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Arnisout?” He put his hand through his thick bobbed hair. “Is he your father?”
    “Yes.” Ash lied without hesitation. She did the thing she had learned to do and the constriction in her throat went away, so that she could speak. “I want him! Tell me where he is!”
    The aide pricked down a parchment list. “Arnisout. Here. He was taken prisoner. The Captains are talking. I imagine prisoners may be exchanged after a few hours.”
    Ash thanked him in as quiet a voice as she could manage and returned to the edges of the camp to wait.
    Evening fell across the valley. The stench of bodies sweetened the air unbearably. Guillaume did not come back to camp. Rumour began to say he had died of his wounds, died of plague caught in the Bride of the Sea’s camp, signed on with the Most Serene as a master gunner at twice the pay, run off with a noblewoman from the Duke’s city, gone home to his farm in Navarre. (Ash hoped for a few weeks. After six months, she stopped hoping.)
    By sunset, prisoners moved aimlessly between the camp’s tents, unused to walking around without sword, axe, bow, halberd. The evening sun lay gold over blood and poppies. The air tasted of heat. Ash’s nose numbed itself to the worst of the decomposition. Richard stalked up to her where Ash stood in dung-stained straw, her back to a cart’s wheel, with one of the baggage train’s washerwomen dabbing witch hazel on the yellow bruises down her shins.
    “When will we know? ” Richard shivered, and glared at her. “What will they do with us?”
    “Us?” Ash’s ears still thinly sang.
    The washerwoman grunted. “We’re part of the spoil. Sell us to whorehouses, maybe.”
    “I’m too young!” Ash protested.
    “No.”
    “Demon!” the boy shrieked. “Demons told you we’d lose! You hear demons! You’ll burn!”
    “Richard!”
    He ran away. He ran down the earth-track that soldiers‘ feet had beaten into existence over the peasants’ crops, away from the baggage wagons.
    “Man-bait! He’s too pretty,” the washerwoman said, suddenly vicious, throwing her wet rag down. “I wouldn’t be him. Or you. Your face! They’ll burn you. If you hear voices! ” She made the sign of the Horns.
    Ash leaned her head back, staring up into the endless blue. The air swam with gold. Every muscle ached, one wrenched knee hurt, her little toenail had been torn off bloody. None of the normal euphoria of hard exertion over and done with. Her guts churned.
    “Not voices. A voice.” She pushed with her bare foot at the clay pot of witch hazel ointment. “Maybe it was sweet Christ. Or a saint.”
    “ You, hear a saint?” the woman snarled incredulously. “Little whore!”
    Ash wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Maybe it was a vision. Guillaume had a vision once. He saw the Blessed Dead fighting with us at Dinant.”
    The washerwoman turned to walk away. “I hope the Most Serene look at your ugly face and make you fuck their nightsoil men!”
    Ash scooped up and hefted the pot of witch hazel in one hand, preparing to throw. “Poxy bitch!”
    A hand came out of nowhere and clouted her. It stunned her. She burst into a humiliatingly loud squall, dropping the clay pot.
    The man, now visible as wearing the Bride of the Sea’s livery, snarled, “You, woman, get up to the centre of camp. We’re doing shares of spoil. Go! You too, you little scarred freak!”
    The washerwoman ran off, laughing too shrilly. The soldier followed.
    Another woman, suddenly beside the wagon, asked, “ Do you hear voices, child?”
    This woman had a moon-round, moon-pale face, with no hair showing under her tight headdress. Over her big body a grey robe hung loosely, with a Briar Cross on a chain at her belt.
    Ash snivelled. She wiped her dripping nose again. A line of thin, clear snot hung from her nostrils to the shirt’s linen sleeve. “I don’t know! What’s ‘hearing voices’?”
    The pale moon-face looked avidly down at her. “There’s talk among the