Cloak of Spears

By Jonathan Moeller

A broken memory. A lost fortress. And a weapon that might consume everything.

My name's Nadia, and I serve the High Queen of the Elves.

My friend Neil Freeman also works for her, and he's the deadliest assassin who ever lived. He paid a high price for his abilities, including a damaged memory.

But his memory holds secrets that might destroy the world.

So when the mad wizards of Singularity come to rip open Neil's mind and steal those secrets, it's up to us to stop them.

Because if we don't, Singularity will build its new world atop a mountain of the dead...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jonathan Moeller
• Release date: Jul 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005203252

Jonathan Moeller

Standing over six feet tall, Jonathan Moeller has the piercing blue eyes of a Conan of Cimmeria, the bronze-colored hair of a Visigothic warrior-king, and the stern visage of a captain of men, none of which are useful in his career as a computer repairman, alas.He has written the "Demonsouled" trilogy of sword-and-sorcery novels, and continues to write the "Ghosts" sequence about assassin and spy Caina Amalas, the "$0.99 Beginner's Guide" series of computer books, and numerous other works.Visit his website at:http://www.jonathanmoeller.comVisit his technology blog at:http://www.jonathanmoeller.com/screed

Book preview

CLOAK OF SPEARS

Jonathan Moeller

***

Description

A broken memory. A lost fortress. And a weapon that might consume everything.

My name's Nadia, and I serve the High Queen of the Elves.

My friend Neil Freeman also works for her, and he's the deadliest assassin who ever lived. He paid a high price for his abilities, including a damaged memory.

But his memory holds secrets that might destroy the world.

So when the mad wizards of Singularity come to rip open Neil's mind and steal those secrets, it's up to us to stop them.

Because if we don't, Singularity will build its new world atop a mountain of the dead...

***

Cloak of Shards

Copyright 2022 by Jonathan Moeller.

Smashwords Edition.

Cover design by Jonathan Moeller.

Ebook edition published July 2022.

All Rights Reserved.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author or publisher, except where permitted by law.

***

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***

Chapter 1: Marshaling

I had no idea what the hell I was doing.

Nothing in my life had prepared me for my new job.

See, my entire life before October of Conquest Year 317 had been spent as a shadow agent, which was basically a fancy term for describing a spy and a thief in the employ of an Elven noble. I used to work for Kaethran Morvilind, and when he crossed one line too many, the High Queen poached my service from him, so I worked for her instead.

But then Sergio Cortez returned from the Shadowlands with a Crystalmorph and almost destroyed the world. Actually, thanks to the Great Gate, he almost ate two worlds – both Earth and the Elven homeworld of Kalvarion.

I killed him first.

I just wished I had killed him sooner. A lot of innocent people had died before we had stopped Cortez, and it had all been for nothing. Cortez had this insane idea that his Crystalmorph would have turned humans and Elves into gods. In reality, his Crystalmorph would have eaten everyone.

That was why I had accepted the office when Tarlia had offered me the Marshal’s badge.

Maybe I could keep things like Cortez from happening again.

But the basic problem, like I said, remained the same.

I had no idea what I was doing.

As Marshal of the Great Gate, my area of responsibility extended for ten miles around the Great Gate on both Earth and Kalvarion. The Marshals of the High Queen had absolute authority in matters of defense, and if I wanted, I could execute anyone at the Gate without a trial on my word alone.

I really didn’t like that.

I could also, in theory, command obedience from any Elven nobles and request aid from the free cities of Elven commoners.

I bet the Elven nobles liked that even less.

Basically, I found myself at the head of a military and police force, which wasn’t great, because I had no idea how to run a military or a police force. The price of power was responsibility, and I had built up a lot of magical power, more than nearly other human wizard. Now I had the power of the Marshal’s office to go with it, and if I screwed it up, if I made bad decisions or did stupid shit, I was going to get a lot of people killed.

But while I had no idea what I was doing, that didn’t mean I was in over my head.

Well. No more than usual, anyway.

I had a template to follow.

My ex-boyfriend Nicholas Connor had been a murdering asshole who would have nuked New York if I hadn’t shot him to death first. But while I had hated him, I had to concede that he had been a good leader. Before he had come along, the Rebels had been a ragtag group of incompetent miscreants who could barely pull off the occasional bombing. Once Nicholas had organized them and allied them with the Dark Ones cults, the Rebels had come within a few moments of overthrowing the High Queen and killing most of the Elven nobles.

