Memory can be precarious. It might have been more than just moments after the girl had sensed they were coming, but they did come, those soldiers and royal carriages. The court had arrived, with the king. As she’d said they were about to.

Thierry also remembered the wind dying down just then, but that might not have happened.

—

Jeanette is almost never afraid. Not since the first voices came to her at home. Then, she’d been terrified that these voices were demons, enemies of the god and his mortal children. Because surely Jad of the Sun would not speak in any way to a miller’s daughter from the village of Broché in the countryside of Ferrieres, or have…something do so on his behalf.

They had summoned her, though, the voices. They had. That had happened. To her. On a winter’s night. A summons to go outside. She had done so. She was not able to refuse this. She’d dressed quietly in the room she shared with two of her sisters and had walked out. Everyone else in the house was asleep. It had seemed as if the whole world was. Both moons overhead. The sun, and the god, under the world.

But the voices had only grown clearer, more precise, and, doing what she was told, Jeanette had gone into their tiny village sanctuary. It was unlit (candles were expensive) and very cold and she was alone there as she knelt on the uneven wooden floor before the altar and the sun disk.

And then, after she’d prayed for guidance and for love, one voice in her head had instructed her that she had to leave her home and go north. She had never been outside the bounds of Broché in her life.

She was to gather people to her, and be prepared to fight and die for Ferrieres when the time came. It was, she thought, a command.

And she is. Prepared to do that. Fight and die for Ferrieres. From that time, that frigid, moonlit night in Broché, Jeanette has been ready, and unafraid. Astonishingly unafraid. Everyone died, didn’t they?

In the morning her mother had wept. Her father said they were well rid of her—refusing any husband offered in the village, not nearly enough help at the mill to earn her keep. There were five other children to feed. They could have an apprentice or a servant girl take her bed and be of more use, he said. He walked out, didn’t say goodbye to her. She thought he was grieving, but wasn’t sure.

Two of her brothers came with Jeanette, one older, one younger. She wasn’t expecting that. Her father was enraged when he saw the older one preparing to go. They fought, out by the mill. Her brother had a blackened eye at the start of their journey.