No, she thought. I can’t kill cut a mother’s throat in front of her toddler, and her with child. Better to use it on myself.

That was illogical, she knew. In war she’d be perfectly ready to pull the lanyard on a trebuchet and send a five-hundred-pound boulder over a city wall to strike whom it would, and this was war. Some things went deeper than logic, though, or beyond it. Everyone was looking at her; the listless, slightly slumped body language was gone and her body was quivering with alertness, her weight up slightly on the balls of her feet and everything flowing smoothly.

Juliet’s face had firmed too. “Mary Havel, isn’t it? Or the other one?”

Three slight gasps, and then she saw recognition dawn on the others, too. Very carefully she spread her hands and kept her own voice level and light.

“Mae govannen, my ladies,” she said. “I am here to see if you need our help. I am Ritva Havel, yes.”

The fog seemed to clear from Cecile Thurston’s eyes as she peered and then slowly recognized the Dúnedain too; it had been only the one meeting, several eventful years ago, after all. Her daughters sat bolt-upright, and the eldest said: “Elvellon!” she said: The elf-friend!

Ritva held up a soothing hand at the clumsy Sindarin that followed. She remembered that Shawonda had been entranced by the Histories even when they first met; she guessed shrewdly that she’d fled into them since as a refuge from her troubles since, and as a source of strength and hope in a world whose foundations had crumbled beneath her in a welter of treachery and blood. The Rangers got a fair number of recruits from exactly that pattern of thought and feeling.

“In the Common Tongue, nethig,” she said; that meant little sister, and brought a tremulous smile.

Juliet’s reaction surprised Ritva most of all; she buried her face in her hands for a moment and started to cry. Not what she would have expected given their previous acquaintance, at all. Doubly so before a stranger.

“I take it,” she said carefully, “that you want to leave too, ah, Mrs. Thurston? Leave your husband?”

“Oh, God, yes, please, he’s not Martin anymore! Since he came back from Bend . . . he, he, he hit me. And then he said if I argued with him again he’d cut out my tongue, that I didn’t need that to breed.”

Cecile Thurston gave a grimace of distaste, and the two girls stared at their sister-in-law with shock and dawning horror; evidently she hadn’t said that in front of them before.

“I can’t . . . I can’t bear the thought of him touching me again!”