By the end of the following day somehow Captain Walker had managed to bring the company up to its full strength with a few extra bodies added just in case some of them didn’t pass muster or decided that the life of a mercenary wasn’t for them. Sure in previous years not all of them would necessarily have been accepted. Still, even the worst of them could boast of easily having surpassed the basic requirements needed to join the guild.

The appraisal of the new members and the reappraisal of the returning members, especially those who had received serious wounds during our last contract had for the most part been completed. Some of the last of those to join the company had still to be processed.

My recommendation to promote Kobi Omana to Corporal and Leon Howey to Sergeant was provisionally accepted by Walker with a review to be undertaken after the end of training and again after the end of our first contract of the season. As to the vacancy generated by Howey’s promotion, that was filled by one Corporal Danny Trent, who had previously been a private in the headquarters Platoon.

That night I attended two different meetings with the captain to discuss the upcoming training. The first of these to which the other lieutenants and all the sergeants had also been invited dealt with the training of the infantry. The second to which only the lieutenants and Sergeant Young were invited concerned the training of the scouts.

The first meeting only took about fifty minutes since over the years the company had already developed an infantry training regime that they were happy enough with. The only real changes we had to discuss were joint training with the new mount scouts that I had once commanded.

The discussions during the second meeting somewhat overlapped with the first but it lasted much longer, slightly over two hours. This was mainly a result of most of the others there not being overly familiar with how mounted scouts operate and how to make the best use of the information gained by them. Sure they had some experience of it gained from the single instance of the two sides working in tandem during the disastrous last contract. Still, it needed work and we had to come up with at least the beginnings of a comprehensive training plan that we could all be happy with.

The next morning we appraised the last of our new recruits and began their training. Over the next five weeks, we ran ourselves and our men ragged training. We marched all over the place, erected temporary fortifications, trained with our weapons until we couldn’t hold them anymore and many other things besides.

By the end of it, we had washed out two of our new recruits and a further three had rung the bell. Even with the captain having padded our numbers at the start this left us one man down but we had feared an even worse outcome so I wasn’t too disappointed and neither was the captain.

By the end of it while most of the new recruits, even some of those with previous experience elsewhere were still no match for veteran members of the company, they had all greatly improved from where they had been before their training had started. And the veterans themselves had also benefited from it, especially those who had perhaps not fully recovered from their wounds beforehand.

Howey, Omana and Trent were allowed to remain in their new positions at the end of the training, though they wouldn’t be truly secure in them until they had the first contract under their belts

Besides the training the men went through Captain Walker made sure that myself and my fellow lieutenants were as prepared as he could make us. He talked us through nearly every battle he had ever taken part in or heard about for that matter.

When I was younger my father, whose own father he told me had been a professor of Military History at the University of Chelmsford, had done something similar though more for entertainment during snow and other storms than any practical reason. He had a different, dare I say less critical perspective than Walker. I had managed to remember some of the battles my father had talked about in enough detail to discuss them with the others.

Stolen story; please report.

They of course had never heard of any of the battles I had mentioned and the fact I couldn’t for reasons of my own reveal their source didn’t help this of course. Thus they took them with a grain of salt, however at the same time they didn’t dismiss them entirely. Captain Walker even compared the Battle of Lunalonge to something similar his uncle had once told him about. He was also entranced by my retelling of the second Siege of Chartres which he no doubt thought involved a case of divine intervention on the part of Telondian.

On the night we finished training Captain Walker arranged a party for all the men in the same vein as the one held at the end of last campaign season. This time we stayed for the entire thing and I can say with full confidence that there wasn’t a single one of us that didn’t wake up the next morning without a hangover.

We all rested that day, having to recover from the night before well, other than the Captain who headed out early for the Guild to look for our first contract of the season. He returned late that evening and immediately called for a meeting with myself and the other lieutenants.

“I had a long look at all the contracts available to a company of our size and since I want to ease the men back into it I had to be picky about it. I selected what I thought were the three best options for us, mainly due to their perceived difficulty. Unfortunately, my top two choices went to the Peachpaw Posse and the Quiet Reapers respectively and thus I had to settle for my third choice.”

“Well sir, what is it, where is it and what’s the likely opposition?”

“Well as I was about to say before you rudely interrupted me, Lieutenant Bracton, please don’t do so again, it’s a simple Bandit Suppression operation. A small bandit band, thought to be less than a hundred strong was spotted in their winter camp by some hunter two months ago on lands nominally belonging to the lordship of Lone Shadow Manor in the Dukedom of Baylem.

That’s about twelve days’ journey from here and while so far there hasn’t been any news of attacks in the area it’s lord Sir Malcolm Haute want the camp, if it still exists, dealt with. And if not he wants them if at all possible tracked to their new location so he can inform the relevant authority of the situation. Ryder, do you think our scouts are up to the task if it gets that far?”

“I’d have to check with Young to be sure but unless they have someone with a high enough relevant counter skill it should be possible.”

“Good, we move out in two days, Ryder go and have a talk with Young and make sure he agrees with your assessment and if not, well I suppose we might get lucky and by the time we get to the manor they won’t have yet moved out of their winter camp, not that I hold out much hope of that.”

Young agreed with my earlier assessment of his abilities and when I communicated that to Walker he wasn’t as happy about it as I would have liked.

“We’ve faced too many surprises recently and they say these things come in threes, don’t they.”

When we departed two days later the mood in the company wasn’t exactly what one would hope for but it could have been a lot worse, most felt there were just too many unknowns with the contract. They weren’t so much concerned that they might face more than they could handle but rather that in all likelihood the eventual spoils were unlikely to be all that impressive.

Captain Walker tried his best to reassure them that when the bandits were tracked down, even if they had moved far from the lands of Malcolm Haute we might be able to get involved with their capture and the rewards that should bring about. This somewhat changed their mood but it was still far from what one would hope it to be.

The Journey to Lone Shadow Manor was best described as uneventful The Weather was as close to perfect as you can get at that time of the year and the roads for the most part were well maintained. We even managed to arrive a day earlier than planned thanks to a newly rebuilt bridge across an hard to ford section of a river.

Upon our arrival in Lone Shadow Manor, we were met by Sir Malcolm Haute’s son Walter who welcomed us on his father’s behalf. He led us to a campsite where we would be staying the night before departing in the morning for the site of the bandit's winter camp. He apologised for his father's absence but since we had arrived earlier than expected he was currently busy elsewhere. He also caught us up on the current situation, not that he had much to add to what we already knew.

Before we headed out the next day he introduced us to Thomas Brus, the hunter who had originally discovered the camp and would be our local guide for the duration of the contract.