Chương 7: CHAPTER SEVEN: FINDING HOLLIS

He had been watching Hollis for a month before he said anything. It was not immediately obvious. Hollis was a garrison sergeant in a medieval town, and garrison sergeants in medieval towns occupied a specific role that encompassed a specific set of behaviors, and Hollis performed all of those behaviors correctly and professionally. He ran the watch rotation. He maintained the equipment.

He managed the twelve men under his command with a combination of authority and personal credibility that Marcus recognized from NCOs he had served under: the kind of authority that didn't need to be asserted because it was simply present, built from demonstrated competence over time. But there were things that didn't fit. The morning physical training was the first thing.

Marcus had started taking early morning walks along the walls — habit, necessity, the need to have a period each day when he was responsible only for observation — and on the third morning he had come around the western parapet to find Hollis running the garrison through a circuit. Not weapons drill, not the formation exercises of period military training. Running. Circuits.

The kind of organized progressive conditioning that was designed by physiologists and codified in training manuals and had been available in this form for approximately no time at all in the medieval world. He had stopped, watched for two minutes, and kept walking. The second thing was the patrol documentation. He had asked for the garrison's records as part of the general administrative review, and what Hollis had provided was — not what he'd expected.

The records were systematic in a way that medieval garrison records were not typically systematic: standardized entry formats, location codes, incident classification, trend notation over time. It was the paperwork of someone who had learned documentation in a context where documentation had consequences. The third thing was the training he was running in the afternoons. Quietly, without announcement, without drawing the castellan's attention.

He had been incrementally adjusting the garrison's combat training over the past month: introducing footwork drills that emphasized small-unit coordination over individual combat, working on the kind of practiced collective response to variable threat scenarios that you got from doctrine rather than from tradition. He was, Marcus had concluded by the end of the fourth week, a soldier. Not a medieval soldier pretending to function in a modern framework.

A modern soldier, functioning in a medieval framework, making it work through professionalism and patience. He found him at the east gate at dusk on a Wednesday evening — or what passed for Wednesday, the local calendar being something he was still mapping to familiar reference points — when the day's activity had settled into the quiet routine of the watch change.

"Sergeant Hollis," he said, in English. Hollis turned. And his face — the face of a man in his forties, weathered and precise — went through a sequence that Marcus recognized because he had gone through the same sequence: the initial alert, the processing of the language, the understanding of what the language meant, and then the specific quality of carefully controlled response that was the professional soldier's version of relief. You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"Sir," Hollis said, in English. His voice was level. His breathing was controlled. He had been doing this — being this contained — for however long he had been here before Marcus found him.

"How long?" Marcus said.

"Since the beginning," Hollis said.

"Same as you, I think. First morning."

"What was your situation?"

"I came up as garrison sergeant." He paused.

"Which was — practical. My MOS translated directly. I knew what was expected and I could deliver it."

"11B?" Marcus said, reading the indicators — the footwork drills, the small-unit emphasis.

"Staff Sergeant, 11B," Hollis confirmed.

"You're not infantry."

"35F," Marcus said.

"Intelligence." Hollis processed this.

"The new lord asking smart questions about granary records," he said slowly.

"That was you adjusting."

"That was me being what I am," Marcus said.

"The granary was the most urgent problem." They stood for a moment in the dusk, the garrison going about its watch change around them, oblivious to the fact that their two commanding figures were having a conversation in a language that wouldn't be invented in this world for several centuries.

"What are you doing here?" Hollis said. It wasn't accusatory. It was the question that needed answering: not why are you talking to me but what is the plan.

"Surviving winter," Marcus said.

"Then finding more of us. Then building something that makes sense of us being here." He paused.

"In that order." Hollis looked at him steadily.

"Garrison's at twelve," he said.

"It should be at thirty to do the job right."

"I know. We'll work on that."

"The training I've been running—""Keep running it," Marcus said.

"I've been watching. It's the right training." He paused.

"I'm going to need to formalize your role. Not the title — that comes later. The relationship. I need to know you're the person I can rely on for the military side of this." Hollis was quiet for a moment.

"You're the ranking intelligence officer," he said.

"In the old framework, sure," Marcus said.

"Here I'm the lord and you're the garrison commander and that's the framework we work with." He held Hollis's gaze.

"But I want to know whether I have a Staff Sergeant or just a very good garrison soldier."

"You have a Staff Sergeant," Hollis said.

"Good," Marcus said.

"Because I'm going to need one." They talked for an hour, standing at the east gate as the dark came down and the torches were lit and the town settled into its evening sounds. Marcus laid out what he knew about the situation: the winter preparation, the granary problem and its solution, the boot prints in the north road mud, what he'd found in Coppermill. Hollis listened with the professional attention of someone who was being briefed and was building the operational picture as the briefing proceeded.

"The kid's in a blacksmith family," Hollis said, when Marcus described finding Danny.

"Seems like a good family," Marcus said.

"I'm going to arrange to bring him to Greyhold, eventually. But not yet — not until I have something here that makes it worth bringing him to."

"What about the others?"

"I have two other possibles in Millrun and Hatch's Ford. I haven't approached them directly yet. I needed — "he paused, assembling the honest answer" — I needed to know what I was offering before I reached out. Right now I can offer shelter and community and the beginning of a plan. That's more than nothing." He paused.

"But it's less than what I want it to be." Hollis nodded slowly.

"The Ironfen," he said.

"The patrol reports I've been filing — there's been more activity in the last month than the previous six months' baseline. Small groups, moving south. Not raids. More like scouting."

"Displacement," Marcus said.

"Something pushing them south."

"That's what it reads like to me." Hollis's voice was even.

"If there's a significant force building pressure from the north, we're eventually on the receiving end of whatever it produces."

"Timeline?"

"This winter should be manageable. Next year, I don't know." He looked north.

"We need better walls and more garrison before this becomes an urgent problem rather than a developing one." Marcus followed his gaze. The north was dark, the tree line invisible, the hills beyond it a suggestion against a slightly lighter sky.

"Winter first," he said.

"Then we build."