What We Do.

[Carnath-Emory]

On the evening that the Governor dubbed her Marshall, the swordswoman was not quite cast adrift into the sea of Myrken bureaucracy. She had powerful resources available to her, after all. Talented minds, educated in the war-room, the council chamber, the distant universities of which she could only, dimly dream. Her position was unique and it was also well-supplied. But every one of these was unavailable, for one reason or another: she was restrained by distance, by time; by the very few hours contained in each busy day; she was, on occasion, enslaved by her own crushing pride.

There was, in the end, no-one to ask. No-one who was competent, no-one to whom she could bring herself to speak the questions. But was that not somehow fitting? She had learned absolution at the feet of Bea Kanaya, blood on her hands and tears in her eyes. She had learned regret beneath a scribe's wounded eyes and in the sterile echo of an empty training room; hours and miles from here she'd learned the far reaches of her heart within the attentive foster of a man Myrken only begins to know. But those were gentler things, and this was an issue of command and of cold contingencies. Myrken matters, if ever there were - and perhaps it was only right that in the end, she'd addressed them in a very Myrken manner: by teaching herself.

The Militia has learned with her - but a step behind, so that they needn't stumble as she has, needn't question the process at all. Its archers were already beyond competent, skilled with their tools and comfortable beneath firm command; Renea Sundance had seen to that, and their expertise had shocked her. The others were not - not in the ways which she needed them to be - but they could be motivated, she discovered very quickly, when she made their inspiration the history which she and they shared. Who would want, for instance, to spend an hour's leisure on digging ditches against summer wildfire? It was brutal work; it didn't even seem like Militia work at all. But though their children are too young to remember the Blight, the fathers were surely not, and it had been shoulders and shovels, in mind of those Blight-driven firestorms of years ago. Shoulders and shovels, day after day, until Myrkentown's key districts had been largely secured - and when she turned the Militia's attention towards its own homesteads, there'd been no need for fresh encouragement at all.

The flags, though.
The flags were another matter entirely.

[Carnath-Emory]

It'd taken time to get to this point.

She is not Proxenus One-Eye. She is not Renea Sundance and she is not the General: unlike the men and women who'd headed Myrken's militia in years past, she has no experience with command and no natural inclination towards it. If the swordswoman has had any advantage whatsoever, it lays simply in understanding that Myrken's history was ever one of unconventional problems countered by desperate measures, and that to continue this pattern of calamity and shocked response was to perpetuate the cycle of disaster for which the province was famed.

Long hours before she ever approached the militia's arena, the Marshall knew that there was only one answer to Myrken's need: they would follow the Governor's lead, this motley assortment of farmers and bruisers and archers and one very ill-suited swordswoman, by being pro-active.

The shame of it was not just that the solution wasn't even her own, but that it was the principle of a man whose methods have become anathema to her. Perhaps that was why she'd been so guarded, at first, about the methods which she was beginning to improvise. It certainly wasn't the specter of a hostile government that accounted for her caution: the Council was neither the ineffective technicality of years past, nor the nagging intrusion that it had become during the Order's bloodied years; there was no reason at all to fear interference. But all the same, the requisitions delivered to their desks had been so dull, so deliberately innocuous.

Shovels, long in the handle; not nearly enough for everybody.
Fabric, purchased by the yard, in a selection of five vivid colours.
Clubs, of an unusual design, being neither pikes nor morningstars but some ugly midpoint between the two.
Lumber; several Militiamen were axe-men by trade and willing to volunteer their services for this cause, but the land was not theirs and neither were the trees which grew upon it.
Twine and good hemp rope, and a re-supply of the very style of torches commonly used to light the Arena's walls of an evening.
And arrows.
And targets and bowstrings.
And still more arrows, because what Renea Sundance had begun, her successor could comfortably continue to excess.

With the exception of the goedendags and the most of the archers' supplies, everything was repurposed. The fabric was particularly troublesome: she'd gone through swatches by the dozen before settling upon the handful of colours which would actually suit her needs, and then it had been down to a seamstress upon Weaver's with pretty fabric by the armful, purchased with the Council's coin and in dire need of edging. The lumber had been time-consuming but otherwise straightforward: those axe-men, after all, and a Militia staffed largely by men who'd been splitting their own logs since they were an inch past their fathers' hips. They'd made clean work on it, and when she explained her intentions for the piled results they'd even offered some sound advice.

After all of that, splitting shovel-heads from handles for the cause of flagpoles was positively dull.

[Carnath-Emory]

A basic degree of martial competence was never going to be enough.

History demonstrated this: hers; theirs. An hour together each day of the week, and she will make a student of unique devotion shine; within months, even a boy of moderate talent and inclination might be made a useful member of any unspecialised fighting body. The Militia, a volunteer service consisting largely of farmers, foresters and tradesmen, conforms to the rhythms of harvest and craft: they were hers for several hours of the week throughout winter, and the approach of warmer days has both changed the timing of the hours and reduced them to patchwork.

