Princess of the Midnight Ball - Jessica Day George [1]
All around him were fields that had lain fallow for years. In one, turnips that some hopeful family had planted had rotted in the earth with no one to harvest them. In another, the weeds were as tall as Galen. A cow and her calf were feasting there, and Galen veered from his path, taking a step toward them. They looked abandoned, so no one would mind if he filled his canteen with milk. But when he took a second step in their direction, the cow lowed with alarm and trotted away, her calf at her heels. She had been running wild for too long to suffer being milked.
With a sigh, Galen continued on. Every so often he came across other soldiers heading home. He would share a meager meal and camp with them overnight, walking for a while the next morning in the familiar company of other exhausted fighting men in blue tunics. But Galen never stayed with these other soldiers for long, something that they found very odd. It was said that in the heat of battle strangers became brothers and the bond was not severed by death or distance. Galen had never felt that way, though. He had seen his first battle when he was seven years old, had helped his mother care for the wounded and watched her wash enemy blood out of his father’s uniform afterward. To Galen, war was a disease, something to be avoided, not something he wanted to talk about with other afflicted men over the campfire.
Sometimes women or men too old to join the fight would offer him a ride in their cart. They often wanted to know if he had met their son or husband during the war. It was rare that he had: the army was vast, and Galen’s regiment had been from the city of Isen, far from these fields and forests.
Galen told people what he could, making light of the conditions the soldiers had lived in and celebrating with them over the end of the war. Westfalin had defeated the Analousians at last, but it was a grim victory. After twelve years at war, the country was deeply in debt to her allies, and many soldiers would not be returning home. Or, like Galen, they no longer had a home to return to.
The son of a soldier and an army laundress, Galen had been born in a cottage that looked out on the training grounds where his father marched in drills all day long. When he was six, the Analousians had attacked, and Galen’s father’s regiment had been sent to the front lines. His mother, the daughter of a soldier herself, had packed up Galen and his baby sister and joined the supply train. She had scrubbed blue tunics and darned gray socks right up until the day the lung sickness—a gift of the damp and cold—had claimed her life. Galen’s little sister, Ilsa, had also suffered from lung sickness. She had recovered, but her breath often came short, and so she had ridden on the supply wagons during the marches. She was killed when the wagon she was riding slipped off a steep mountain road in the rain and fell into the river below.
By that time Galen was twelve. He had been working with the soldiers since his eighth birthday: fetching powder and shot, reloading rifles and pistols, carrying messages from the generals to the field marshals. He could shoot a rifle or pistol, use a bayonet, peel potatoes, splint a broken leg, shine boots, wash shirts, and knit his own socks. He could also spit six feet with great accuracy, swear like the best of the sergeants, and scream insults at the Analousians in their own tongue. His father had been very proud.
Galen’s father made sergeant, and then lost his life to an Analousian bullet one morning when Galen was fifteen. Galen had buried him in the common grave dug after that battle, shouldered his father’s weapons, and marched away to the next skirmish. He didn’t know it, but just a week later, he shot the man who had killed his father, putting a bullet neatly into the same place his father had been shot—an inch to the left of the heart.
Those days were past, God be praised, and Galen hoped to never kill another man. He was headed