On the fifth day of their journey, a Saturday, they came to a village the ashes of which were still hot and smoking. That wasn’t all—over a dozen corpses could be seen at various stages of carbonisation. Mořic the Scrapper tracked down and dragged out from a nearby potato cellar two living people—an old man and a young girl. The girl had a blonde plait and a grey frock full of holes burned into it by sparks. The old man had two teeth—one above, the other below—in a bushy white beard.

“Fell on us,” he explained incoherently in answer when asked what had happened.

“Who?”

“Them ones.”

Enquiries into who “them ones” were achieved nothing. The mumbling old man was unable to describe or name “them ones” beyond calling them “rascals,” “rogues,” “devils” and “God strike them down.” Once or twice, he also used another expression—“martauz”—that Reynevan had never encountered before and didn’t know.

“It’s from Hungarian.” Scharley frowned and surprise could be heard in his voice. “They call slave traders and kidnappers ‘martahuzes.’ The old man probably meant that the villagers were abducted. Taken into captivity.”

“Who could have done it?” said Reynevan, sighing. “The papists? I thought we controlled this region.”

Scharley bristled somewhat at the “we.” And Berengar Tauler smiled.

“Our destination, Trosky Castle, is barely two miles from here,” Tauler calmly explained, “and not without reason do they call Lord Bergow a Hussite-killer. Also nearby are Kost, Hrubý Rohozec, Skála and Frýdštejn—all bastions of the lords of the Catholic Landfried. The seats of knights loyal to King Sigismund.”

“You know both the locality and those knights,” said Reynevan, watching the old man and the little girl with the plait ravenously gulping down the pieces of bread Samson was giving them. “You’re pretty well informed. Isn’t it time you revealed your information source?”

“Perhaps it is,” Tauler agreed. “It’s like this: my family have been vassals of the Bergows for years. We travelled with them to Bohemia from Thuringia, where the Bergow family supported the Lord of Lipa in a rebellion against King Henry of Bohemia. My father served Sir Otto the Senior of Bergow, the Lord of Bílina. I served Otto the Younger at Trosky for some time, but no longer. That, though, is a personal matter.”

“Personal, you say?”

“I do.”

“Then we’d like you to lead the march, Brother Berengar,” said Scharley coldly. “Up to the front with you—to the place reserved for experts in the land and its inhabitants.”