She could, in the time allowed them and under the circumstances to which they were bent, make them relatively self-sufficient in a fight whose odds favoured them from the start. Proxenus had done that much, and they'd been fine until the riots. She might, given some assistance with her wording, wield Myrken's cruel history like a tool that would inspire them endure past the limits of their competency. The General had accomplished that, and it had done well by them until the Baie came like a storm into their midst.

The first mistake, by her reckoning, lay in expecting them to react, behave, and become like a conventional military force.
The second was rooted in treating Myrken like an arena, rather than the battlefield it's always been.

***

What vivid fabrics she'd purchased! The Council, she'd imagined, might have assumed her intent was uniforms - of a particularly garish sort, true, but then they'd always considered the Militia a rather motley affair; perhaps it had seemed to suit. Bright mustard yellow; ferocious scarlet; a green so searingly pale as to leave after-images in the eyes if one had the misfortune to handle it too long. Well before they'd begun to attach newly-edged fabric to makeshift flagpoles, she'd had one game fellow up onto their arena's wall to test large swatches against a darkening twilight sky; even from a healthy distance, there was no mistaking the motions of his arms, and when they'd tried again at dawn the following day, they'd discovered only a very few adjustments were necessary.

The Battle at Haberdasher's Row ought to have been easily managed, because it need never have become a battle at all. Everyone had seen it coming, long before it peaked into violence: shouts in the streets, aimless bodies gathering and just looking for a cause, looking for an excuse. Manpower was not a concern, not with the Constabulary at full strength and the Militia rife with volunteers: there were trained and able bodies available to forestall that mob before it really gathered momentum, to split it into manageable segments. And if they'd just had the means to summon them and to co-ordinate their movements once they were there; if there were something more than church-bells, some reliable way to command multiple maneuvers across long distances...

The Militia's first principle is Communication.

***

The massacre at Townsedge, all those years ago, had been disastrous by any reckoning. Between the military strength of the Thessilane Guard and the firm leadership of Kanashia and the General, it should have been possible all the same to prevent outright carnage. But by the time the mounting crowd came up against the guards and their shields it was a rolling chaos; Thessilane proved barely sufficient to pause the mob's advance, and even their tight formation had crumbled when the Baie dove headlong into the crowd. If only they'd had the tools available to reinforce their lines; if they'd had something to throw against that tangle of bodies other than their own...

Woodsaws and lumber, when the day's drills were done. Most of the Militiamen were back to their fields by then, but those few able to stay had their time put to good, hard use: the requirement was sometimes slender logs and sometimes sawed wood in good, flexible lengths. It was experimentation which followed, and they were at that for weeks; it was question and advice, and requests as well to friends, to neighbours, because when they were done with this work they would need the means and permission to store its results in key points about the town. These were efforts bolstered by their previous success, for it was not impossible, the Militia had finally determined, to construct barricades that were both moderately portable and substantial enough to give pause even to a crowd's unruly advance.

The Militia's second principle is Containment.

[Carnath-Emory]

In the wake of her struggling return to sanity, the Marshall's first priority had been Catch - always, always - and the information that only Gloria Wynsee could supply.
But come morning next...

It's impossible to make it a conversation, when you're one person speaking to hundreds. Impossible, because it swiftly becomes a series of speeches made to a captive and uncomfortable audience, and when you're a northern brute with no talent for rhetoric, that becomes just as impractical in every imaginable way. She knew that, knew it well in advance of her arrival at the Militia's arena.

If only she'd reached a solution by the time she'd reached the men who required one of her.

They were a sea of expectant eyes. A demand - silent, but as potent as Gloria Wynsee's had ever been: a demand tempered by the mutual respect of three months' fruitful endeavours, and informed by the presence of a Marshall who'd shed silk and billowing lace in favour of a uniform's ascetic black. Ordered to the exercises that had become rote for them months ago, they were a crowd of shuffling feet and tangible unease: more backwards glances than she could count, one man after another clearly just going through the motions of a routine which had become increasingly meaningless in the face of what Myrken has become.

For a time she wandered amongst the groups into which they'd partitioned themselves: addressed them this way - piecemeal explanations, questions and answers; hesitated a moment before deciding against drawing key figures aside for more detailed discussions. Learning to function as a single body had been the work of months: above all else, she would not fracture their cohesion with sudden selectivity.

Even so, this wasn't enough. This did not begin to be sufficient to their needs. Time wore on; unease magnified into frowning resentment, crystallised into the sort of frustration which has tempers ready to flare, and when a stumble became a shove, and hard words threatened to explode into so much more -

No more. No more, and she gathered them to her with a shouted word: assembled them in the arena's shadows, four hundred men and more, united less by a sense of camaraderie than by the urgency of their concerns.