Nicholas had been a vicious jerk, but he had been an excellent leader. When he planned things, he defined clear areas of responsibility and assigned tasks to those with the appropriate skills. Obstacles and setbacks had never thrown him into a rage but instead were calmly discussed as he developed a plan to handle them. And while Nicholas hadn’t been lacking in ego, he had nonetheless been wise enough to realize that he didn’t know everything and couldn’t do everything himself.

He had recruited experts and listened to their advice.

I intended to follow that example.

And that meant I gave my husband a job.

Unlike me, Riordan MacCormac had actually been part of multiple military organizations – first the men-at-arms of Duke Tarmegon of Houston and then the Wizard’s Legion. He had been a Shadow Hunter for decades, which wasn’t exactly a military organization but had some of the same rules.

I appointed him the Captain-General for the Marshal, second in command of the Army of the Great Gate.

The thing about any military force, said Riordan in October of Conquest Year 317, is that it’s basically like the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Okay, I said. That doesn’t make sense, so you’re going to have to explain it to me.

We were in his truck, driving to the headquarters of the Army of the Great Gate, which in October consisted of a large warehouse I had bought near the Gate complex. Granted, at the moment, the Army of the Great Gate consisted of the remnants of the Gate Police who had survived Cortez, a deputation of Wizard’s Legion soldiers, and men-at-arms on loan from Duke Tamirlas and Duke Carothrace, but the organization was going to grow quickly. Tarlia had given me a big budget, and I was going to need all of it.

Any large military organization is basically a bureaucracy, said Riordan. Albeit one that occasionally needs to go places and kill people. We’re going to need different departments – accounting, logistics, medical, and so forth – and competent people to run those departments. The High Queen has what’s called the Uniform Military Law that applies to Elven nobles. It’s there to make sure that Elven nobles and the Elven free cities train their men-at-arms to a common standard. We can probably use the Uniform Military Law as our baseline.

Okay, I said. I’m still lost. How is that like the DMV?

Because it means you’re going to be in charge of a large bureaucracy, and everyone hates bureaucracies, said Riordan. I’m not a fan of them myself, but they’re necessary. It’s the only way to manage a large body of people. Granted, we’ll have it easier than a civilian organization. When you give orders, your people will be in trouble if they don’t obey. Civilians have more latitude than soldiers.

But there’s still room for people to misunderstand my orders, or to misinterpret them, or to ignore them, I said. Or for me to screw things up.

The perils of command, said Riordan. Also, there’s another challenge. You need police officers as well as soldiers.

I frowned as he exited I-94 and got on the road to the Gate complex. What do you mean?

Soldiers are trained to go places and kill people, said Riordan. Or Shadowlands creatures, as it happens. But the Gate Police mostly did traffic control and customs inspections. Keeping the peace. That’s why they weren’t ready to fight someone like Cortez and his Crystalmorph.

I hadn’t thought of it that way before. In my head, soldiers and law enforcement officers had been lumped together in the category thugs with guns. But that was partly from my own reflexive dislike of law enforcement and partly because I had never been a man-at-arms serving in the forces of an Elven noble and hadn’t thought all that much about it.

Which meant it was time to follow Nicholas’s template, recruit experts, and listen to their advice.

When I got to my office that morning, I called Beauregard Byrd, the sheriff of Red River county in western Montana. We had met in September when Tarlia had sent Neil Freeman and me to track down the source of some Shadowlands iron, and that had ended with Singularity mounting a full-scale attack on the town to seize the iron.

Nadia MacCormac, said Byrd. He had a deep voice with a hint of a western drawl. To what do I owe the pleasure?

Well, I might as well come out and say it, I said. The High Queen appointed me as Marshal of the Great Gate. I need someone to start training military police. Interested in a new job?

He (very politely) did not believe me at first, but then he did a UNICORN check in the background. We wound up talking for fifty minutes, and at the end of the conversation, he accepted the job. Sheriff Byrd was going to resign and become General Byrd of the military police of the Great Gate, who would have responsibility for traffic control, customs inspections, and general peacekeeping and law enforcement duties within the Gate complex.

