She tried to keep her eyes on her work, such as it was, chewing her tongue, trembling fingers fumbling with knots and pins. Trying not to listen to the whispers for help that she did not know how to give. That no one could give. Red spots appearing on the new bandages even before she finished, and growing, and growing, and she was forcing down tears, and forcing down sick, and on to the next, who was missing his left arm above the elbow, the left side of his face covered by bandages, and—

‘Finree.’

She looked up and realised, to her cold horror, that it was Colonel Brint. They stared at each other for what felt like for ever, in awful silence, in that awful place.

‘I didn’t know …’ There was so much she did not know she hardly knew how to continue.

‘Yesterday,’ he said, simply.

‘Are you …’ She almost asked him if he was all right, but managed to bite the words off. The answer was horribly obvious. ‘Do you need—’

‘Have you heard anything? About Aliz?’ The name alone was enough to make her guts cramp up even further. She shook her head. ‘You were with her. Where were you held?’

‘I don’t know. I was hooded. They took me away and sent me back.’ And oh, how glad she was that Aliz had been left behind in the dark, and not her. ‘I don’t know where she’ll be now …’ Though she could guess. Perhaps Brint could too. Perhaps he was spending all his time guessing.

‘Did she say anything?’

‘She was … very brave.’ Finree managed to force her face into the sickly semblance of a smile. That was what you were supposed to do, wasn’t it? Lie? ‘She said she loved you.’ She put a halting hand on his arm. The one he still had. ‘She said … not to worry.’

‘Not to worry,’ he muttered, staring at her with one bloodshot eye. Whether he was comforted, or outraged, or simply did not believe a word of her blame-shirking platitudes she could not tell. ‘If I could just know.’

Finree did not think it would help him to know. It was not helping her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered, unable even to look at him any longer. ‘I tried … I did everything I could, but …’ That, at least, was true. Wasn’t it? She gave Brint’s limp arm one last squeeze. ‘I have to … get some more bandages—’

‘Will you come back?’

‘Yes,’ she said, lurching up, not sure if she was still lying, ‘of course I will.’ And she almost tripped over her feet in her haste to escape that nightmare, thanking the Fates over and over and over that they had chosen her for saving.

Sick of penance, she wandered up the hillside path towards her father’s headquarters. Past a pair of corporals dancing a drunken jig to the music of a squeaky fiddle. Past a row of women washing shirts in a brook. Past a row of soldiers queuing eagerly for the king’s gold, gleaming metal in the paymaster’s fingers glimpsed through the press of bodies. A small crowd of yammering salesmen, conmen and pimps had already gathered about the far end of the line like gulls about a patch of crumbs, realising, no doubt, that peace would soon put them out of business and give honest men the chance to thrive.