“Most of ’em aren’t now,” she replied, and shook her head. “Some of ’em, in fact, a lot of ’em, are Karsite orphans—some of ’em are camp followers’ children. And, dare I repeat myself, some of ’em are ours, grabbed every time they hit Valdemar in the past three years! But like I said, they don’t have much use for girls that aren’t breeding age, so they don’t pay any attention to ’em, and boys aren’t useful until they’re thirteen and old enough to take into a Tedrel lodge for training, so they’re all right up until then. Basically, they’re not Tedrel, they’re not Karsite, they’re not anything, really. When I was in there, they had a lot of the camp followers that were tending to all of them, and most of those were girls out of Rethwellan, Seejay, and Ruvan, with a couple of Karsites. So that’s what they’ve been raised as.”

“Raised as nothing, then,” Selenay ventured.

“Pretty much. A pretty weird mix, they all speak a kind of Tedrelpidgin with words from all over. The girls don’t ever get taught pure Tedrel tongue; that’s a man’s mystery. The kiddies have got some little religious cult they’ve made up on their own that isn’t like anything I’ve ever heard of. Like I said, they aren’t Tedrel, they aren’t anything.” She sighed. “What they are, is dead needy for adult attention. Even an old hag like me, they swarmed over.”

“But babies—without mothers—” someone put in doubtfully.

“Babes in arms—” She shrugged. “That little, the Tedrels don’t take. The ones born to the camp followers, well, they may be whores, but they’re still mothers; the ones that’ll bolt, they’ll take the children they can manage to carry and run for Rethwellan. That leaves the orphans, or ones whose mothers don’t care, and there’s a couple hundred, anyway, of an age we could rescue. No more than a thousand…”

Selenay glanced at Alberich, who was thinking furiously. “Karse—I think might be busy—elsewhere—”

Elsewhere hunting down all the escapees on their side of the Border and either conscripting them as bound slaves or making sure no one else ever does—

“—and,” he continued, “if the rescue and evacuation were made quickly, might not know it had been entered at all.”

“And a thousand children?” Selenay gulped.

“It’s not an unmanageable number,” the Lord Marshal put in. “It’s not as if it would be a thousand captives; most of them couldn’t run far.”