Poor bastard. Byrd was ambitious – he had mentioned he wanted to run for the Senate someday – but I still felt like I had conned him.

###

At the end of October, my advisory council met for the first time.

Yeah, I had a council of advisors now.

Apparently, all the Marshals did.

Granted, we met in a trailer with a folding table and a space heater, but still.

Perhaps the makeshift setting kept the people with grudges against each other from violence.

I sat at the head of the table, Riordan on my right as the Captain-General. Byrd was on my left. He was a big man with blond hair going gray at the temples, a bushy gunslinger’s mustache, and cold blue eyes. Next to him sat the commander of my detachment of Wizard’s Legion soldiers, a middle-aged man named Colonel Ian Nash. He was on the grizzled side, with close-cropped graying hair and a lot of fine scars on the back of his hands and his jaw line.

Nash didn’t like me. He hadn’t said anything, but I knew that he thought a woman and a human had no business serving as a Marshal, that Riordan was really the one in charge, and I was window dressing. Not that Nash had said anything – I had seen it in his emotional aura. Still, he wasn’t insubordinate, he followed orders, and he hadn’t seen me fight yet. It was kind of refreshing to meet someone who wasn’t afraid of me.

Because people who had seen me fight tended to be, at the very least, wary of me.

Jake Bowyer sat next to Nash. He was a wiry, leathery man, and I had first met him when he had applied for a job at Moran Imports when he couldn’t get work anywhere else because of his criminal record. He tended to get into trouble when he drank. But now, he was the Army of the Great Gate’s senior non-commissioned officer, currently in charge of training new recruits.

We were the humans.

The three Elves sat on the other end of the table, one of them eyeing the other two with naked suspicion.

The first two Elves I had known for some time already – Duke Carothrace of Madison and Duke Tamirlas of Milwaukee. Tamirlas was a dour, taciturn man, though he had a dry sense of humor that sometimes emerged in times of crisis. Carothrace, by contrast, was cheerful, ebullient, and tended to talk and talk unless something held his attention. All the photos on his official website always showed him surrounded by adoring crowds. Since the boundaries of the Gate complex abutted the territories of both Dukes, they got to become part of my advisory council. It helped that I had saved their lives in the past – Carothrace, during the Sky Hammer battle, and Tamirlas during Cortez’s attack, and that business with the Fusion wraithwolves last year.

The Dukes sat next to each other.

The third Elf sat on the opposite side of the cheap folding table, his eyes narrowed, his lips pressed into a thin line.

His name was Harmathyr, and he was an Elven commoner from Kalvarion. We had met before. Specifically, on the day of the Mage Fall, when Morvilind killed all Archons. Harmathyr had been the leader of the ragged group of commoner Elves who had emerged from the labor camp to see what had happened. Now the labor camp had been rebuilt as the Elven free city of Castaris, and Harmathyr had been elected its Consul, which was the title for the chief executive of an Elven free city.

Since Castaris was within ten miles of the Great Gate on Kalvarion, it fell within the scope of my authority.

Lucky me.

Harmathyr had a gaunt, ragged look that many of the Elves of Kalvarion shared, which was the result of long-term malnutrition. He had a shock of gray hair and vivid green eyes that were usually bloodshot. The two Dukes didn’t like him very much, but Harmathyr detested them. The disdain for the Elven nobles I had seen in my friend Tythrilandria, also a commoner Elf from Kalvarion, was full-blown loathing in Harmathyr. To judge from the way his emotional aura darkened whenever he looked at the Dukes, he was having a hard time not erupting in anger.

Nicholas Connor had persuaded, compelled, and sometimes coerced a group of men with strong egos and mutual dislike to work together. Another lesson I would have to copy from him.

Granted, I had once seen him personally execute one of his lieutenants as a lesson to the others.

Hopefully, that wasn’t something I would have to emulate.

One of the enlisted men poured coffee for everyone and then left the trailer.

Thank you all for coming, I said. We have several decisions to make.

Before we begin, said Duke Tamirlas. I wish to say something.

Riordan, Nash, Jake, and Byrd all looked at the Duke. Carothrace seemed amused. Anger pulsed through Harmathyr’s emotional aura, the only visible sign on his face the thinning of his lips.

Please, my lord Duke, I said.

