General Mallery

Mallery was a sergeant in the old royal army and a general of the Republic before he was thirty. He never forgave the Eagle for making himself master of what the volunteers of the Year II had fought for, and he said so, once too often, at the wrong dinner.

He has spent years under arrest in a private asylum for the restless, where the regime keeps the men it would rather not try. He reads the bulletins from the eastern front with a pencil in his hand. He has kept his old uniform pressed, a few friends in the barracks, and the conviction that a government held by one man can be overthrown by another man with a good story.