It could never have been possible for the Marshall explain to them the full breadth of what had overcome her. But in the end, it was not entirely necessary: too many of them, she realised quickly - when they called certain questions, when she gave them careful answers - knew someone who numbered amongst the lost. A moneylender, an apothecary; a cousin or a cousin's friend. Someone, gone suddenly strange and abruptly remote, until one day they'd abandoned shopfronts and families and traveled east, east to the party at the province's edge.

There's no coming back, they said. And yet Here, she insisted, I am.

There's no trusting what used to be like them, they said; not all of them. But enough, and she nodded her assent.

How are we to solve this?, they asked at last - as she'd hoped, as she hadn't dared to expect. And that was when the Marshall began to smile.

[Carnath-Emory]

She sends home eighteen men within the hour, and they hardly even know it. Not precisely 'swain, these men; she'd realised that very quickly. But not precisely themselves, either, as if they'd fallen afoul of the same mentalism that had afflicted half of Myrken; as if something had gone wrong in the conditioning beneath which they'd succumbed. Bewildered and bewildering, they'd proved pliant beneath her commands, and left in much the same confusion as they'd arrived.

They were not to be the only losses. By the second day she's dismissed two dozen more: men with families, men with a good idea by then of what she intended and every reason to keep their distance from it. The Militia had always operated within certain parameters, after all, established years ago by Proxenus and the General, and set firmly into stone by Renea Sundance; augmented by the present Marshall, but within reasonable limits. Ditches against fires. Containment against atrocities. Reasonable, and what the Marshall proposed that first day was not the expansion of those boundaries but their fundamental transformation. Some of the militiamen made their apologies before they left; some few simply turned their backs upon it all.

During the days which followed, there was not a point at which she failed to invite the hundreds remaining to do the same. As she organised them into cells of operation, solid thinkers teamed with the physically adept; as they leaned together over the maps she'd obtained months ago, colour-blocking Safe and Contested, marking out troublesome corridors and corners most likely to erupt into violence. Assets. Hazards. Exhaustive consultation, countering an absence of weeks and redefining the points at which barricades could be harnessed, the quarters of Myrkentown which at all costs they must not see fall.

The violence done to Catch's home had fueled her. No clearer demonstration of what Myrken's become than the unthinkable; the unreasoning.
The establishment of a civil constabulary - what is this? she'd asked, and received explanations whose details were nothing but shocking - had only fanned the flames.

By the third day of this work, it had become impossible to shock them with the urgency of her intents.

[Carnath-Emory]

Upon the fourth day, one of them comes to her. One amongst hundreds; a hand to her shoulder, requesting a word, and even before he speaks she's ready to dismiss him as she had the reluctant others. Send him back, to see to the safety of his family and his friends, give him her best and see him gone -

The words go silent in her throat when she sees the look in his eyes.

It's about his wife, he says. Smart; tough, for a woman. Quick learner, too. His wife, he explains, who wants to join them. There'd never been any children for them, he adds - hastily, over the Marshall's sudden protests, a hand raised to forestall her. Never any children, the Faith not seeing fit to bless them that way - but a cousin, though. Marjorie, the two of them close as could be since they were just young girls. Little cousin Marjorie who was like a sister to his wife, and two days ago they had her backed up against a wall behind St. Iona, crowded her into the bricks like they meant to hit -

Something about her shoes, his wife said afterwards. Like they'd beat a girl over her shoes, and she wants this now, he says. She wants this, a uniform and a place behind the barricades with all the rest; she doesn't want a club, she won't lay hands on one of those, but anything else, he says. Anything else at all.

The idea of it is revolutionary. She thinks on it, this swordswoman with her uniform and her ready steel. For moments, thinks about the choice she already knows she's going to make.

***

There's five of them, by the end of it. Five women intent upon lending their efforts to the Militia's cause; rolling back the sleeves of uniforms that don't quite fit, reinforcing the newest barricades alongside husbands and brothers and new acquaintances. Filthy work. Punishing hours. They take to it with more willingness than even the swordswoman had thought to expect. Two of them she takes aside, to drill with the men already assigned flags; just two, chosen for their speed, for what she'd told Seasons had been no exaggeration: this need for runners, for quick and capable minds. Everything depends upon this, she tells them. This, and our ability to hold a line.

They day before their final drill - the drill which circumstances have made into a demonstration for the benefit of two perhaps-doubtful Councilors - they come to her. Three of them, not quite certain, not quite hesitant; insistent to have a moment of her time, all the same. She expects apologies and hasty departures - because she always has, since this began; had expected to lose far more than the few dozen she'd already sent home. But - they have an idea, these women explain. An idea that's more like a solution, for like the rest they've embraced the words embroidered into their uniforms, and like the rest they've noted a discrepancy. In silent explanation one of them tugs at her sleeve's gilded edge.

That night, the arena is filled with great vats of dark liquid, and the damp scent of uniforms hung to dry.