And yet, just as they approached the camp with what seemed like half the inhabitants waiting for them, and in the very moment that the blackest depression descended on him, the children changed the complexion of everything.

They had been clinging to the sides of the wagons, peering over and around each other, trying to see ahead—when they saw the lines of white-clad Heralds and Companions, they could not hold themselves back. They boiled out of the wagons, spilled over the sides, tumbled to the ground, laughing and shouting, and ran to those who waited. “White Riders! White Riders!” they shouted (virtually the only Karsite they knew), pouring into the camp and running up to anyone who looked even halfway friendly, as if these were not strangers, but friends and beloved relations.

There were a great many of these children, he realized, as more of them spilled out of the wagons and carts. More than the “thousand” that Laika had promised. But no one seemed to mind. Certainly no one called him or Selenay to account for it, not then, and not at any time thereafter.

And in the days following, as the bodies were burned or buried, as the wounded were taken north, as the encampment was disassembled and troop after troop of fighters sent north again, it was the children who kept them all sane. They were everywhere, poking their noses into everything, trying to learn Valdemaran, trying to help where they could, and just being children, some for the first time in their short lives.

Not even Selenay was proof against their sheer exuberance at being here, a place that they seemed to consider an earthly paradise, and before long she had “adopted” a half dozen (or they adopted her), making them her pages and promising that they would be allowed to join her Royal Household in that capacity once they all reached Haven. Nor was she the only one; every wagon going north seemed to hold a handful of children going to a new home. Fighters, teamsters, Heralds—servants and highborn—everyone who could take in two, three, or four children did so.

“I never would have believed it, no matter who had told me, if anyone had claimed that bringing these children here was the best thing we could have done,” Selenay told him on the third afternoon of the return, watching a child dash away with a message to be given to the next dispatch rider going out of the camp. Her eyes were still shadowed with sorrow, but her lips curved in a faint, fond smile. “I thought that it was something that had to be done, but truth to tell, I was dreading the mess they’d make for us.”