And, to be truthful, there was far more of trust in Drak than could be expressed by mere hope.
On the same day that the news of Layco Jhansi’s raid reached us our vanguard flew off for Ovalia.
They flew in all the vollers we had. A regiment of churgurs, sword and shield men, and a regiment of archers, almost one thousand men. The swods in the ranks of these regiments were old hands, they had served with me before and would have to form one of the hard cores of the little force. The other hard core, it goes without saying, would be the Tenth Kerchuri. The pikes would have to stand, and hold, and charge, as they had been trained, and no one must allow doubt to creep in that these men, these brumbytes wielding their pikes in the files, were green, raw, and had seen no action.
Like that hal
