Looking for women with a single name to their credit among the endless shelves in the castle archives was a daunting prospect. Even knowing the year they had enlisted did not help much. Their names were present in the cadet census, but almost nowhere else. Of the more recent female soldiers there were records aplenty, but about ten years back, the documentation began to peter out. Individual names vanished into plurals and then disappeared entirely. When they were mentioned, they appeared as a group, described only as "the women" or "the females". The only half-way decent volume was a strangely linear little book that described the exploits of the first few groups of women en mass. Clearly copied from older material, Leo did his best to track down the original source but found nothing.
Barricaded behind a mound of books and papers, Leo barely noticed as someone sat down at the far end of the long reading table. Chancing a brief glance up from his fruitless research, he blinked and looked again. A stout old woman with a patch over one eye and a rather ridiculous set of shiny black braids trailing down over her shoulders had made herself comfortable. Here in the castle archives she looked horribly out of place, as if she'd wandered too far from her seat near the fire at her favorite pub. She too had a stack of books, albeit significantly smaller than his own. Not only that, the books appeared to be in dreadful condition. The largest one at the bottom of the stack bore unmistakable scorch marks.
"Lord Gallen," she greeted him.
"Madam," he nodded politely. Flipping one braid back over her shoulder, she adjusted the woolly cloak wrapped around her shoulders. Beneath it peeked the rust-colored cloth of a Zexen army uniform. One of the Lady Guard.
"My pardon, Dame…?"
"Danielle ," she supplied in a voice made of gravel. "The head librarian tells me you've been tearing the archives apart."
"I have," he nodded. "Dame Henrietta has set me a on a quest, but I'm having a difficult time finding a map."
"You look in the wrong places, Lord Gallen." Silently, she slid the short stack of books toward him.
"What are these?" he asked, paging through the first and smallest notebook.
"A map," was her cryptic response. "Begin at the beginning, at the bottom."
Obediently, Leo set the smaller volumes aside and opened the larger one. He recognized the simple binding; a cadet roster for all the new recruits to enter service in the same year. This one, however, bore heavy charring along its pages and cover. Opening it proved that entire sections had been reduced to charcoal, and that most of the ruined pages were empty. Only about half the pages were full. Full, he realized, of entirely female names.
"This is a listing of the original Lady Guard," he murmured, carefully turning the flaking page. "Along with seven or eight subsequent cohorts."
Dame Danielle nodded.
"What happened to it?"
"Documents are regularly burned at Brass Castle, those deemed either too trivial or too dangerous to remain on the shelves."
"Which were you?" he dared to ask. Dame Danielle gave him a gap-toothed smile. Leo couldn't help returning it.
The next three books proved to be rather haphazard accounts of the women's military careers. These, at least, bore no damage, but apparently had only been updated in fits and starts. Written in a dozen different hands and styles, it was difficult to decipher what little information the pages contained. None of them had been signed. With a sigh, Leo resigned himself to another night of digging through the archives for the names of the men who had been commanding officers of the first few women in ranks.
The last little book, no larger than one of his notebooks, read almost like a diary. The entries were chronicled by name and date of enlistment, with lists of battles, merits, wounds, and, in a few cases, deaths. The hands varied here as well, but the level of detail was astonishing compared to the scattered, careless remarks in the official records.
"I don't understand," he confessed.
"Nor would you. You are a noble's son, born to privilege. Yes, you earned your place in the world, and I do not begrudge you your station, but you had a leg up early on that the rest of us could never hope for."
"That does not explain why the female records are nowhere to be found in the archives," he insisted. Danielle shrugged.
"As I said, these were documents too trivial to take up space. It was widely assumed that all of us would be gone before long, either drummed or driven out if we didn't first get ourselves killed. We had to make sure out existence was documented, and as you can see, if left to the castle clerks, we might have no record at all."
"There are records of women at the castle, but none of them go back farther than fifteen years."
The yellowed grin returned. "Why do you think that is, Lord Gallen?"
