Brown told the story, drinking his wine. He told it sparely but professionally, and they asked him questions, and then they asked Donna Beatrice questions, and then they ate a light meal, and by then Long Paw was awake and more himself.

“What was it, Paw?” Sauce asked.

Long Paw shook his head. “Never seen anything like it,” he said.

Tancreda had all her patients treated; her healing skills were minimal, but with two doctors to support her, she had stabilized M’bub Ali and saved both of his men, and Long Paw’s poison was wearing off of its own accord, hurried along by wine. She joined them on the first floor and sipped some sweet white wine herself. She listened to Long Paw’s description and then, with his help, drew a picture of a sucker-faced greyhound with hands instead of paws and long, thorny talons.

“Eeeuuuwww,” she said in disgust.

Donna Beatrice shuddered. “I will see it until I die,” she said in Etruscan.

Tancreda copied out their description of it, alive, and went downstairs with her wine to the blood-soaked bag that contained the thing’s mortal remains.

“Oh, sweet Christ,” she muttered. She summoned the others so that they could see that the thing had rotted almost to nothing—foul slime and a heavy hide and some bones, like something a month in the ground.

Brown shrugged. “It was in the Patriarch,” he said. “When I think about it, I have to wonder if there was one in the Duke of Mitla.”

“Blessed Virgin,” Sauce spat. “Worms and fire dogs.”

“Salamanders,” Long Paw said. “That’s what they are.”

Sauce read over Tancreda’s coded dispatch. She wrote Salamander in her own hand under the sketch. And then, in her own code, she wrote, I think we’ve found Kronmir’s fourth player. She looked up, sighed for a lost opportunity, and wrote, I’ll be marching north tomorrow.

Then she took the sword from the old cloak in which it was wrapped and handed it to Tancreda.

“Oh my God,” she said. The sword was fine, but the blade was a rainbow of colours unlike normal steel, and set in it in letters of gold, it said, Durandala.

Sauce smiled. “Always wanted a magic sword,” she said.

Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

Loomsack Mountain—Ser Gavin Muriens

Ser Gavin Muriens knew he had very little time to get his army across the Cohocton, and he drove them like a cattle herder in the predawn darkness. But bad luck, or fate, sent a flight of wyverns over before the baggage was fully across; the ford was already muddy, the rain was raising the water level, and nothing was moving until he allowed them to use torches, which were like a beacon for the wyverns. Days of fighting were taking their toll; discipline was not the best, and too many of his best people were already across with the cavalry, whom he had sent first.