Not all the looks he got from the rest were friendly, but they seemed willing to listen, at least.

“You’re mainly the Third Battalion, right?” Fred said. “That correct, Sergeant Saunders?”

He was looking at a platoon sergeant he’d met on maneuvers when he was in the ROTC. The man licked his lips, looked to either side and then cleared his throat and spoke:

“Yes . . . sir. We got . . . captured in March, up north and east of here.”

“That would be near Dayton? Castle Campscapell? Stand easy all, by the way.”

“Yessir, big concrete fort, castle, whatever.” He paused to lick his lips. “We took it last year, after this CUT guy opened the door, is how I heard it. You know what happened there when we were taken, sir?”

“I hear about that when we got back, yes. I’ve talked to Lady Juniper about it. She tried to explain and she was using English, mostly, but it didn’t mean Thing One to me. Something about casting trouble in your dreams. And she said that she could only do it . . . do it without some sort of heavy blowback . . . because the CUT had one of their Seekers there and he was doing things.”

The sergeant nodded vigorously. “He . . . he’d talk to you and it was like flies buzzing inside your head, I’m not shitting you, sir. Like the world was twisting into a bad dream, and maybe if it went on long enough you wouldn’t wake up. And we’re still trying to figure out what the hell happened that night; we just . . . had some real strange dreams and then woke up and there were a bunch of Mackenzies standing over us. And that Seeker dude was lying with his body in one place and his head about a yard away and the biggest badass I’ve ever seen with the biggest Godammed sword was standing over him grinning like a cat.”

“Little John Hordle. He is sort of impressive.”

“That was how the Third got here. Some of the rest came in just lately, from the Tenth and Fifth and some cavalry pukes, but a lot of those were wounded, and they were all captured in the usual way.”

Fred nodded. “Have you men been treated all right?” he asked.

The noncom shrugged, looking a little less nervous; he was a snub-nosed young man about Fred’s own age, with close-cropped blond hair and a healing scar across the side of his face.

“Yessir,” he said. “It’s not a beer-bash being a prisoner, but we got good medical care and plenty of plain food. Better than field rations, a bit. Work details for the enlisted men but nothing too hard and no direct help to the enemy war effort, farm work and lumberjacking mainly, just about enough to earn our keep.”