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answer, you can be sure of this: one or another of your employers will be very unhappy with your answer.”
    “You mean, as unhappy as they were when you turned in your commission and titles?”
    O’Donnell’s voice was quiet. “You’ve heard then?”
    O’Neill shook his head. “Not officially, no: your officers have been keeping it quiet. But when your tercios came over here into bivouac with Preston’s, talk started—particularly when your men started getting orders from the Sassena—from Colonel Preston. And there were some as claimed that before you left, you’d folded up your tabard and sash of the Order of Alcantara and sent them back to Madrid.”
    “That I did.”
    Owen kept his voice carefully neutral: “So are you wanting us to follow your example?”
    O’Donnell waved a negating hand. “I’d ask no man to follow my path. And there’s no need for you to declare your allegiance until you’re asked.”
    “Then why didn’t you wait to do so, yourself?”
    “Owen, when I was made a Knight-Captain of the Order of Alcantara, a Gentleman of His Majesty’s Chamber, and a member of his Council of War, I took my oaths before, and to, the king himself. In his very person, in Spain. I had my benefits and titles directly from his hand, and was, at his personal instruction, naturalized as a Spanish citizen. Honor demands, then, that if I know in my heart I can no longer be Philip’s loyal servant, I must relinquish all those privileges and garnishments at once. I can’t bide my time, waiting to be cornered into admitting that my allegiances have changed—even as I continue to enjoy the king’s coin and favor. Given the state of affairs here, honor may be all I have left—so it was both right and prudent that I keep it untarnished.”
    “Fairly spoken,” Preston said. Owen found himself nodding; the earl of Tyrone’s officers were doing the same.
    The flap of the tent came back. The young surgeon of the Tyrconnell regiment—blood still on his hands, some on his face—crossed the open center of the council ring and sat down next to O’Donnell. He said nothing, stared hard at nothing.
    O’Donnell leaned toward him. “You’ve word on our worst wounded, Dr. Connal?”
    “I do. Russell and Fitzgerald will live, but Nugent—” The young man dropped his head; O’Neill couldn’t tell if it was out of anger or grief. Perhaps both.
    “Easy, Shane, easy,” soothed O’Donnell. “Have we lost him?”
    “Not yet,” the younger man snapped through gritted teeth. “But we will, and there’s damn-all I can do to stop it. A gut wound”—he looked up, eyes narrow—“a small gut-wound. And I still can’t save him. If I were an up-time doctor—even one of their nurses—then, yes, maybe so. Probably. But me? I’m just—just a damned butcher, I am.” His head dropped again, neck rigid.
    “It’s not a bit of your fault, lad,” put in O’Neill, seeking a moment in which simple kindness might also achieve some additional interclan mending. “And let’s not hear any more o’ this tearing yourself down because you’re not up-time-trained. I’m sure those fancy Grantville doctors are not half as good as everyone says they ar—” And he stopped, transfixed by a baleful glare from Hugh’s senior sergeant and old companion, O’Rourke—until a sudden, stinging chill of realization coursed through him. O’Donnell’s young wife of barely a year had died in childbirth only six months ago—and it was universally held that her death could have been prevented by an up-time doctor or nurse. O’Donnell might have had access to one of them through his godmother, the Infanta Isabella, but he had known that Philip IV would have been sorely displeased. And so, Hugh had refrained. And so, his wife, and only child, had both died. Criticizing up-time medicine was, Owen concluded, probably the stupidest thing he could have done at such a moment. He surveyed the faces in the tent to see just how much