I shall be blunt, Worldburner, said Tamirlas. I think your appointment as Marshal of the Great Gate was a mistake. A Marshal is necessary to oversee the complex, but I do not think you were the best choice.

Harmathyr glared at the Duke. Then you deny the High Queen’s choice of the Champion of Morvilind as the Marshal?

Yeah.

That.

To think I had been uncomfortable when people called me the Worldburner.

Peace, Consul, said Tamirlas. I do not contest the High Queen’s authority to appoint Marshals. The choice has been made, and we must make the best of it. His hard gaze swiveled to me. I think highly of you, Marshal, and you have saved my life at least three times of which I am aware. However, you have no experience in battlefield command or in overseeing a large organization.

Well, I have no problem with the choice, said Carothrace. I’m sure we’ve all known people with experience running large organizations who really shouldn’t have been, so we may as well try the opposite.

Lord Tamirlas is right, I said. I’ve been in a lot of fights, but I’ve never commanded men in battle, and I’ve never run a large organization. Which is why all of you are here. We’re going to decide how to turn the Army of the Great Gate into a force that can protect the Gate from both sides.

Byrd spoke into the silence first.

I think the first thing we need to do, said Byrd, is increase the number of military policemen to handle the Gate crossings and the truck inspections. Another few years, and the Gate’s going to be the biggest border crossing in the world. We’re already averaging fifteen hundred trucks coming and going each day, and that number is going to increase with every month.

Lord Tamirlas and I have lent our men-at-arms to the Gate as we recover from the Crystalmorph’s attack, said Carothrace. Is that not enough?

With respect, my lord, no, said Byrd. Your men are good soldiers, but that’s what they’re trained to do – soldiering. Policing and traffic control in a place like the Gate is a whole another animal. The MPs will need to know what to do in the event of a Shadowlands incursion or bandit attacks…

We have endured a few of those near Castaris, said Harmathyr. Orcish and goblin mercenaries emerging from the Shadowlands. So much material is coming through the Gate to assist in the rebuilding of Kalvarion that bold thieves seize the moment to strike.

But until another major war begins, raids like that will be the exception, not the daily rule, said Byrd. Keeping the day-to-day traffic flowing through the Gate will be a major problem.

It already was, and it was only going to get worse. The High Queen intended to rebuild Kalvarion after the ravages of the Archons, and that meant keeping the Gate clear for traffic. Those fifteen hundred trucks a day were only going to go up. Eventually, we were going to need enormous parking lots where vehicles could stage during customs inspections.

The logistical challenges are considerable, said Tamirlas.

We’re going to need a military base, said Riordan. Something comparable to the bases where the Dukes train their men-at-arms or the training facility for the Wizard’s Legion in Seattle. We’ve already got a makeshift facility, he waved a hand at the trailer, but we’re going to need a lot more.

The discussion turned to the ongoing construction of the base. It was going to be a big facility west of the existing Gate complex, and it would practically be a small city in its own right – barracks for the soldiers, a motor pool for vehicles, training rooms, armories, an infirmary, and so forth.

We will need a name for the base soon, said Carothrace. Difficult to coordinate anything if we just keep calling it the construction site.

I understand it’s traditional in the US to name military bases after pre-Conquest generals, said Tamirlas.

I did my basic training at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, said Riordan, and Byrd and Jake agreed. I believe that was named for a pre-Conquest US general.

Fort Casey, I said. The Army of the Great Gate’s main facility will be called Fort Casey.

Very well, said Tamirlas. Fort Casey.

Casey hadn’t been a general, though. Casey Willman had been the name of the five-year-old girl I had seen on the plane full of Sergio Cortez’s victims. She had been sitting next to her mother’s corpse, a permanently surprised look as her final expression.

Death had come for her so quickly that Casey hadn’t realized what was happening.

A small comfort. A very, very small comfort.

I suppose it’s surprising that had enraged me so much. I generally don’t like kids. I wasn’t going to have any, partly because Riordan was a Shadow Hunter and Shadow Hunters can’t have children, and partly because the regeneration spell had played merry hell with certain hormones, so I was very unlikely to get pregnant anyway. I know that infertility is a source of lasting pain for some people, but I didn’t mind. I mean, if by some twist of fate, I did have a kid, I would do my damnedest to be a good mother, but I had already experienced having someone’s life completely in my hands when I had been Morvilind’s shadow agent, knowing that if I made a single mistake, Russell would die. I didn’t want to do that again.

