Dvor smiled and the small easterner laughed. “Bird hunting. It is his own, for knocking down game. To eat.”

She smiled.

Gabriel reached over and took the easterner’s hand. “Tell him that I believe that of all the men who serve me, he has come the farthest, and I treasure his service,” Gabriel said.

Dvor spoke. The easterner’s heavily wrinkled face, windblown and bright-eyed, broke into a brilliant smile.

“Rose Leopard,” he said to Anne, and she fumbled in her purse and produced one—the most valuable imperial coin, solid gold, worth five Leopards. The easterner took it and dropped it inside his khaftan and nodded his head.

All of them remounted. The emperor noted that the easterner retied his quivers while he was mounting.

Gabriel raised an eyebrow to Michael, who caught the direction of his attention. “The value of veterans isn’t just that they understand war,” Gabriel said aloud. “It is that they know how to do everything.”

The Vardariotes were merely the first of the regiments of the casa to return from the campaign in Galle, and as the day wore on, the Nordikaans rode in, and then the guildsmen, and then Ser Thomas Lachlan himself leading the lances of the imperial bodyguard, as they had taken, somewhat mockingly, to styling themselves. Some wag had painted a small banner on silk, the black silhouette of a tusked Umroth with a red line through it per pale on an ivory ground.

The man under the Umroth banner was Ser Tobias, and he couldn’t keep the grin off his face, and neither could Francis Atcourt or de Beause or any of the other household knights.

The emperor’s inspection was detailed and personal, but it was clear that the men were ready; horses groomed, kit clean.

The emperor reined in by Kessin. “You’ve lost weight,” he said.

“Vittles was poor, Cap’n,” Kessin said with a smile. He was still a big, broad-shouldered man with a heavy gut, but his eyes no longer vanished when he grinned. He dismounted and produced fifty-two arrows, a long coil of rope, his section of a portable scaling ladder and a clean, rust-free shirt of maille and a brigantine, a steel bridle gauntlet, and a fine storta, a curved Etruscan saber. His hardened steel basinet was polished like a mirror and had a fine red and white silk turban woven around it in an intricate pattern.

Kessin saw the emperor looking at the turban. “Which Ser Pavalo showed us a better way o’ windin’ her,” he said. “Cap’n. Sir. Highness.”

The emperor walked around Kessin’s horse, looked at the shoes, and then back at Bad Tom. “Are all the horses in this good shape?” he asked.

Tom nodded in satisfaction. “The Venikans gave us the best horses,” he said. “And I bought some remounts from the Ifriquy’ans. And we just had almost a week on good grass wi’ oats.” He nodded. “Lookin’ good, Kessin.”