He made a face. “I wouldn’t try,” he said. “We’re like too little butter on too much toast as it is, lady. Let the Count of the Borders retake the lost section when they come.” He shrugged. “I’m more for collecting yer taxes at fairs, my lady. I’m not a great captain.”

“Would you try and retake it?” she asked. “If I let you take all our garrison?”

“My lady,” he said. “I will do whate’er you order me to do. But let me tell ye as a soldier, that as long as you and yer ladies hold the . . . the air, so to speak, the hermeticals, my fifty lads can hold these walls against the legions o’ hell. But when ye send us out into the woods, you are naked to any assault—ladders, engines, towers.”

She snorted. “So you say me nay, in your very polite way.”

He shrugged. “Order me,” he said.

She shook her head.

*

An hour later, a second bastion was stormed, this time by irks. A whole company of the South Brogat militia shot wildly and ran, leaving a half a mile of newly built walls in the hands of the enemy.

Rannulfson went out and looked at the situation for himself, on horseback, and he rode back up the long ramp. His hoardings were long since mounted, and so were the machines that he’d built to copy those the company had used years before; he was confident in his elderly but very capable garrison.

But as soon as he dismounted in the courtyard, he shook his head.

“Their captain’s a duffer and no mistake; he’s no experience. He won’t budge, and to be honest, my lady, he has no knights, and not enough armoured folk to mount a credible attack. His people are out for the second time this year. Their leaders are all off in the west. They’re in a parrilous way, my lady. An’ they could no more retake those walls than a crowd of yer novices.” Rannulfson frowned. “In point o’ fact, the novices would be a good deal more likely to succeed.”

“Can you drive them back with the engines?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I can at least trouble them,” he said, and gave the orders, and a dozen nuns worked on the first loads of stone, enhancing them.

They burst with satisfying concussions, well up the valley toward the remains of Abbington. But an hour later, there was an organized attack along the wall right below the abbey. All four towers loosed buckets of gravel from their massive trebuchets, and the militia held, but one of the novices reported that there were already bogglins inside the defences, moving along the valley.

Miriam had a messenger from the Green Earl in her hand, and she nodded.