But.

Hurt a kid when you’re within my reach, and you’ll regret it. Nicholas Connor had found that out the hard way when he had plotted to bomb that soccer stadium in Los Angeles. I suppose Cortez had found that out the hard way, too, given that I had cut open his chest and exploded the Crystalmorph inside his ribs.

I don’t know if Casey Willman and her mother would rest easier knowing that the man who had killed them had died screaming.

Doubt they rested any worse, though.

That was one of the reasons I had taken on the role of Marshal of the Great Gate, even though it was an insane task and it had earned me the permanent enmity of people like Duke Vashtyr of Venice. Maybe I could get ahead of the curve. Maybe I could keep things like that airliner full of dead people from happening again.

I could see the storm clouds on the horizon. Earth should have been at peace after the destruction of the Archons, but Singularity was moving in the shadows. Maybe they would soon feel confident enough to come out of the shadows, as the assault on the town of Red River had shown. Vashtyr wanted to overthrow the High Queen and take the Elven nobles back to Kalvarion. He had allied with Singularity to make that happen, though I wondered if he realized that hadn’t been the best idea.

That letter Vashtyr had sent me showed the Duke of Venice didn’t always think things through.

The rest of that meeting dealt with practical matters – the construction of Fort Casey, Jake’s work to train the new recruits, and so forth. I had one big advantage and disadvantage when it came to recruiting soldiers. All healthy human males eighteen years of age were required to put in six years of military service, and they enrolled in the men-at-arms of whatever Elven noble’s territory they lived in. Riordan had grown up on a hog farm in rural Texas, so he had enrolled in the men-at-arms of his local knight, who was a vassal of Duke Tarmegon of Houston. Byrd had been a man-at-arms of Sir Trandor of Red River, though the old Elf was not in his right mind most of the time, so usually his men-at-arms served under the Baron of Bozeman.

But I wasn’t an Elven noble, so I couldn’t recruit eighteen-year-olds. That said, despite the horrors of the Shadowlands, a lot of twenty-four-year-old men found they preferred the military life and re-enrolled once their mandatory term was up. Men who re-enrolled could serve anywhere they wanted, and the Elven nobles competed to get experienced non-commissioned officers and specialists in their forces.

Bit by bit, we started to build the Army of the Great Gate at Fort Casey. The fort went up with gratifying speed – I bought a bunch of Quonset-style prefabricated buildings, and soon Fort Casey was a grid of hastily laid roads and temporary buildings. Our only permanent buildings so far were the warehouse I had bought and the headquarters of the old Gate Police, which itself had been a warehouse hastily constructed after the Great Gate opened. Both buildings quickly became offices – as Riordan had told me, commanding a military force was a bit like running a bureaucracy that sometimes went places and killed people, and the quantity of records we needed to keep was staggering. Riordan, Jake, and Colonel Nash took charge of training the men-at-arms while Byrd trained the military police officers. Nash also commanded our Quick Response Force, which we had to use once in October when a group of goblins emerged from the Shadowlands and tried to make off with cargo containers holding electronics.

What did I do while they were doing all that? I was in charge, and I poked my nose into everyone’s business and made sure they were doing what they were supposed to do. I did fire a few people on the spot for incompetence and arrested a few others – one supply officer had the bright idea of quietly selling cases of ammunition and reporting them as lost in transit.

I had him flogged and then dishonorably discharged.

That sounds harsh, I know, but that same week goblin raiders showed up and tried to make off with more shipping containers. We needed that ammunition. Lack of it might have gotten some of my people killed.

Also, I could have shot the supply officer in the head, and no one would have batted an eye.

Because as the Marshal, the only people I had to answer to for any decisions I made were the High Queen and Lord Mythrender. Obviously, there were limits. If I went crazy and attacked Duke Tamirlas, for example, there would be hell to pay.

But I had so much power now. Not just magic, but the authority of a Marshal.

The price of power was responsibility, and I had to be able to live with myself, to be able to look Riordan and Russell in the eye and not be ashamed of the decisions I had made.

The rest of my time I spent dealing with the Elven nobles and the Consuls of the Elven free cities.

