He lay very still. It seemed odd that he had not awakened yet. She opened the blanket to feel his chilly, flaccid hand.

“Gilly, stop blocking the lamplight!” Gilly hastily stepped back from the table.

She turned the baby so the light shone full on his face. The violet shadows that bruised his eyelids seemed stark and terrible. She had seen children who were sick unto death. She knew what it looked like.

Gilly came over to her. He looked into the baby’s face. He put an arm across her shoulders. Of all the clumsy, graceless actions Clement had seen him do over the years, this was by far the most awkward.

She pressed her face against his arm, which was all knotted with the muscle it took to support his ungainly body’s weight on the cane. “I’ll send for the midwife right away,” he said. “Listen,” he added desperately, perhaps fearful that Clement would weep. “If you’re a criminal, so am I. And I’ll gladly share your fate with you, if I can die your friend.”

Chapter Thirty‑Four

Sometimes a babe just fails, the midwife said. The nurse’s milk is plentiful, but milk does no good if the child won’t suck. He was born early, and his mother died–such infants commonly don’t survive. The midwife gave Clement a cool glance. She seemed to think Clement should have expected this outcome.

Clement sent the midwife home.

The baby remained with his nurse in Clement’s quarters. Though Clement pursued business that was too urgent to wait, she forced herself to keep returning to make certain the frightened girl attempted to make the baby take the breast. Each time Clement returned, she took up her son, and held him, and watched the nearly indistinguishable movement of his breathing. Each time, she learned a new lesson in excruciating helplessness.

She could endure anything but hopeless waiting. That her urgency drove her out again into the bitter night seemed almost fortunate.

In the refectory, she talked to the night watch as those soldiers came on duty, and then to the much larger day watch as they came in for their evening meal. She found some soldiers who had been posted in South Hill, and in nearby Reece before that. They remembered the seer, Medric, quite vividly: a ridiculous, voluble little man, nearly blind without his spectacles, hopelessly bad at combat, and, reportedly, a drunk. Yet under his guidance the Sainnites in Reece had decimated the Paladins, and at first it had seemed they could do the same to the Paladins in South Hill. The informants agreed on the man’s practical incompetence, and doubted he could have survived as a deserter. It did not occur to them that such a man might get himself some powerful friends.

The ringing of the night bell customarily would have ended Clement’s inquiries for the day, but if she delayed until the dawn bell, Ellid would inevitably hear of her activities, and just as inevitably would ask Cadmar why Clement’s inquiries had not proceeded by the usual slow but methodical transfer from commander to captain to soldiers. Then Cadmar would certainly stop her investigation and might well relieve her of duty, for she was acting without orders.

Clement burst into barracks, roused the sleepers, dealt with the affronted company captains, and dismayed the soldiers with her urgent questions. By halfway to morning, Clement had spoken to all four hundred soldiers in combat companies, and also to the armorers, the cobblers, and the stable crew. It was in the stable that she finally found a man, the stable captain, who had participated in the attack on the Ashawala’i. A bow‑legged man Clement’s age or older, he had been burned while rescuing horses from last summer’s fire, and after all these months the injury still kept him awake nights. In the back room of the newly built stable, he stoked the fire in the stove and set on top of it a rusty pot of what appeared to be treacle, though he claimed it was tea. He appeared to view Clement’s unprecedented visit as the opportunity for a leisurely chat to while away the night, and he was less than pleased when, upon learning that his duties had prevented him from attending any of the storyteller’s performances, she insisted that he immediately put on his coat and come to the gaol with her.

The night had gotten bitter cold. The deserted roadways, transformed to narrow passageways by the piled‑up snow, offered a very slippery argument for the value of hobnailed boots. It was the kind of cold that silences speech, but Clement persisted with questions that the captain answered with chilled brevity.

He had witnessed the attack on the Ashawala’i from a distance. The Sainnites’ approach had been noticed in time for the tribal warriors to set up a defense, but the war horses had galloped right over them, and had herded the fleeing villagers into the second prong of a two‑pronged attack. What followed was a bloody slaughter.

“So that was it?” Clement asked. “The Ashawala’i were all killed?”

“We certainly wished that were true. Some ten, twelve days it took us to get out of the mountains, and sometimes we feared not one of us would get out alive. They burned our supply wagons, drove our pack animals over a cliff, and shot a dozen pickets. That was just the first day.”

“How many survivors were there, do you think?”

“We didn’t know. We hardly saw them.”

“What did the people of this tribe look like?”

“Like racers: deep chests, light build, strong legs. It’s hard to even breathe in them mountains. And if you’re not grinding your way up a heartbreaking slope, you’re trying to keep from falling down one. Those people, they could run all day up and down those vicious ridges, and then they would sneak into our camp at night, and cut throats so quietly no one would even notice until fifteen or twenty soldiers were dead. It got so no one dared sleep.”

“They were fearsome, then. But what was their appearance?”

“Dark skin. Black hair: straight, coarse, long as a horse’s tail. Eyes the color of their skin. Their faces were sharp and narrow. Long, braided hair–dozens of braids, all knotted together.”

There was a silence while in her mind Clement compared this description to the storyteller, and found no difference but in the length of her hair–excepting that solitary braid.

The stable captain said, “You’re not thinking this storyteller is the one that was captured alive? Because I can tell you now, she’s not.”

“One of these warriors was captured alive?” she said in amazement.

“She lured us into a canyon, and then her companions dumped a mountain of rocks onto our heads. We pulled her out of the rocks, and it turned out she spoke Sainnese, so the commander thought she might be some use, and didn’t kill her.”

“Good gods, she spoke Sainnese? Would you recognize her, do you think?”

“I tell you, it’s not her. This warrior we captured, her back was broken. She was paralyzed–when they chopped off some of her toes she didn’t even flinch. And her skull was cracked, too, a kick from a war horse, probably. The medic figured she’d die any moment, but she was still alive when we reached the garrison. I don’t know what became of her, but she sure isn’t walking on her own two feet!”

They had reached the gaol. As they went through the ritual of recognition and admittance, Clement’s exhausted thoughts were overcome by a dreadful image of a woman warrior like herself__

maimed, broken, tormented by memories of a massacre–and yet alive. Then, Clement and the stable captain stood at the barred door of the gaol cell. Within, the storyteller sat awake, huddled in her cloak, gazing blankly into darkness. Clement held up the lantern so its light could enter through the grate. The stable captain peered in. He stumbled back. He gave Clement a look of terrified disbelief. “It’s her.”

In Clement’s bed the girl‑nurse slept, puffy‑eyed and tangle‑haired, in a mess of blankets that testified to a terrible restlessness. She must have realized the child was sick, and was terrified even before she saw the storyteller arrested. But she had found a temporary peace now, and Clement left her alone. The baby, closely wrapped in his basket near the fire, was still cold, still limp, still unresponsive, but still breathing. She talked to him softly and bid him farewell. An eventful, possibly dreadful day lay before her, and she doubted she would manage to see him alive again.