The whole world seemed to be coming apart. Perhaps the guns also lay in pieces. Not a shot had been fired.

Clement wrenched herself out of the stunned soldier’s grip. Cadmar and Gilly had taken shelter against the wall on the other side of the gate. She stumbled across–were the stones actually heaving under her feet?

“Cadmar!” she cried.

He turned. His throat was already bruising purple. His face was red. He had the weird, blank gaze of a berserker.

She shouted at him. “Call after the G’deon! Tell her you’ve changed your mind! Tell her you will make peace!”

The soldier had been right: she was addled. And she was too slow to turn away from his fist. Her nose gave a sickening crack. She went down in snow. She could not pay attention to much of anything for a while. Then, she realized she was suffocating on snow and blood, and began choking and coughing, and then she could breathe.

Her face was a pain so vivid that it cleared all the clutter of fear straight out of her mind.

She felt her pocket. The bottle of milk had not broken. She rested her battered face gently in the soothing, scarlet‑stained snow, and waited for the chaos to end and the bleeding to stop.

Chapter Thirty‑Six

The soldiers and their shattered weapons were trapped behind walls they could not climb and a gate they could not open. Garland strolled away with Karis’s hand again on his shoulder, and Mabin snickering to herself at Karis’s other side.

Emil stepped out of the alley from which he had been watching, and showed them the way down a maze of back roads. They were not escorted by the visible and remarkable Paladins, but by a half dozen ordinary, if somewhat self‑important, townsfolk. These people looked sidelong at Karis, who plodded like a plow horse coming home from the fields.

Near someone’s back garden, Norina paced up and down by a covered delivery wagon. She uttered an exclamation at the sight of Karis’s face. “What happened?”

Karis crawled into the delivery wagon and folded herself up in a corner. Norina gave Emil a significant glance, and followed her in.

“What went wrong?” Emil asked tiredly.

Mabin leaned her head close to his, for the gathered people had anxiously drawn forward. “General Cadmar is Karis’s father.”

Emil glanced sharply at Garland, who nodded a confirmation. “Did she kill him?” Emil asked. “Or not?”

Garland thought that if Karis had killed Cadmar it would have devastated her. And if she hadn’t, it still would have devastated her. In the shadows of the van, Karis’s face seemed like a pale mask. Norina had clasped one of her hands, and was talking to her urgently, with her mouth close to her ear.

“She seemedresolved,” Mabin said uncertainly.

“She killed him,” Garland said.

Emil glanced at him again, inquiringly. Garland held up his hands as Karis had when she put them both through the gate. “This is your son’s life,” he quoted Karis, gesturing towards the right. Then, he gestured towards the left, holding an invisible Cadmar by the throat, speechless.

“This is my father’s death,” said Emil.

Garland put his hands down, feeling extremely self‑conscious. Mabin was giving him a very surprised look, but Emil clasped Garland’s elbow and said, “I knew you were the right one to send in with her.”

They got in the wagon and closed the doors, and were taken on a jolting journey across rough cobblestones. Garland supposed that Norina’s fierce whisper continued to fling itself at Karis’s obdurate silence, but all he could hear was the rumble of the wheels. When the wagon stopped and the door opened, the light revealed a sight Garland had never imagined possible: Karis in a huddle, with her face buried in Norina’s shoulder, Norina’s hand stroking the mad tangle of her hair.

Yet another contingent of awestruck citizens had met the wagon at the back of a dry goods shop. Emil firmly pushed the crowd back, and Karis crawled heavily out of the wagon. White‑faced, stark‑eyed, she began to remove a ragged glove so she could properly greet this new group of strangers, but Emil said firmly, “Karis, you’ve done enough. Who’s in charge here? Take us where we’re going, please.”

Walking next to Karis, Garland took part of her weight–not a light burden. Karis asked Norina, “Where’s Leeba?”

“Is there something wrong with your ravens? Emil!”

Emil extricated himself from an intense conversation with Mabin. Norina said to him, “We’ve got to find the ravens somehow, and get them into shelter. And does anyone know exactly where Leeba is?”

“She’s with my children, ice skating,” a nearby woman said. “The pond is over there–see those treetops?”

Emil said, “Send someone to bring Leeba to Karis. And J’han also–he’s with her.”

“I’ll go myself.” The woman left.

Emil picked another member of their escort, apparently at random, who found himself in a very peculiar conversation with the G’deon of Shaftal as she attempted to tell him where the ravens were by describing what the birds could see. They walked down a narrow passageway between buildings, and Karis was saying, “It seems like a big garden, with a fountain in the middle.”

“Is there a red and green house nearby, with a tower? And a lightning rod with a blue glass ball in it?” Apparently, Emil had managed to pick the exact person in their group who knew every minuscule detail of his town’s landscape.

Karis stumbled on a loose cobblestone. Up ahead, there stood an extremely dilapidated house, with a Paladin standing guard at the sagging back gate. They appeared to have arrived at their next destination.

The baby’s girl‑nurse still huddled in the bed, but she was awake, and wide‑eyed with fear. “Lieutenant‑General, I’m sorry–I didn’t know–” The baby lay in his basket, blanket‑wrapped, though the stupid girl had let the fire practically burn out. The girl’s terrified babbling continued, but Clement paid her no heed. She picked up her son and sat down by the cold hearth.

A couple of confused soldiers had helped Clement to her quarters, and now stood uncertainly in the doorway. Clement broke the wax seal on the milk bottle, stuck in her finger, and let a drop of milk fall from her fingertip to the baby’s mouth.

She waited. His mouth moved. She dipped her finger again, and put it into her son’s mouth, and felt the slight movement of his lips and tongue as he sucked.

A drop of blood fell from her nose to his blanket. As she tilted her head so the blood would run down her throat, she noticed the wide‑eyed soldiers. “Escort this girl out of the garrison.”

“I’m not sure we can.”

“If they haven’t got the gate open yet, lower her over the wall with a rope. Tell her to go home to her parents.”

“Yes, Lieutenant‑General.”

The other soldier said sympathetically, “The general’s got a heavy fist, eh? I’ll find a medic for you.”

They left, dragging the sobbing girl, who probably thought she was going to be killed. Clement fed her son from her fingertip. Later, she paused to build up the fire and to boil a clean bottle. She returned to find the baby blinking at her from his basket.

She said, “Well, I’ve ruined my career for you.”

His mouth opened; he sucked her finger hungrily.

She said, more to herself than to him, “So the child creates the parent, eh? Backwards though it seems?” She added, “Listen, little guy. I have to tell you some surprising news: you aren’t going to be a soldier.”

As they entered the run‑down, back‑alley house with a roof that seemed certain to leak and a garden that was piled with frozen ordure, Garland could hear a muted commotion of cleaning, of furniture being brought in and the rapid, confident banging of several carpenters’ hammers. They entered a big, crowded kitchen, and Garland was immediately irritated to see how far advanced the cooking had gotten without his help. A survey of the first‑floor rooms revealed that all the bedrooms were in the midst of a frenzy of cleaning, so he told Norina to bring Karis into the parlor. As Garland put together a plate of bread and cold meat and got a pot of tea steeping, J’han arrived with Leeba, followed by a woman carrying two exhausted ravens. In the parlor, Karis held Leeba on her lap, and listened, as though she had no other concerns, to her daughter’s excited account of alphabet lessons, ice skating, and playing with a pet ferret. J’han had gotten Karis’s boots off and was affectionately admonishing her for getting her feet wet.