Purnal took a deep, preparatory breath and uttered a roar. “A scandal! You sent me a wagonload of babies.Half of them couldn’t even do up their own buttons.What was I to do with them, eh? Use them for target practice?”

She cut him off. “I’ll take one of them back.”

“Good luck. A lot of them are dead.”

It had been a dreadful journey already, and Clement had no idea how she’d manage to get back to Watfield. To do it empty‑handed, to wait for Death‑and‑Life to do whatever they planned, to watch the Sainnites collapse into their own hollow center … “Gods,” she said wearily, and put her face in her hands. “All for lack of one little girl? A weight in the scale, indeed!”

“Eh?” Purnal looked at her blankly.

“Do you think I traveled here on holiday? You will produce the child, or give me an accounting of what became of her.”

“Or what, eh? You’ll hack off my other leg? You’ll exile me to some godsforsaken corner of some wretched land and order me to turn babies into soldiers?”

“How about if I blame you personally for the destruction of your people in Shaftal?”

He uttered a phlegmy snort, but followed it with a shout to the boy Sergeant in the hallway.

“Sir?” the boy stuck his head in.

“One of the Watfield children, a girl named–”

“Davi,” said Clement.

“Is she still alive?”

“I don’t know, sir!”

“Well, go ask your fellow officers. And then ask the clerk to check the death records. Report back to me in the dormitories.” He added to Clement, as the eager sergeant raced away, “The longer it takes to find her, the longer you and your company will remain. Don’t think I haven’t thought of that.”

“Apparently, you think your garrison’s interests are the only ones that matter.”

“Take some advice from an old man,” he suggested. “Stop trying to shame the shameless. Let’s go look for your girl.”

In the youngest children’s dormitory, a dozen older children were putting the younger ones to bed. They were able to point out the Watfield children, who huddled together in shared beds. Clement spoke to them in Shaftalese, and soon regretted it, for they cried out for their parents, siblings, and homes. She had thought they would have forgotten them by now. None of them was Davi.

The boy‑sergeant caught up with them in the hallway, and reported that there was no Davi in the death records. When Clement asked how accurate the records were, Purnal shrugged. “If we never knew her name, we couldn’t record it, could we?”

“I’ve only seen fifteen of the Watfield children. Where are the others?”

“Sick or dead. You know where the sick ones are.”

“You’d better hope she’s still alive, commander, or I’ll have you digging up the graves next.”

“We burn ‘em,” he said. “Sorry.”

Clement returned to the sick room. There, it smelled just as bad as before, but at least it was quieter. A bitter chill was setting in, and she stopped first to add fuel to the fire, for what good it did. The signal of a candle flame led her to a one‑armed soldier who bathed with cold water a child delirious with fever. He told her he had not noticed a child like Davi, but then who had time to pay attention?

She found a candle of her own, and started the dreary business of working her way down the rows of pallets, turning back blankets and pulling up nightshirts. If she had to leave this place empty‑handed, she would at least be absolutely certain that the child was indeed lost.

After the Battle of Lilterwess, Clement had assisted in the gruesome job of identifying the dead. The Sainnite corpses had been lined up on the hillside, while beyond them the soldiers methodically took the ancient building apart, stone by stone. It was the height of summer, and the flies swarmed, and the rooks noisily invited their friends and neighbors to the feast. Sometimes, Clement identified a soldier by clothing or gear, because the face was gone. Sometimes she stripped a corpse, seeking clues in flesh, in scars, in gender. Friends and lovers were thus revealed.

There was great celebration, that day, and the Sainnites called themselves conquerors. Twenty years later, Clement knelt in a cold, stinking room and searched the bodies of parentless children, and knew herself a fool in an army of fools.

The night was old when she found a very small girl with a mole on her knee. The illness had gone into the girl’s lungs, the sick‑nurses said, and she would not survive to morning. “She will,” Clement said, gathering up the child, blanket and all. “I won’t have my labors be for nothing.”

The one‑armed veterans, who surely thought that the labor of their lives had long since come to nothing, rolled their eyes at each other, and refrained from comment.

Chapter Twenty‑One

“Clement is no longer in Watfield,” said Gilly to Alrin, as she politely quizzed him at the door about why he had refused to be shown to the parlor. “The general needs me at his side, and so regrettably I have no time for tea. The woman is here? In the kitchen?”

He stumped down the hall, refusing to even let her take his snow‑dusted coat. Alrin bobbed ineffectually in his wake, saying, “I’m truly sorry for putting you through such trouble. But her answer to your note asking her to tell stories in the garrison was so … complicated! I urged her to give you a plain reply, but–well, she’s got some peculiar ways.”

She added, surprisingly, “Clement is traveling? The snow can be heavy, even so early in winter.”

“She is a soldier,” growled Gilly.

He opened the kitchen door to find the storyteller standing in the exact center of the room, utterly still. Her clothing shimmered in the flickering light: silk, a deep red vest over a rich purple blouse, and trousers black and glossy as her hair.

“Don’t you look fine!” Alrin sounded more nervous than complimentary. “Those deep colors, they suit you!”

The storyteller turned her head as though to seek the object of Alrin’s admiration somewhere behind her, and Gilly noticed for the first time that, though her hair was chin length, a single slim braid hung down the center of her back, black as a burn, with a coal‑red tassel dangling from its tip. It was no more strange than the rest of her: peculiar but not frivolous. Alrin certainly had known how to dress her.

Gilly said to her, “It’s foolish and dangerous to dicker with Sainnites over price. All we’re paying for is a few tales.”

The woman turned, and slowly said, “What does it mean, to be the General’s Lucky Man?”

Alrin made an anxious sound. “Oh, sir, you see! She’s not right–she’ll say something to offend.”

Gilly said to the border woman, “I’ll explain that to you, if you tell me why no one knows your name. A trade, tale for tale.” She nodded her assent. “Well, then. The Sainnites say there’s a certain allotment of suffering that the gods set aside for each one of us. Some few are given all their life’s curses at once, when they are still in the womb. They are born monsters, but they are lucky, for all their allotted ill fortune has been used up already. Powerful people have monsters beside them, as barriers against the ill will of the gods. So, I am Cadmar’s Lucky Man.”

As though she did not quite trust her finery, the storyteller sat cautiously on a kitchen stool. She said, “A curse has taken away my name, and made me a gatherer of stories. The witches of my people took my weapons, and cut my hair, and burned all my belongings, and destroyed my name, and with my name they destroyed my memories. I know this is what happened, but I don’t remember it. Now, I am just a storyteller, and have been for many years.”

“Without memory the stories are all you have ?”

She said quietly, “You want to be my friend, Lucky Man, because I am as monstrous as you are. Beware, or I will make you into a story.”

Gilly said, “Make it a good one.”