“Not only are those two out on their own,” she went on, “but they’re already headed our way. I think you and Jasper can probably intercept them about there—” she pointed to where a clump of trees thrust out from the base of their hill “—without anyone noticing you, and invite them up here to talk to me.”

“ ‘Invite’!” LaFollet snorted. Then he shook his head resignedly. “All right, My Lady. Whatever you say.”

Honor sat on a thick, gnarled root, leaning her spine against the tree to which it belonged with Nimitz in her lap, as the two POWs were escorted towards her. They were still too far away for her to feel their emotions with any clarity, but the way they moved proclaimed their uncertainty and wariness. They stayed close together, looking back over their shoulders frequently, and the man had his arm around the woman in a protective gesture which would have looked silly, given the difference in their heights, if it had been even a little less fierce.

Jasper Mayhew followed them, his pulse rifle casually unslung but with the muzzle pointing unthreateningly away from his “guests,” and Andrew LaFollet brought up the rear. Her armsman, she saw, had collected the POWs’ spears. He’d evidently lashed them together so he could carry both of them in one hand, and he carried his drawn pulser in the other. The spears had long, leaf-shaped heads chipped from a white, milky-looking stone of some sort, and each POW wore an empty belt sheath. She glanced at LaFollet again and saw knives or daggers of the same white stone tucked into his belt.

She watched them come closer, and Nimitz stirred uneasily in her lap. She reached out through her link to him and winced as a fist seemed to punch her in the face. She’d felt fear to match the POWs’ often enough, but never such bleak, helpless, terrible fury. The emotion storm was so ferocious she almost expected to see one of them burst into spontaneous flame—or at least turn to charge Mayhew and LaFollet in a berserk suicide attack—but they had themselves too well in hand for that. And perhaps there was another reason beyond self-discipline, for even through their seething rage, she felt a tiny edge of something else. Uncertainty, perhaps. Or curiosity. Something, at any rate, which whispered to them that what was happening might not, in fact, be what they had assumed it must be.

They reached the top of the hill and paused suddenly, stock still as they saw Honor and Nimitz. The two of them looked at one another, and the woman said something too low for Honor to hear, but she felt that spark of curiosity flaring higher, and realized it was the sight of Nimitz which had fanned it. Mayhew said something to her in reply, his tone courteous but insistent, and they shook themselves back into motion and walked straight to her.

She gathered Nimitz up in the crook of her arm and stood, and she felt another, stronger flash of shock and curiosity snap through them as they stepped under the shade of her tree and stopped, staring at her from a distance of three or four meters. Then the woman shook herself and cocked her head to the side.