By midnight, six hundred wagons had passed through the army and headed west to the passes. The company folded its tents in the very early morning and marched in behind them as a strong rear guard, and found supplies left in prepared camps.

Long Paw and Brown and Lucca and M’bub Ali were long gone. In fact, all four were asleep while a middle-aged woman named Beatrice watched their horses in a merchant tavern’s barn just north of the Mitla Gate of Firensi.

Beatrice had never even contemplated a life of violence. She’d been a capable farm wife until the duke took her daughter as a concubine. A year later, everyone in her family was dead.

And so was the duke.

She watched the darkness, listened to men snore, and tried to imagine herself as a hard-faced mercenary killer, or one of their sluts.

She said some prayers.

They were terrifying men, every one of them, and she knew they were on their way to kill the Patriarch, and it all horrified her.

She said more prayers, and then she woke one of the infidels to take his watch. The man was now in Etruscan clothing; his swarthy good looks were not very different from the men of Rhum, and he grinned at her in the one candlelight of the barn’s lower half.

Brown, who had lain awake watching her, now watched her crawl into her blankets, and then let his eyes close. He didn’t trust her; he had enough trouble trusting Lucca.

“People,” he said to himself.

Arles—Empress Blanche

Two hundred leagues and a mountain range to the north, the empress rose early and read the night’s dispatches with Master Julius. She noted in the messages that the Venikans had drovers gathering cattle in the lands that had formerly been the Darkness and she read with interest about the assassination of the Duke of Mitla, although some reports claimed he’d died of the sudden onset of a disease.

She sipped quaveh from a small porcelain cup and wished she still had Jules Kronmir.

“Majesty?” said a Hillman voice. “Miss Kaitlin. An’ the Queen o’ Arles.”