Fred wasn’t much surprised. Most people sang or played; it was the only way to have music, unless you were able to hire specialists or acquire the fabulous rarity of a windup phonograph. Mackenzies made more music, and better, than any group he’d run across in very extensive travels; they’d been founded by a musician, after all, and they associated it with both holiness and leadership.

The song ended, and Edain wiped down the flute and tucked it away in a boiled leather tube.

“Merry met, Fred, Virginia,” Rudi said, seriousness dropping over him like a veil.

He was in plain Mackenzie gear, kilt, plaid over one shoulder, knee-hose and green-dyed shirt and flat bonnet with a spray of raven feathers in its silver clasp. And at his right hip, the Sword of the Lady. Fred found his eyes skipping aside from that, and made them steady. After all, if there was one phrase which summed up his faith, it was “don’t flinch.”

“Let’s be going, then. Do I need guards for this?”

“No,” Fred said.

“Yes,” Edain said, simultaneously.

They looked at each other, Fred glaring in frustration; Edain folded his arms over his barrel chest and the green-leather surface of his brigantine armor.

Rudi looked at his follower. “I need to persuade them, Edain,” he said mildly. “They’re fighting men, and you know how such react if you point an arrow at them.”

“That’s your job, Ard Rí. My job’s to be in a position to kill any evil bastard who might take it into his head to win the war at a stroke by killing you. And that, by the Dagda, I will do if I have to knock it into your head with His club.”

“All right. A score, no more; there are the camp guards, and the prisoners aren’t armed.”

“No, they’re not supposed to be armed. And by your own word, they’re fighting men. The only time such aren’t armed is when they’re dead.”

Edain turned and barked an order; twenty archers fell in, and strung their bows with the left tip against one boot and the leg over the risers to bend the heavy staves. The High King’s Archers were the hundred-odd best in the Clan and the pick of the followers the quest had acquired along the way, and Fred doubted that the fabled weapons of the old world could have done much better than their bows at a pinch.

“I’d better not come at all,” Mathilda said thoughtfully. “There was a lot of tension between the Association and Boise, even if we never fought, and Fred’s father used us as a boogeyman. Feudal isn’t a word with, mmmm, positive connotations over there.”

Fred shot her a look. Before he could speak Rudi did, grinning: “Mo bòidheach, back then you . . . collectively speaking . . . really were the boogeyman.”