“I must admit,” he said, “it was a bold plan. Not a good plan, but I can’t fault your courage. Although I suppose in your case that doesn’t really apply, does it?”

“The plan seems to have worked fine,” Raesinia said. “Aside from me getting left behind.”

“Really?” The Penitent looked puzzled. “I’d assumed you intended to extract the Thousand Names before sinking the boat, though I admit I don’t understand how.”

“They all thought the same way,” Raesinia said. “But I realized we didn’t need to steal the Names back, just keep you from getting away with them. A few weeks on the bottom of the river won’t hurt them any, and once Janus crushes Maurisk he can fish them out again.”

Getting to see the look on his face, Raesinia thought, was almost worth getting stabbed in the head.

Chapter Twenty-four

WINTER

Just after dawn, they ran into the first hint of resistance. Three Patriot Guards, hiding behind an abandoned wagon, jumped out from cover, fired an ineffective shot or two, then ran for it.

“Well,” Winter said, watching from Edgar’s back, “that answers that question.”

They’d camped the night before at the edge of the noisome swamp called the Bottoms, only a few miles from the edge of Vordan City proper. If there had been a hill, a man standing atop it could have seen the lights of the Island, but there were no hills in the Bottoms, only bits of ground that were nominally above water. The Green Road, which they’d been following north, ran along a raised causeway here to keep it out of the mud.

The army was still well outside the formal boundaries of the city, but the first shacks had already started to appear. The Bottoms had always been a place for castoffs, those too destitute, crippled, or mad to survive even in the slums of Newtown. They drifted here, eking a meager existence from the marsh and living in tumbledown huts made of scrap and sod. By and large, they hadn’t turned out to welcome the Army of the East. Winter suspected these were people used to hiding at the first sight of armed men, whatever banner they were flying.

Janus had sent riders, the evening before, bearing his terms to the Directory. The Army of the East would remain outside the city if the Directory officially dissolved itself and returned power to the Deputies-General and the queen, to whom Janus would submit himself for judgment. No answer had been forthcoming, so as soon as there was enough light to see, Winter had taken the Girls’ Own forward along the causeway. That the Patriot Guard were shooting at them, however ineffectually, more or less decided the issue.