“Well, then. Your people need someone good to follow. I’ll send you a couple of personable, cheerful young Marshals.”

They came around a clump of trees, and there before them was Kindle—but a different Kindle.

“I thought you said it looked like a wreck of war,” the Marshal-General said.

“It did—” Dorrin looked around her. Where was the real Kindle? “Did Paks do this?”

“I don’t know. I suppose she could have.”

The ramshackle huts now looked like cottages in need of some repair, which they were getting. A wall Dorrin clearly remembered as leaning now stood upright, and two half-grown children were smearing the uneven stones with mud; another side already had whitewash up to the thatch. Roof framing had been mended, so even old grass thatch looked more like a real roof, and others were now half-thatched with reeds.

Every cottage had its kitchen garden, and despite the late start, the gardens flourished. Washing hung over fences and bushes. Faces appeared at cottage doors, around corners—women and children mostly; the children already looked plumper and distinctly cleaner.

“She’s back, she’s back!” a small child screeched, and ran toward them. Dorrin dismounted, recognizing the little girl who had brought her the crown of flowers. The child flung herself at Dorrin, hugging her knees. “We’s water!” she said.

“Don’t bother the Duke,” a woman said. “Come back—”

“It’s all right,” Dorrin said. “She’s not bothering me. Look—this is the Marshal-General of Gird, come to visit. She wanted to see your village—and you’ve done so much work since I left—”

“Gird’s grace on this place,” the Marshal-General said. The women stared. “Did you ever have a grange here?”

Frightened looks now. “No … lady.”

“Do you know who Gird is?”

“T’old duke, he said Gird was a liar and a thief and a long time dead and good riddance.” That came out all in one breath.

“He was wrong about that,” Dorrin said. “Look—you know the merin of wells and springs, don’t you?”

“ ’Course, m’lord, everyone knows about them.”

“And Alyanya, the Lady of Peace?”

“Ye-es.”

“Gird was a farmer in a village, just like you,” Dorrin said. “He put flowers at the well, just like you. He blooded the spade and the plough, first time in the ground, just like you.”

“Yes, but—but he’s dead.”

“He did a lot of good things before he died,” Dorrin said, with a glance at the Marshal-General. “You should learn about them.”

“Is that what you want?”

“I want you to have a good life,” Dorrin said. “And I think it would be good for you to learn about Gird, at least.”

“Could Gird heal our well like it was, if he wasn’t dead?”

“I don’t know,” Dorrin said with another glance at the Marshal-General.

“ ’Cause you did, m’lord, and you freed us from the old duke, and now we have water and our childer an’t cryin’ for food. We don’t know Gird.”

“Tell you what,” Dorrin said. “I’ll have a Marshal of Gird at the big house, and maybe the Marshal will come visit you—not to poke and pry, just visit—and maybe someday you’ll want a Marshal nearer than that.”