"We treat our dogs well!" retorted Calos indignantly. "What do you take us for? Any dog we take in, we treat well. Train it. Feed it."

"You'd treat this child as nothing more than that?"

Calos shook his head. "What are you thinking, friend?" he said, with a tilted smile and a narrowed gaze, as if he were scolding Alain or laughing at his naivety. "This poor child has never in his life been treated as well as us troopers under the command of Captain Lukas treat our good dogs. I'll swear to you he'll do as well. Better than he's done. We need a laugh in our barracks."

"What happens to the child when you go home to your villages?"

Both of them laughed, but the laughter concealed pain.

"I was born in town," said Calos. "The lady's service is my life, friend. As for Jochim here, he's got no village to go back to. Flooded out, it was, when the river went running backward last autumn. His whole family died in them floods and most of the other folk in the place likewise. The rest had to beg in the lanes and I suppose most of them died over the winter and early spring. He's lucky to get a meal every day and a bed to sleep in. He's lucky we took him in, seeing him a likely soldier. So will you be—lucky if we take you in. Or haven't you heard? Times are hard. If these frosts don't lift, if the sun don't come, if the crops don't grow, they'll get worse. Much worse."

"I pray you," whispered young Jochim, wiping a tear from his eye. "Don't speak such ill words. The Enemy hears us."

“Are you coming?" asked Calos. "Can we adopt the little lad?"

He wasn't afraid to meet Alain's gaze, dead on, searching as much as he was searched. An honest man, of his kind, not compassionate but not cruel either; he meant what he said. He did his job, and was loyal to those he had pledged his loyalty to. Maybe he was right about the child. Maybe the most a beggar's crippled and abandoned orphan son could hope for in these days was to be treated as well as a well-kept dog.

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