Michael spat. “I came here to rescue him,” he said.

“He refused to go with Ser Ranald, two days back,” Favour said. “I’m that sorry, Ser Michael, but we was—not best pleased. He was the only royal prisoner to turn us down.”

“That idiot,” Ser Michael said. He looked at his captain and shrugged. “So?”

“Officers,” the captain said.

Blanche was awakened to find Nell leaning over her.

“Wake up, girl!” Nell said. “Get the Queen up!”

The babe awoke and, finding the world changed, challenged it with a yell.

Outside, a brazen trumpet rang out a long call.

The barn seemed to explode into motion. Once, as a child, Blanche had seen her mother find a nest of mice in a chest in their garret. As soon as she touched it, mice ran in every direction, making her mother scream.

This was like that, except that the mice were unkempt men and women.

At the door, an archer stopped Nell.

“We attacked?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Nell spat, and pushed past him, looking for horses.

Nothing had been packed well in the exhausted darkness. The cursing from beyond the door was fluent and very descriptive. Blanche might have admired it, but she had all her damp laundry to pile into a basket thrown through the door by Nell’s boy.

The babe was louder than the trumpet.

Sister Amicia awoke—if she had been asleep. She picked the baby off her mother’s lap as soon as it finished feeding and began to bounce it. She grinned a very un-saintlike grin at Blanche.

Blanche got the Queen bathed—just a sponge and lukewarm water—and into a shift that hung on her like a sack. Then she put the Queen in the same gown she’d worn the day before—the white gown of a bride or a penitent sinner. The gown in which the Queen would have been burned.

“Don’t fuss,” Desiderata said, taking her baby back from Amicia. “Don’t fuss. If we’re moving now, there’s a reason. Be quick, Blanche. Leave anything you cannot carry.”

Blanche frowned, thinking that it wouldn’t be the Queen’s problem if Blanche had no clothes and no clean swaddling for the baby.

But again, Nell appeared to save her. She had Blanche’s palfrey of the day before in the small stall just outside the door, and she had a donkey. Cully, the master archer, stood by the donkey.

“Just gi’ me your baskets,” he said kindly. “I’ll see ’em onto the animal.”

Blanche favoured him with a smile. She knew she must look a fright, but there was nothing she could do—no bath, no clothes, no nothing.

The saddle on her palfrey was worth more than her whole wardrobe had ever been worth, and she wondered whose it had been.