Sister Katherine slept through it effortlessly. Sister Mary complained that she was getting no sleep at all.

“And all the men are looking at me. All the time.” Sister Mary shuddered.

Sister Amicia forbore to comment and sat up. In the convent, they all went to careful lengths, as hospitallers, to be perfectly clean. They also dressed carefully so that as little flesh as possible showed at any given step. The Order had long experience of various passions and a very realistic view of what might happen to large communities of young men—or women—all working together.

The life of a military camp made most of these practices impossible. Men and women had to dress outside their tents, unless they wished to take so long that the captain’s master of household might order the tent taken down around them, which had almost happened to Mary on their first morning on the road. Nicomedes was a Morean—tall, very thin, a scholar. And a hermeticist of some small talent, as Amicia quickly discovered. But he was the captain’s major-domo, and he made sure that tents went up and down, fires were started and quenched, and food was cooked on time. He and Miss Sukey—Mag’s daughter—ran almost every aspect of camp life, and if they ever quarrelled, Amicia never saw it.

So, on a damp morning with rain threatening, Amicia had to force herself out of her warm blankets—roll them tight against further damp, and put them in a sleeve of waxed linen to go behind her saddle—and then leave the tent in the light rain in her sleeping shift, which was also her second shift and bid fair to be her only shift if she tore out the shoulder in the better one.

From there, though, her convent training stood her in good stead. No matter how many pages and squires made time to watch her dress, she could get into her man’s shirt and hose under the shift without showing her knees, much less anything more exotic. The boyish clothes didn’t please her—the wool hose were prickly against her legs and the loose gowns of the Order offered a certain freedom—but the men’s clothes were much easier on horseback. She and Katherine were dressed in heartbeats, and set about folding, brushing, and tying everything in their small camp. Katherine, by far the better horsewoman, went to fetch their mounts.

Nell came early with her boy. He was handsome, large-eyed and hard-muscled with something of the feral ferocity of all young men, but an edge of gentleness and care for Nell that Amicia liked. He held out three wooden bowls with sausage and eggs and two-day-old bread, toasted and buttered.

Amicia went into the tent where Mary was dressing carefully. “Don’t forget to eat,” she said.