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sudden infusion of all the Marines, either?” Merlin asked.
    He was watching Green Valley attentively. The baron had been chosen for his present assignment, despite his relative youth—he was still well short of forty—and painfully new elevation to the aristocracy, not simply because he was so good at his job, but because of the acuity of his insights. Now Green Valley gave the seijin a wry headshake, as if admonishing him for having asked a question to which they both so obviously already knew the answer.
    “No, it hasn’t,” he said out loud. “Partly, I think that’s because of their professionalism. They’re more interested in learning how to do their jobs even better than in defending their reputation for how well they already do them. In that respect, they remind me a lot of our naval officers like Earl Lock Island and Baron Rock Point. They’re professionals first and prima donnas second, or even third.
    “But, as I say, that’s only part of the reason.” Green Valley’s eyes were narrow now, his expression intent. “I think probably an even bigger reason is that, aside from its very uppermost ranks, such a huge percentage of the Army’s officers are commoners. One of the things I think most frustrates the great nobles who are so unhappy with the Emperor and the Empress is the way they’ve been shut out of any real positions of power in the Army. It would be stupid of them to be surprised by that, I suppose, since the whole reason King Sailys and Baron Green Mountain—and Halbrook Hollow, to give the man his due—created the Royal Army in the first place was to restore the Crown’s prerogatives at the expense of the nobility. After the amount of fighting that took, I don’t think it should astonish anyone that they decided against handing out generalships to any noblemen whose loyalty to the Crown they weren’t totally sure of. And the fact that lowborn soldiers could—and have — risen to high rank in the Army helps explain how enthusiastically the commons support it. Here in Chisholm, the Army holds exactly the same position—as far as the commons are concerned, at any rate—as the Navy does in Charis, and it’s young enough and professional enough to be genuinely flexible.” He shook his head. “I honestly never expected just how flexible it really is.”
    Merlin nodded in agreement. He’d been a bit more optimistic about the Royal Chisholmian Army’s willingness to adopt the new weapons and tactics than some Charisians had been, but even he had been pleasantly surprised by the Chisholmians’ enthusiasm for the changes.
    And, the seijin thought, Green Valley had an even better point than the baron himself might realize about the Army’s importance in the eyes of the Empire’s Chisholmian subjects.
    By and large, the majority of Chisholmians appeared firmly united behind the decision to fuse the kingdoms of Chisholm and Charis (now almost universally referred to as “Old Charis,” just to keep things straight) into the new Charisian Empire. Not all of them were, however. Some—and especially those who were most prone to think in terms of their own power and influence—doubted that the promised equality between Chisholm and Old Charis could (or would) truly be maintained. Old Charis boasted half again the population of Chisholm, and its economic wealth was at least four times that of Chisholm. Its manufactories and merchants had held a dominant position in Chisholm ’s economy even before the two kingdoms had united, the Charisian merchant marine dominated all the seas and oceans of Safehold, and the Royal Chisholmian Navy had disappeared—almost without a trace—into the much larger Royal Charisian Navy, even if the resulting union was officially called the Imperial Navy.
    Under the circumstances, it probably wasn’t unreasonable for at least some Chisholmians to nourish a few doubts about how long it would be before Chisholm openly became the junior partner—one might