He had to disgrace himself in properly shouting. It wasn't the graceful bellow of a General. He hadn't spoken enough that morning for his first words to come out properly. He felt his voice crack as he repeated that same word. "Gentlemen!"
And with the cracking came a clenching of his teeth. Never had he been more aware of the oddness of his youth in such high command then. It brought a flush to his cheeks. These men, seized from Tavar as they were, how disgraced they must have felt to be put in his hands of all people. An army that was now composed nearly entirely of foreign elements, apart from those Patrick soldiers that Oliver still had.
He looked down the lines as he moved on the back of his white horse – a horse that finally, he'd come up with a name for, and he'd done it at the worst possible time, when he ought to have been thinking of other things. When the matter of their current situation had haunted him. He'd chirped up, distracted. "Nelson," he'd said to Verdant.