The Great Gate had become a big deal. I mean, obviously, a magical portal that connected two worlds would be important no matter what. But so much effort was going towards rebuilding Kalvarion after the Archons had run the place into the ground that a lot of people’s livelihoods, whether Elven or human, had become tied to the Gate. I was the first human Marshal, which inspired more curiosity than I liked.

The Consuls of the Elven free cities didn’t give me much trouble. The ones from Earth were polite enough. They didn’t like the nobles and were sworn directly to Tarlia. Quite a few of them had been born on Earth, thought of it as their home, and didn’t have any problems with humans.

The Consuls of the free cities of Kalvarion liked me a little too much.

The way that Harmathyr had called me the Champion of Morvilind?

They all thought like that because they revered Kaethran Morvilind’s memory.

I suppose it made sense. Think about it from their perspective. For three hundred years, the people of Kalvarion had been terrorized by the Archons, and then in a single day, Morvilind killed them all, and he did it without any collateral damage. To say that the Elven commoners regarded Morvilind as the single greatest hero in Elven history would have been an understatement. They were even building a statue of him in Castaris.

That was annoying. Understandable, but annoying.

What was annoying and worrying was the way that I had been pulled into the mythology they were creating around Morvilind. The way the Elves of Kalvarion thought of it, I was Morvilind’s chosen champion, the one given the great honor of executing his plan to destroy the Archons. That wasn’t what had happened. Tythrilandria and I had been Morvilind’s only two shadow agents to outlive him – he had used up and killed all the other ones, my husband's brother among them.

It was jarring to go from the suspicion of the Elven nobles, to the probing greed of human politicians, to the reverence and awe of people like Harmathyr.

Since we’re discussing suspicion, let’s talk about the Elven nobles.

I met a lot of Elven nobles the first few months after I became the Marshal. Most of them already knew who I was, thanks to the Sky Hammer battle in New York. Some of them, like Duke Carothrace and Duke Tamirlas, were supportive. Some of them were indifferent to the idea of a human Marshal at the Great Gate. A substantial minority absolutely hated the thought that a human was the Marshal and would have been quite pleased to see me dead.

The opinions split along the political divide among the Elven nobles. One faction supported Tarlia’s plans to remain on Earth and organize Kalvarion into free cities. The rival faction wanted to abandon Earth, return to Kalvarion, resume their ancient titles, and return the Elven commoners to serfdom. Given how the commoners of Kalvarion hated the nobles, I thought that flew in the face of reality, but Duke Vashtyr didn’t think so.

Duke Vashtyr didn’t visit the Great Gate, thankfully, but he sent me a charmingly threatening letter.

To help deal with the visits from the nobles and other matters of protocol, the High Queen sent me Lady Terynda.

Terynda and I didn’t get off to a great start.

She arrived in November. I was sitting in my office in the first warehouse the Army of the Great Gate had bought. I had my feet on my desk and was reading a supply report when someone knocked at my door.

Yeah? I said.

Corporal Rayburn stuck his head into my office. He was twenty-four, had just signed up to the Army of the Great Gate, and had gotten the unenviable assignment of screening visitors who wanted the Marshal’s time. Marshal, there’s an Elven noblewoman here to see you.

Right. The last time I had talked to Tarlia, she had said she would send over someone to advise me on the various protocols and legal problems that dealing with Elven nobles created. Go ahead and…

I have been waiting, declared a woman’s voice, strident and angry, quite long enough.

The Elven noblewoman in question shoved past the flustered Rayburn and marched into my office.

She gave me a measuring look that quickly turned to disdain. The Elven woman was tall, as they usually were, with dark hair braided into an elaborate crown and bright golden eyes like coins. She wore the formal dress of an Elven noblewoman, a long gown of blue with black scrollwork upon the bodice and the skirt. The formal gown was usually sleeveless, but it was Wisconsin in November, so her dress had sleeves, and she also wore a fur-lined mantle. Jewels glinted on her ears and at her throat.

I was wearing jeans, running shoes, a sweater, and my pea coat.

How utterly slovenly, said the Elven noblewoman. I thought that appointing a human female as a Marshal was a mistake, and this proves it. Her Majesty the High Queen sent me to teach you appropriate manners and behavior, and I see that I have a great deal of work before me.

Rayburn gaped at her.

"You can