The powerful smell they gave off was just summer and not much opportunity to wash in the last little while. They didn’t have the crusted, scabrous appearance or the hard stink people did in areas where the habit of washing at all had died out. And the weapons were pointed up once they recognized him as one of the newfound allies helping them fight Boise and the Prophet. A couple of them even smiled.

Better than I expected.

“Take me to your leader,” he said.

“The lord baron has arrived with his menie, my lord,” one of them said.

His full-time soldiers, Ingolf mentally translated. What we’d call his deputies back home, or National Guardsmen.

“Girars, you show him,” the oldest of the men said; he might have been anything from a work-gnarled thirty to fifty.

The militiaman delegated for the job was pathetically young, not more than seventeen and a bit scrawny with a growth spurt, with only a little yellow peach-fuzz on his acne-scarred cheeks. The steel-strapped leather breastplate and simple bullet-shaped conical helmet he wore both seemed too big for him; he left the four-foot kite-shaped shield propped against a stump, which was a bad sign. Ingolf’s own went on his back on a leather strap, where he could swing it forward with a quick duck of his left shoulder and pull.

Yeah, those big shields weigh fifteen pounds, the way they make them here. But if you suddenly need a shield, you need it bad. I’d roast his ass for leaving it just ’cause it’s heavy and awkward if he were in my outfit. Better years of a sore arm than one minute of an arrow in the gut. I’m tempted to do it anyway, but I don’t know the baron well enough to interfere in his chain of command.

The militiaman led Ingolf forward and down the bank of the dry river to the sandy bottom, an arroyo they called it hereabouts. The branches of the cottonwoods mingled overhead, turning the creek bed into a tunnel of green that sparkled with moving golden flickers.

It was cooler here, too, and easy walking. No water showed, but the sandy bottom was damp in spots, and insects buzzed and clicked. This was a fair-sized river in the winter rains, to judge from the height of the banks; it might flow at night even in August, when the cottonwoods weren’t sucking water and pumping it into the air. It was a convenient place to be safely out of sight in daytime right now, but it would be dangerous a little later in the year; he’d spent enough time in arid areas to understand what a flash flood meant.

“My lord . . . is there going to be a fight?” the boy asked after they were out of sight and hearing of his friends and neighbors.

Ingolf stopped himself from barking: I’m not a lord!