“I don’t know how sheep do live long enough to make little sheep,” Ian Kovalevsky said. “My family didn’t raise ’em. Cattle, yes; beefalo, yes; horses, yes. Even some pigs. But not sheep. It’s too cold for them in the Peace River country, and a bit too wet; we trade south for our wool, they have big flocks down around where we met in the Triangle country, the dry prairie. And I thought cattle were dumb!”

“Why couldn’t he have sent us with a herd of cattle? You’re used to them and I’ve done a little droving now and then.”

Ian shook his head. “Not if we wanted to travel in pairs. You need at least four, maybe six people to push even a small herd of cattle any real distance, and a wagon. To tell you the truth, Ritva, apart from horses . . . well, it’s not an accident I left the farm!”

Just then a cry came from up ahead, from someone on the stretch of roadway just this side of the bridge over the Boise river.

“Way! Make way! Clear that lane for westbound military traffic!”

The harsh shout was backed up by a bray of trumpets, the deep-toned tubae, along with a dunting snarl she recognized as an oxhorn. Her brows went up; Boiseans didn’t use those, although many other peoples did.

“Now, do it now or get ridden down! Make way!”

Everyone on the left crowded over. The two sheepdogs were nearly as hysterical as their charges, as the influx squeezed them into a solid bleating block of rolling eyes and exposed tongues. They did their duty, though, keeping the sheep together with nips and barks, sometimes running over their heaving backs to do it.

Ritva’s stomach clenched when the column rode out. Horsemen in three-quarter armor of lacquered leather plates edged in steel, its liquid sheen a dull red the color of dried blood, armed with bow and shete and nine-foot lances. Every breastplate bore the golden rayed sun of the Church Universal and Triumphant, and so did the round shields slung over their backs.

Their spiked helmets were slung to their saddlebows; the heads were cropped close enough to be like plush fur, even shorter than Boise regulars, or shaved altogether, in odd contrast to tufts of chin-beard. Their faces were things of slabs and angles, all with a slightly starved look. She’d met men like that before, more often than not over a blade or in a shower of arrows, though once at closer range.

Not just Cutters. Not rancher levies. That’s the Sword of the Prophet.