On the evening that the Governor dubbed her Marshall, the swordswoman was not quite cast adrift into the sea of Myrken bureaucracy. She had powerful resources available to her, after all. Talented minds, educated in the war-room, the council chamber, the distant universities of which she could only, dimly dream. Her position was unique and it was also well-supplied. But every one of these was unavailable, for one reason or another: she was restrained by distance, by time; by the very few hours contained in each busy day; she was, on occasion, enslaved by her own crushing pride.
There was, in the end, no-one to ask. No-one who was competent, no-one to whom she could bring herself to speak the questions. But was that not somehow fitting? She had learned absolution at the feet of Bea Kanaya, blood on her hands and tears in her eyes. She had learned regret beneath a scribe's wounded eyes and in the sterile echo of an empty training room; hours and miles from here she'd learned the far reaches of her heart within the attentive foster of a man Myrken only begins to know. But those were gentler things, and this was an issue of command and of cold contingencies. Myrken matters, if ever there were - and perhaps it was only right that in the end, she'd addressed them in a very Myrken manner: by teaching herself.
The Militia has learned with her - but a step behind, so that they needn't stumble as she has, needn't question the process at all. Its archers were already beyond competent, skilled with their tools and comfortable beneath firm command; Renea Sundance had seen to that, and their expertise had shocked her. The others were not - not in the ways which she needed them to be - but they could be motivated, she discovered very quickly, when she made their inspiration the history which she and they shared. Who would want, for instance, to spend an hour's leisure on digging ditches against summer wildfire? It was brutal work; it didn't even seem like Militia work at all. But though their children are too young to remember the Blight, the fathers were surely not, and it had been shoulders and shovels, in mind of those Blight-driven firestorms of years ago. Shoulders and shovels, day after day, until Myrkentown's key districts had been largely secured - and when she turned the Militia's attention towards its own homesteads, there'd been no need for fresh encouragement at all.
The flags, though.
The flags were another matter entirely.