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“War maids are supposed to be free of this sort of petty oppression. It says so right in our charter.”
    “That’s free of petty male oppression,” Erlis pointed out. “Now watch your flank. I don’t think Leeana’s going to give up just because she missed us back at Thalar, do you?”
    Garlahna stuck out her tongue, but she also turned her attention obediently back to the left flank of the small column making its way across the rolling grasslands of the Wardenship of Lorham towards the free town of Kalatha.
    It didn’t occur to her to think about the fact that that sort of exchange between a lowly commander of twenty and a commander of three hundred—the equivalent of a very junior lieutenant or a very senior noncom and a major in the Empire of the Axe—would never have been tolerated in most military organizations. She was aware that other armies put far more emphasis on things like saluting and standing at attention and titles of rank, but the awareness was purely intellectual and such antics left her with a sense of bemused semi-tolerance rather than any desire to emulate them, for war maids had little use for the sort of formality which infused those other armies. Most of them regarded the aristocratic, birth-based power structure of their own birth society with outright contempt, and the spit and polish of standing armies like those of the Empire of the Axe and the Empire of the Spear filled them with amusement. Their own warriors were trained to operate as light infantry—scouts, skirmishers, and guerillas—and they valued initiative and ingenuity far more than unthinking obedience to orders. War maid officers came in all flavors and varieties, of course, but martinets were few and far between. Discipline was always maintained, yet that discipline rested upon an esprit de corps which didn’t require formality, which had led more than one of their adversaries into underestimating them...with fatal consequences.
    Unfortunately, there’d been quite a few of those adversaries over the years, given the disapproval with which Sothōii society regarded them, and there were those who wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment to rob them. Some of those people would actually have felt a sense of virtuous justification at punishing such an uppity and unnatural bunch of women, if they could only figure out how to get away with it, which was the main reason Garlahan and her six-woman detachment were out here sweltering in the heat. Erlis, on the other hand, was just a bit senior for this sort of nonsense. The three hundred would normally have let Garlahana get on with her routine task without looking over her shoulder this way, but she’d had business of her own in Thalar, so she’d decided to come along and turn the trip into a training exercise.
    Not that anyone was taking the trip lightly. “Routine” was quite a different thing from “unimportant,” and the two large wagons at the heart of the formation were piled high with supplies and raw materials for Kalatha’s craftswomen, especially for Theretha, the town glassblower. Garlahana didn’t know exactly how much their contents were worth, but the weight of the purse Erlis had turned over to their agent in Thalar had been impressive, and the wagons were heavily laden enough to be an unmitigated pain in the arse. That would probably have been true under any circumstances, but the condition of the road didn’t help a bit.
    The muddy track (even Sothōii notions of a “highway” would have made an Axeman engineer cringe, and this ribbon of muck was little better than a country lane) ran between tall walls of prairie grass. The good news was that it was still early enough in the summer that the grass hadn’t had time to turn into the sort of sun-dried tinder which all too often flared into rolling walls of flame later in the year. The bad news was that there was absolutely no wind today and the rains of spring, while nourishing the grass quite nicely, had