Iron and Magic (The Iron Covenant, #1)

by Ilona Andrews

There used to be good-natured competition between the squads, the centuries, and the cohorts, which Hugh encouraged, because it bound the soldiers closer together. But now, with the fragments of cohorts on his hands, he had to reform them into a new unit. Teach a man to fight and you made him into a warrior. He didn’t need warriors. He needed soldiers. To make a soldier, you had to put her with other prospective soldiers and make them go through hell and back together, relying on each other. They all had memories of walking through blood and fire with their old squad mates. He had to replace those memories with new ones, and so he did the only thing he could do to purge them. He’d sectioned off Felix’s scout team and formed the rest of his force, three hundred and nineteen soldiers, into a single cohort, which he split into four centuries, eighty people for the first three and seventy-nine in the last. Stoyan, Lamar, Bale, and Felix each took a century. And then he ran them, tired and starving, into exhaustion. He smoked them until their arms could no longer hold their weight. He kept them from sleeping. He did it all with them, picking a different century every day. Respect had to be earned.

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