The training ground was cold, the winter wind cutting through the compound, but the men were sweating.
Lysander stood at the edge of the field, watching Miros move among the new recruits. The first cohort of the militia—forty-seven men, drawn from Shebek's fishermen, from Maea's settlement volunteers, from the families who had held the line on the eastern beach. They were not soldiers. Their stances were wrong, their grips uncertain, their strikes too wide. But they were here, in the cold, before dawn, because they had asked to be.
Miros corrected a fisherman's grip with two fingers, said something too quiet for Lysander to hear, and moved on. He had been training men for a decade, but never like this. Never men who had already fought and killed and watched their friends die. Never men who knew exactly what they were training for.
