One of the men checked inside the awning. Others stared at Eridit.

“She going for sale, too?” asked the leader finally, indicating her with an elbow.

“Neh. She was Captain Mani’s bed warmer, although I don’t see what she saw in him. I promised to see her safely back to the army.”

The man leered. “Looking for a real man to take you on, eh? I’ll consider it, but you’d have to show me what you have to offer.”

Eridit looked about to say something rude, but she scanned him in a measuring way. “I’m looking for a man who will treat me decent. One with a bit of coin to keep me clothed and fed. Say what you will about Captain Mani, but he treated me decent and so I treated him decent. That’s worth plenty.”

Simple words, and yet with her tone and posture she did get those men to looking at each other as though sizing up their competition. Set their backs up. Sow a scattering of dissension. Good tactics. Bai signaled, and Eridit herded the children back under the awning.

“We’ll move out at dawn,” Bai said.

They settled into an uneasy truce, one man from each company set to the watch. Shai was dismissed, but although he settled down against the awning, he was twisted too tight to sleep. He fretted all night, wondering where Tohon was concealed, but neither saw sight nor heard sound of the Qin scout, not even when night’s shroud lifted to reveal an overcast dawn.

They walked the next day on forest tracks, pushing east through heavily overgrown countryside. At their approach, birds ceased singing. The children ate nai paste in the morning, and afterward trudged with faces set, little soldiers who had lost all hope of returning home and, in doing so, gained new strength. Shai moved up and down the line as they marched, keeping an eye out for exhaustion, quietly making sure none of the soldiers bothered them.

In the afternoon they stumbled across an abandoned farmstead, blowing through like locusts, stripping any least thing that might be edible. Dena and Eska proved adept at crawling along the narrow eaves of the storehouse to collect bundles of drying herbs. It was strange to see how sharing food altered the behavior of the soldiers, some joshing the children good-naturedly as they might younger siblings. The landscape began to open with harvested woodland, large clearings suitable for pasturage, a pair of charcoal pits, and strips of old field gone fallow. Twice again they moved through emptied farmsteads, and gleaned what they could.

Where had the farmers gone? No one made any guesses.

But in both farmsteads Shai collected an arrow fletched in the Qin style discarded in the dust beneath one of the storehouses. Tohon had been here before them.

As they traveled on, the shadows grew long. A murmur nagged at Shai’s ears.

“Best we look for a camping site,” said Bai.

The leader shook his head. “Neh. We’re near enough. Keep moving.”