as he was walking out the door, and he stiffened. Dorell had said that, too, or something close enough to it that it made no difference years later.

Five years. Ten chances. All wasted.

Dorell was, first and foremost, an oddity in the Seventh Guard. Most were there because there was food and warmth, which was better than most jobs, but it wasn't really much of a choice. Food and a chance at death or cold and humiliation for what wasn't their fault? Easy decision. But Dorell's father was one of those rare men whose job was vital for the continuation of the war, a cartographer that they couldn't risk falling into enemy hands. He could have continued in his father's trade, but a strange sense of duty, combined with the more understandable motivation of wanting to be able to marry later on, had sent him to a recruiting center to pick up a spear and haversack.

As though the recruiters communed about those they had brought to the army before placing them, all off those men who were slightly odd somehow made their way to the newly formed Seventh Guard, under the sometimes brilliant, usually bizarre Major Leris. Though he couldn't remember the incident that had sparked the conversation—Dorell would have remembered, but he was strange like that—he could repeat the words from memory.

"I'm Dorell."

"Enjar. I've got a question for you. What's the best place for a spear?"

A flash of a grin, more suitable for a meeting of friends than a training hall. "In a Chirrum, of course."

And all around them, similar questions and jokes being made, glee at finding someone who knew their hometown, delight at being able to compare quirks of former trades with someone else that had been thus trained, the ties that brought them from a hundred raw soldiers to the Seventh Guard. From an assortment of strangers to a tight-knit group that could, on a moment's notice, recite ten people who needed new boots, the last man to lose a spearhead in battle and who'd helped them back to the physician's tents the last time they were injured in battle.

After the battle of En Kelsar, throughout which the Seventh Guard had held the fort against four companies of Chirrum and the Blood and Fire mages that accompanies them by picking and choosing which of Major Leris's commands were more genius than insanity and sheer determination, they'd sprawled across the battlements. It was dark, for they still flinched at any sight of fire, but at least they'd been immune to the sight of having their unwary companions begin to spurt blood due to a Blood spell. That was common enough. Yet this time, Queen Aidana had come down from Tal Eilum to set up shields against the mages of the Chirrum, and they'd cheered her with the bizarre mixture of energy and exhaustion that came after a day of hard fighting.