Captain Margaret

Margaret, whom everybody calls Totty, has been captain of the guard at Ostrad a long while. She served in the Dhel army once, a long time before that, got herself out of it, and came to Ostrad, and she has been there ever since.

Dwayne gave her name when Koa asked who might be got to take charge of the defenses at the Crack, and he dropped his voice to do it, because word was that Ostrad had fallen to Beltran Grayeras’s forces and he did not know whether she was still alive. She is old, she is not somebody anyone would put in a front line now, and she is at the end of a career rather than in the middle of one. What Dwayne put on the other side of that was that she had never once been one to back away from a fight, and that if she was living she would need nobody to supply her a reason to want at Beltran.

Getting a letter into an occupied town was the difficulty. Dwayne took Ostrad as his own errand and could not get there. The letter reached her regardless, and she answered yes.

She did not get the post. Set against Hanza, who had never held a command of her own, the company found it could not judge either woman’s skill and so decided on the cost of taking each: pulling Margaret out would have left an occupied town without the only defender it had, and the same could not be said of Veren. Koa wrote back to tell her they wanted her still, and that what would help most from where she stood was word out of Ostrad, which she had already offered to give them.