“Oh my!” she blurted as she almost tripped over a young boy. She wrapped her arms around the child’s shoulders, but he promptly wriggled free and ran away. Oh my seemed a terribly quaint thing to say, and she flushed to wonder when it had become an instinctive phrase. The boy barreled recklessly down the path between dining tables, his long golden-blond hair flowing behind him. Marion tried to recall his name but it slipped out of her mind, fluttered away, and probably had a very nice life without ever missing being a part of her vocabulary. All she could recall was the boy was an orphan, found alone by a river, and had been collectively adopted by four or five families since.

Children and families. It would be a lie to say this was the most able-bodied group in the world. There were more women than not, children, and elderly. They were, at a cold-blooded assessment, the obvious choices to be exiled from their previous masters’ vassalage. But a percentage of them were men, and a percentage of those men were physically and mentally fit. And a percentage of those capable men were willing to go beyond normal, lawful work to show their gratitude.

And those men were Marion’s other reason for visiting.

IF MARION HAD TIME to waste she might spend it thinking backward, prodding at her own memories like a loose tooth, to recall the first point she strayed from a truly honest life. She had been raised with a fear of the law and the Lord in equal measure, and as a little girl had been exacting in her obedience to both. But as a lady at court, the granddaughter of the esteemed Earl of Essex, she quickly discovered both the law’s limitations and its failures. Policies that genuinely helped the country often neglected the poorest of its citizens. And in a world of politics ruled by men, charity had somehow become a character flaw.

It may have started off as something as simple as a dilapidated footbridge, kept in neglect by the rivalry of the noblemen on either bank. No one but Marion would ever know who eventually tended to its repair. From there she might recall the next time some accidental political slight had gone unnoticed, and unpunished. The bread crumbs would lead to increasingly daring acts of willful disobedience. She would likely remember the fitful balance of risk and reward, and of maintaining deniability. She’d recall the people who received new seed after being robbed, the problematic raiders who mysteriously disappeared, or a missing delivery of wool blankets that its baron would never miss.