The following day, amazingly, it stopped raining. The horses, trudging through the mud, were walking a lot more energetically and briskly. Amadej Baťa began to whistle. Even the Cherethites and Pelethites—the squad of ten men led by Mořic the Scrapper that Scharley had christened with biblical names—had become animated. The previously gloomy, morose slovens who had appeared to be constantly at odds with the world began to converse, swap lewd jokes and chuckle. And finally, to everyone’s amazement, sing. In Czech.

The skylarks are calling me high above the moors,

Saying my true love cavorts with vulgar boors.

I should let her tarry and take my feather bed,

To lay it neath a tree and rest my tired head…

A son, thought Reynevan. I have a son. His name’s Vitus. He was born a year and four months ago on Saint Vitus’s Day. Exactly the day before the Battle of Ústí. My first great battle. A battle I might have died in if things had gone differently. If the Saxons had destroyed the wagon fort and scattered us, there would have been a massacre and I might have died. My son would have lost his father the day after his birth…

And Nicolette…

The ethereal Nicolette, Nicolette as slender as Masaccio’s Eve, as one of Parler’s Madonnas, had a swollen belly. Because of me. How can I look her in the eye? And will I even be able to look her in the eye at all?

Oh, never mind. It has to work out in the end.

It was the Thursday after Saint Ursula’s Day when they reached Krchleby and rode towards Rožďalovice on the Mrlina, a right-bank tributary of the Labe. They were still, in accordance with the earlier advice of Flutek and Sýkora, avoiding busy highways, particularly the major trade route leading from Prague to Leipzig via Jičín, Turnov and Žitava. They were only around three miles from Jičín, where they intended to conduct reconnaissance outside Trosky.

The terrain around the upper Mrlina warned them at once that they were entering a dangerous region, one of conflict, a still-burning strip of borderland separating feuding religions and nations. “Burning” was utterly appropriate, for charred remains suddenly became the defining element of the landscape, the blackened ruins of homesteads and cottages, of large and small villages. The scene was almost identical to the remnants of the village near Huncleder’s gambling den, the scene of recent fateful events. The same soot-covered stumps of chimneys, the same piles of fused ash, the same blackened skeletons of beams and roof timbers. The same acrid stench of burned-down buildings.

The Cherethites and Pelethites hadn’t sung for some time and were attending to their crossbows. Tauler and Baťa, who were leading the cavalcade, had theirs at the ready. Reynevan followed their example.