"Laurent and Tomas went before you. Did you see them there?"

"No sign of them. Did they know where to look? They might be lost in the ruins."

"Did you hear anything?"

"What is it?" he asked again.

When they told him, he rubbed his clean-shaven chin with the stump of his right arm as if he had momentarily forgotten that he lacked the hand.

"Do we send out a search party?" asked Sergeant Aronvald.

By now night had swept in. Beyond the halo lent by the campfire it was impossible to see anything except the wall of darkness that marked the distant line of trees.

"They can see our campfire," said Lady Bertha. "They can shout, if they are injured."

She was a hard commander. Hanna had seen her drive her men over mountain paths more suitable to goats, had seen her set her own noble shoulder to pushing the wagons where the road became nothing more than a series of dry rills dug into earth by runoff. She had suffered an injury in the infamous battle against Anne's forces that no one would talk about in detail, and had lost most of the range of motion in her left arm, but if the injury pained her day in and day out she never complained. Yet she never smiled, and her frown dug deep as she faced her muttering retainers.

"If they have been ambushed, then sending out a search party will only offer our adversaries more swift kills. If they are lost, and in no danger, they can find us by the light of the campfire or at dawn."

"There's some rough ground back there," said Brother Breschius. "A defile, a few drops where the ground falls away. This palace was built to take advantage of the high ground. They might have fallen."

Her expression did not change. "They might have. If so, it is unlikely in this darkness we will find them. We'll search at dawn."

She looked at Sister Rosvita. After a moment, with genuine reluctance, Rosvita nodded to show she agreed. Hanna looked past the two women to the fire where Sister Petra had gotten her charge seated and was fussing to get her to drink broth out of the stewpot.

Princess Sapientia stared into the flickering fire. She did not look as if she had lost her mind. She did not act as would a madwoman, babbling and cursing and flailing her arms in the manner of the moon-mad who had lost their wits, or spitting and frothing at the mouth as might a soul possessed by a demon. She just did not speak and did not respond and seemed to have cut the thread that binds one person's actions to those of her companions, which threads are all that stitch the world of living things into a single fabric of being. She acted as if she were already dead.

"Pull the two cargo wagons across the open side," Bertha was saying. "Fix shields to cover what they can. Set men up where they can watch along the height of the wall on the other sides. Yes, even up there, in those rafters that can take their weight."