“Should we camp in the town, my lord?” asked Captain Frigo.

“What do the men say?” Hugh asked him. “I think the shelter will do us some good, but if they prefer a more open site, if they fear plague, that is as well with me.”

Frigo nodded, scratching his beard. “They’re muttering that it’s well enough to walk a town like this in daylight, when night might bring ghosts, and devils carrying sickness. I think otherwise. There’s no sign of dogs or corpses. Deserted as we are here, it’s best to have a defensible position. They’ll see the wisdom of staying within walls if anything attacks us by night. Wolves or bandits. Those other things.”

“Wisely spoken, Captain. Set up camp.”

John and Theodore found a campsite that suited the nervous men. They planted their backs against the broken wall of a merchant’s compound with a long storehouse along one side and a stable along another. The courtyard gave them space to set up a couple of lean-tos for shelter without having to camp right within the ruins where scorpions might scuttle and ghosts poke their knuckles into a man’s ribs while he slept.

Scarred John unfolded a leather-and-wood tripod stool. Lord Hugh unrolled a map on top of the small traveling chest. He pinned the corners with an oil lamp, a heavy silver chain mounded up over a silver Circle of Unity, his knife, and his left hand. He studied the map, twisting a wick between thumb and middle finger but not yet lighting it.

“We escape tonight,” Blessing whispered to Anna as the girl trotted past in Captain Frigo’s wake. The big man glanced at her. Anna wasn’t sure how much Wendish he understood, but she guessed he couldn’t follow her conversations with the princess as well as she could follow the Dariyan spoken between soldiers and master.

Under the shelter of sloped canvas, she unrolled the blankets she and Blessing shared, and there she sat to watch Lord Hugh as he stared at the parchment. The canvas ceiling rose and fell as a twilight wind gusted out of the east.

The men chatted companionably as they got the horses settled in the stables and sentries up onto the walls. Liudbold and scarred John set to work splitting wood from the abandoned houses to fuel the fire. Frigo sat on his saddle and, with Blessing trussed tight beside him, set to work dressing a sapling trunk with an adze.

Lord Hugh had that ability to build trust between himself and those who served him. In this same manner, Prince Sanglant led his men, knowing all their names, their home villages, their sense of humor, and which man needed a coarse joke or which a kind word to keep his spirits up. In this wilderness, Hugh’s entourage was nervous and watchful but not terrified, because they trusted him.

In her mind’s eye, she saw Elene’s blood leaking over the chessboard and pooling around Berthold’s slack fingers. She could not shake off the memory.