"Which of the scoundrels d'you care to see?"

"Biddiscombe himself," Victor answered.

"Thought you might. Heh, heh." That chuckle would have sent ice snaking up any prisoner's spine. "Come along with me. We've got him in the snug cell by his lonesome, so he can't go trying any mischief."

The snug cell had a redwood door as thick as the side timbers on a first-rate ship of the line. The pair of locks that held it closed were both bigger than Victor's clenched fist. The jailer opened a tiny door set into the enormous one. An iron grating let people peer into the cell. The jailer gestured invitingly.

Victor looked through. The window that gave the cell its only light was more than a man's height above the ground. Even if it hadn't been barred, it was much too small for even the most emaciated prisoner to squeeze through. Habakkuk Biddiscombe had got thin, but not that thin.

He lay on a miserable straw pallet. Along with a water pitcher, a cup with the handle broken off, and a thundermug, that pallet comprised the furnishings in the dark, gloomy cell. Biddiscombe's head swung toward the opening in the door. "Who's there?" he asked.

"Victor Radcliff."

"I might have known." Biddiscombe stiffly got to his feet. Yes, he'd taken a thumping when the Atlantean cavalry caught him- and maybe afterwards as well. "Come to gloat, have you?"

"I hope not," Victor said. "You would have done better to stay with your own side."

"That's how it worked out, all right. But who could have guessed ahead of time?" The traitor peered through the grating "And you would have done better to listen to me more."

"It could be so," Victor said. "You aren't the only man I didn't always heed, though. The others didn't turn their coats to pay me back."

"Well, the more fools they." Habakkuk Biddiscombe kept the courage of his convictions, even if he had nothing else.

"How well did Cornwallis listen to you?" Victor inquired.

"He would have done better if he'd listened more." Biddiscombe hadn't lost his self-regard, either. "In that case, maybe you'd be stuck in this stinking cell instead of me."

"He wasn't going to hand you over. You might have done better staying where you were."

Habakkuk Biddiscombe laughed raucously. "Likely tell! If he'd made up his mind to protect us come what might, he wouldn't've needed to call a council of war. And the damned Englishmen wouldn't've taken so long making up their miserable minds, either. No, they were going to hand us over to you, all right, sure as Jesus walked on water. They wouldn't've lost any sleep over it, After all, we were nothing but Atlanteans-one step up from niggers, and a short step, too."

And what would Blaise have said about that? Something interesting and memorable, Victor was sure. "If the redcoats felt that way about the loyalists who fought beside them, why did you stay on?"

"Because I wanted your guts for garters, General Victor High and Mighty Grand Panjandrum Radcliff, and that looked like my best chance to get 'em." Biddiscombe didn't bother hiding his venom. And why should he? Things could get no worse for him than they were already.

"If it makes you any happier, I felt the same way about you after you raised Biddiscombe's Horsed Legion," Victor said.

"It doesn't, not so much as a fart's worth," Biddiscombe replied. "Only one of us was going to get what he wanted, and I wish to heaven it were me." He scowled through the grating. "If you were any kind of gentleman, you'd pass me a pistol so I could end this on my own."

Victor shook his head. "The trial will go forward. The hounds baying outside wanted to end it on their own, too."

"Ah, but my way would finish it fast, and with luck it wouldn't hurt so bloody much," Biddiscombe said.

"When properly done, hanging slays quickly and cleanly," Victor said.

"Why bother with a trial when you already know the verdict?" jeered the man on the other side of the grate.

"So all the evidence comes forth. So the future can know you for the traitor you are," Victor answered.

Biddiscombe's mouth twisted. "A traitor is a man unlucky enough to end on the losing side. Past that, the word has no meaning."

"Not quite," Victor said.

"No? How not?" his onetime cavalry officer returned.

"A traitor is a man unlucky enough to choose the losing side in the middle of the war," Victor said. "You might have chosen otherwise. You would have done better if you had. And you will pay for what you chose."

Habakkuk Biddiscombe's sweeping gesture took in the whole of his sorry cell. "Am I not already paying?"

"You are," Victor said, and walked away.

Victor declined to serve on the three-officer panel that decided Biddiscombe's fate. "I doubt my ability to be just," he said. He doubted any Atlantean's ability to be just to Biddiscombe, but that was the turncoat's hard luck. At least Biddiscombe's blood would not directly soil his hands.

He was summoned to testify against Biddiscombe. The accused did have counsel, a Croydon barrister named Josias Rich. Outside the small meeting room in the town hall that served as a courtroom, Rich told Victor, "I do this not in the belief in the man's innocence, nor for the sake of my own advancement, God knows-people I thought my friends commence to cut me in the streets. I do it for the sake of Atlantis' honor. Even a dog should have someone to speak for it before it is put down."

"Your views do you credit, and I agree," Victor said. Josias Rich-whose worn linen and down-at-the-heels shoes belied his name-looked surprised and pleased.

In due course, a sergeant serving as bailiff called Victor into the room. He took his oath on a stout Bible. The judges elicited from him that Habakkuk Biddiscombe had commanded cavalry in the Atlantean army, had gone over to the English and formed Biddiscombe's Horsed Legion, and had led the Horsed Legion in combat against the forces of the United States of Atlantis.

Biddiscombe (who was burdened by manacles and by a ball and chain attached to his ankle) had muttered to Josias Rich all through Victor's testimony. The barrister rose. "Did Biddiscombe fight well and bravely while serving under your overall command, General?" he asked.

"He did," Victor said.

"Might he have continued to serve Atlantis well and bravely had you been more inclined to recognize and applaud his military merits?" Rich asked.

"I have no way to know that," Victor replied.

"What is your opinion?"

"My opinion is that, had I judged him worthy of more recognition and applause, I would have given them to him."

Rich tried again: "Do you now regret not having given them to him?"

"I regret that any man who once fought for us should have decided to cast his fate with King George, whatever his reasons may have been," Victor said carefully.

"In retrospect, do you wish now that you had been more inclined to heed his suggestions as to the Atlantean army's conduct of its campaign against the redcoats?"

"Do I think he might have been right, do you mean, sir?"

"Well-yes," Josias Rich said.

"Here and there, he might have been," Victor said. "But that is hard to say with any certainty now, looking back on it. And it would have been all the harder to say trying to look forward into an unsure future."

"Thank you, General." Rich sat down.

One of the captains who would decide Biddiscombe's fate asked, "Did other officers who sometimes disagreed with your orders remain loyal to the cause of the United States of Atlantis?"

"They did," Victor said. And there, in two words, was the essence of Biddiscombe's treason.

The panel excused Victor after that. He left the little room with nothing but relief. Baron von Steuben waited outside "Bad?" the German asked sympathetically.

"Well…" Victor didn't need to think long before nodding. "Yes. Plenty bad."