The farmer said, “No questions, then. So …” She gestured, palm up, as though requesting the gods to fill her empty hand. “What? What do we do?”

Clement kissed her. That worked very well, so she kissed her again. After that came an extremely pleasant and quite long‑lasting and stunningly satisfying confusion.

Clement dreamed a very strange dream in which she was a cowherd, but the cattle paid her no heed, and kept wandering away and getting eaten by wolves. When there were no beasts left, she stood alone in an empty field under an empty sky, with nothing to do but ponder her own incompetence. “Your girl’s calling you,” the angular farmer said blurrily. So Clement awoke from emptiness to surprise: a cozy bed, a warm shoulder against her cheek, the lingering memory of an extremely memorable night.

Davi’s voice came very faintly down the hall.

“It’s dawn,” Clement mumbled. “Well, almost dawn. I think I’ll get on my way. Long journey ahead.”

“Stay,” said the farmer quietly.

Clement swallowed surprise. “I don’t know a thing about cows.”

“Not much to know. You’ll come to hate milking and mucking as much as we do. It doesn’t take long!”

“Davi’s father–”

“I’d say he’s not much of a husband. Neglectful.”

Clement let that sink in. Had she acted neglected? She had indeed. “A good father, though,” she said.

“But what have yougot to go home to? Stay the winter. Send him a letter. My family won’t mind.”

Seth’s hands were good, and for a little while Clement didn’t try to escape them. Davi subsided, back into sleep. But eventually, Clement got out from under the warm quilts, put on her clothes, and got underway. The angular farmer stood on the porch and watched her leave, but when Clement looked back, she was gone, to the cow barn, no doubt, to start the milking, or to the dairy, to check on the cheese.

These things happen, Clement told herself.

Bittersweet regret followed her all the way to Watfield. Nine days later, blistered and frostbitten, she unwound her muffler in the middle of a blinding snowstorm so the gate captain could recognize her face. Later still, with Davi big‑eyed and frightened in her arms, she endured the wrath of Cadmar. She had been gone twice as long as she had promised, and had taken untoward risks, and had abandoned her soldiers. She admitted all that, and did not argue with his anger. Still later, with Davi asleep in Clement’s bed, she sat with Gilly while his nighttime pain draught was taking hold, and told him about the blinding white days, the one bewildering storm that did its best to kill her, the nights in cold barns on straw beds with only pauper’s bread to eat, the nights of sharing hearty meals at family tables and sleeping in a bed hospitably vacated for her and Davi. And she told him about Seth.

Gilly did not laugh at her. After a long silence, he said, “If you become Shaftali–”

“What?”

“Oh, don’t be dishonest with me. If you become Shaftali, I couldn’t endure my life. And with both of us gone, Cadmar would fall like a house without a center beam, and maybe the Sainnites would fall with him.”

Clement said, after a stunned silence, “My face is known. I’m the notorious baby thief of Watfield. I can never escape that. I never even thought to try.”

“Stop playing these dangerous games, then. Be what you are.”

The next day, Clement was back in uniform. Her hair was trimmed, her buttons polished, her feet, though they ached with frostbite, were jammed into her newly blacked boots. Davi found her attire fearsome, and cried. She refused to eat her porridge, fought the bath, huddled under the blankets in Clement’s bed, and was generally defiant and exasperating. “I want to go home!” she whined. “You promised!”

“I see you’re feeling much better. Well enough to accuse a lieutenant‑general of being a liar. You’ve got a lot of courage, little girl, but not much sense.”

Davi glared at her: sturdy, angry, not much intimidated. “You promised!”

Unable to leave Davi unattended, Clement had paper and ink delivered to her room, and she tried to work on the task Cadmar had set her, but even without the distracting child it would have been impossible. He had refused to accept the closure of any garrison and demanded alternatives. She wrote an extremely irritable list of impractical and intolerable solutions:

1. Go back to the homeland and recruit a few thousand mercenaries to join us in exile.

2. People the garrisons with straw dummies.

3. Command each soldier to kidnap and personally raise two children, while also fulfilling all other duties.

4. Take a thousand Shaftali women prisoner, impregnate them all, and force them to raise the resulting children as Sainnites.

5. Require the female soldiers, myself among them to bear and raise children. (Though I am too old, probably.)

She snorted. She didn’t have to look beyond the child glowering at her from the bed to see why her people were childless. What would she do, if Davi were hers? After a year of pregnancy and a year of nursing, two years off the battlefield, if she survived childbirth and did not suffer any of the terrible injuries birthing women were subject to, would she then carry Davi on her back into war? Or leave the child behind to be inevitably orphaned? And who would raise her then?

“Lieutenant‑General?” A hesitant tap on her door. “Davi?”

Davi came out from under the covers, big‑eyed. “You should have trusted me,” said Clement sourly, and went to open the door.

The steady, quiet father of this sturdy girl came in, pushed past Clement, and snatched up the child. “Oh, blessed day! Davi! You’re so thin! Oh, my sweet girl!”

Davi clung to him, and cried, and then declared that she had been very brave, though she had been in a scary place, and that Clemmie–she had forgotten that she hated her, apparently–had taken her home across the snow.

“So much adventure for such a little girl.” The man gave Clement a look and added dryly, “I thought you Sainnites were cowards about snow.”

“Your information had better be worth what I’ve been through.” Strange that it hadn’t occurred to her until now to wonder if this man were telling the truth. But the Shaftali were an honest people, a quality that was, according to Gilly, embedded in the culture by the once ubiquitous Truthkens. In most of her dealings with the Shaftali, when they agreed to speak at all, they spoke the truth.

Davi’s father had brushed most of the snow from his clothing. His skis and ski poles were slung across his back, and an empty sling for Davi to ride home in. He set all this gear down and sat reluctantly, with Davi clinging to his neck.

“These people, Death‑and‑Life,” he said. “They’re going to rescue the children. But they aren’t going to send the Watfield children home, not right away, because they think you Sainnites would blame their families, and the people of Watfield have suffered too much already, so maybe Davi would have been safe anyway. But I’d never see her again. And I couldn’t bear it.”

“I didn’t tell anybody Clemmie was a soldier,” announced Davi. “And I didn’t cry.”

Her father said, “All your mothers and fathers will be so proud of you.”

Clement, while gathering up Davi’s warm clothing, had noticed a loose button and sat down to sew it on. The man gave her a surprised look, and she glared at him, saying, “I suppose you feel required to explain to me now how badly you feel, but I wish you wouldn’t. Tell me: nobody knows where the Watfield children are. So how are they to be rescued?”

“Not just the Watfield children. All of them.”

She looked up again from her stitching, genuinely surprised now, and even more dismayed.

The farmer said, “I suppose you thought it was a secret that you’ve got a garrison full of children. But those people knew you Sainnites had to be keeping your children somewhere! And your children aren’t in the garrisons, because no one’s ever seen one, and a child’s not easy to hide. So the rebels have been looking around, and asking questions, and they’ve found your secret place, and they know the Watfield children are there. They wouldn’t say exactly where that place was, though. I guess they feared the Watfield parents might go there and wreck their surprise. And I wouldhave gone, too, if I had known. In fact, my husband wasn’t supposed to tell anything at all, even to his family, but he did because he was so sick. And my husband was sure those Death‑and‑Life people knew exactly where the children were.”