“You never gave me what you promised!” she shouted.

He didn’t even look back. “I took what you offered, whore!”

Men sniggered, but glanced nervously toward their sergeant.

Bysantius stuck his quirt into his belt and drew his knife before the soldier could step down onto the path. “Pay her what you promised.”

The soldier—he was young and cocky—pulled up short, eyeing the knife. “I’ve nothing to pay her. I eat what the rest of us do, when it’s handed out at night. I’ve no coin, as you ought to know, Sergeant. I’m to be paid with land.”

“Then you’re a thief.”

The column staggered to a halt as soldiers poked and pulled at each other, turning to see the confrontation.

“Thieves are punished with death, by the lord general’s order. Any man who takes without permission is a thief.”

“Here, here,” said the man, extracting a crust of bread from his sleeve, “no harm done.” He turned, tossed the bread at the woman, and hurried back into line, his face red and the rest hooting at him. The woman scrabbled in the dirt and, scooping up the crust, ran away into the woods.

“Get on!” Bysantius added a few curses, sheathed his knife, and strode up the line brandishing his quirt.

Hanna, too, had stashed away a bit of her last night’s meal, nothing more than a bit of dry cheese, the last cut off a round. She fished it out of her sleeve and hissed.

“Tss! Here, you!” The young woman with the child had been weeping, huddled on the hill. Hanna tossed the cheese at her, but the wagon jerked forward and she stumbled to her knees and then scrambled to get up before she was dragged, and by the time she got herself stable again, she had lost sight of mother and child.

She was, therefore, doubly hungry that night, but as she ate the thin gruel out of the pot she couldn’t regret what she had done.

“Mind you,” said Sergeant Bysantius, coming over to crouch beside her, “the infant will die a day later rather than sooner. You’re just prolonging her misery.”

“Perhaps not. You can’t know what will happen. Why are all these refugees on the road?”

He scratched his neck. It was a mark of the general’s respect for the sergeant that he had been given command of the rear guard, but the dry and dusty conditions, the constant kick of dust all day long, had caused his skin to rash. “Nothing good, I’m thinking,” he said. “Nothing good.”

Years ago she, Liath, Hathui, Manfred, and Wolfhere had ridden east into the rising sun, traveling toward Gent. On that ride she had seen streams of refugees fleeing the Eika invasion. They had come on carts and on foot, leading donkeys or carrying crates that confined squawking chickens. They had hauled children and chests and sacks of withered turnips or baskets filled with rye and barley. The road, damp with rain, had churned to mud under the crush of so much traffic. Yet, despite their desperation, those Wendish refugees had not had the despairing, hopeless look of Arethousa’s wretched, fled from what every man and woman in the army referred to always and only as “the city.”