"...you were finally knighted then," he said slowly, realization dawning. "You began to be put into positions of relative power."
She nodded, approving. "Very good."
"Dame Danielle, may I borrow these?"
The jovial smile vanished from her leathery face at once. No more the beaming inn keeper's wife, she had suddenly turned to steely-eyed street tough.
"That you may not," she said sharply. Upon witnessing his dismay, however, her expression softened. "I removed them from the library only with special permission."
Leo blinked. They were already in the library. There was no other that he was aware of. And then it hit him.
"Where is this library?"
The bulldog smiled returned. "Come with me, Milord."
Once he considered it, the location of the second library hinted at by Dame Danielle should have been obvious. The castle infirmary housed a good-sized clerical office, the better to keep track of injuries, illness, and other medical records. Dame Elizabeth was not chief physician, nor even head nurse, but instead functioned ostensibly as a sort of secretary to the male doctors. Her office was tiny, all but one wall crammed with books and folios.
"Lord Gallen," she rose and nodded to him in salute. "I thought you might pay us a visit."
"Dame Danielle was kind enough to refer me," he told her, offering the stack of damaged books. Taking them from his huge hands, she lost no time in returning them to their rightful place on the shelf nearest her desk.
These were not the official records, not by anyone's tally, but they were no doubt much closer to the truth. There were more salvaged tomes here, many in better shape than the one Dame Danielle had shown him. None of them, he noticed, dealt with classes later than ten years after that of the Lady Guard. There was no need, he surmised, to keep extra records after that. By that time the Lady Guard had been made officers, women in the army had become an accepted fact. Evidently, the castle scribes had adjusted accordingly.
"I recognize these records are too precious to be far removed from your library," he began. "I therefore ask if I might come here to review them, if such a thing would be convenient?"
Dame Elizabeth looked positively amused at his politeness. "Do as you please, Lieutenant General."
It was harder- given his schedule and the never ending mountain of forms and files waiting in the salon- to find time to visit the infirmary. As Lieutenant General he hardly needed an excuse to visit. Others might talk, but no one save the others of the high command would ever question it. That being the case, stolen hours here and there found him wedged into a corner, carefully committing the Lady Guard's records to memory.
He had been a child wearing holes in the knees of his breeches when Aurella and her sisters had first shocked the nation with their audacious request: to serve in the Zexen military alongside the noble and tradesmen's sons. Now such a thing would hardly cause such a stir. Paging through the records, the outrage it had triggered in everyone from nobleman to tavern wench came as a bit of a shock. As a boy, he had not understood the significance of the only distantly remembered fuss. There had always been both commoners and women in the Zexen military, but generally in non-combative support positions. To be fair, knighthood had been a comparatively recent invention in the equally young Zexen federation. No noble daughters had shown an interest at the time, only a pack of low-class teenagers hoping to improve their lot. Who could blame them? Several men had already risen to the title of "Sir" with a surname to accompany it. Lands and the hand of a lady had even been earned by a lucky few. It only made sense that the female foot soldiers would desire a similar chance to better themselves.
All twenty-six of the young common women had been admitted to the corps of cadets on the grounds that no one could find a legitimate reason to turn them away. No more than eight years old at the time, he had never give much thought to the matter, being more concerned with childish things. It would be another eight years before Leo would join ranks himself. By that time, the first group of lowborn girls should have completed their training as squires and moved on into positions in the regular army. However, as Aurella had mentioned, such had not been the case. A number of ridiculous concerns and complications had prolonged the process. By his reckoning, Aurella and her sisters should have been knighted the same year he enlisted. Instead, their knighting ceremony had preceded his own by only one year.
Perhaps because the official records were so spotty, none of the women had risen past the rank of Sergeant-Captain. Admittedly, it was a long tour that usually required some sort of merit or act of valor in order to ascend to Sergeant Major and then Lieutenant. Now that he thought about it, only Percival and perhaps one or two others- also men- had risen to command positions without the benefit of wealth and family to recommend them. It was a discouraging thought.