“Master Smythe said: go to the tournament.” The Red Knight shrugged. “Every bone in my body tells me to sit tight in Albinkirk and raise an army, but mayhap—with a great deal of luck—mayhap we can save something.” He shrugged. “Any road, we’ll be cautious, and move as if in a land at war.”

The men all groaned.

Ser Michael shook his head. “I don’t like it. Is the King… possessed?”

Since it was treason to propose such a thing, a certain hush fell.

Ser Gabriel leaned back and looked into his wine cup. “I thought I knew what was going on. The arrest of the Queen…” He shrugged. But Amicia noted that he merely sipped his wine. She had seen him drink more heavily. He was very carefully controlled.

Ser Michael looked over at Ser Thomas. “Send for the company,” he suggested. His suggestion was stated in fairly imperious tones.

Ser Thomas wrinkled his nose.

Ser Gabriel managed a thin-lipped smile. “I’m tempted. But—if we take an army into the Albin, then we’re the ones doing the provoking—and to all the people, all the merchants and yeomen and farmers, it will always seem that we provoked the King. The rightful King.” He looked around—at Ser Christos and Ser Alcaeus. “We have a good force—enough knights to defeat any casual attempt to take us. And we have friends.”

“And where exactly is Master Kronmir?” Ser Michael asked.

“Exactly where we need him to be, of course,” Ser Gabriel said, with something of his old arrogance.

Two days of intermittent rain turned the roads to a froth of mud and leaves. The gorge road that ran along the ridge top had good rock under all the mud, and the wagons continued to move well enough. Twice, Amicia rode along a path so narrow that she looked down to the left and wished she had not, and once, she and Sister Mary, who was feeling a little more human, had to dismount and put their backs against a cart to keep it from taking a wagoner and two mules into the gorge. The second time they got covered in mud, they had to accept dry clothes from the pages.

Sister Katherine laughed. “I could wear hose and a jupon every day,” she said. “If it weren’t so infernally difficult to pee.”

Nell smiled. “You get used to it,” she said.

Sister Mary looked at Amicia, with her hair under a man’s hood, and Katherine, with her curly red hair badly captured by an arming cap. “We will all be burned as heretics,” she predicted.

Waking among the captain’s household was as different from waking in the nunnery at Lissen Carak as could be imagined. It started with animals—the whole company was mounted, and a hundred men and women had three hundred animals—mules, horses, two pairs of oxen, a cow for milk; a pack of dogs led by a pair of mastiffs who belonged to Bad Tom but never seemed to be with him, and some cats who lived on the wagons, and the captain’s falcons and Ser Michael’s and a few terrified chickens. Morning came suddenly and almost violently, as the sun roused the animals to a chewing, barking, calling, biting, farting, neighing clamour.