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ingrained was the terror of disease, even though everyone knew the kind that sometimes followed injury wasn’t infectious. Ignoring them, the bearers set the litter on the open maroon tile floor at the foot of the dais.
    â€œI want to give my testimony, if I may,” Gaétan croaked. He struggled to sit.
    â€œPlease, brave boy, don’t trouble yourself,” Bogardus said.
    â€œNo. I won’t lie like a lump. I need to speak. You need to listen.”
    Like an eel through rocks his sister Jeannette made her way through the crowd to kneel at his side. With the help of his litter-bearers she helped him sit, half upright and propped in her lap. The thin sheet that covered him fell away from the bandages wound about his chest.
    Violette said nothing. But her lips compressed to the vanishing point and her eyes turned briefly to slits. Brave girl , thought Rob, to risk the wrath of that one.
    He knew the powerful Council member could make his sometime-lover’s life in the Garden into Old Hell on Paradise. But he feared worse, somehow. Violette and her supporters had taken on an edge, recently. Something he couldn’t put a name to.
    He couldn’t see Violette lowering herself to wielding a dagger herself. But she and her cohort Longeau had been willing, eager even, to adopt a rabidly aggressive strategy even as they continued to mouth words of pacifism. He didn’t find that reassuring.
    Haltingly, Gaétan spoke. “We’d marched a kilometer or two west from Pierre Dorée, that village abandoned last year after the bastard Guillaume sacked and burned it. Master Rob’s scouts reported they’d found Salvateur’s forces not far past a rise just ahead. Captain Karyl ordered us to take up positions blocking the road, in and in front of the woods we were just passing through, where the goblins couldn’t all come at us at once.
    â€œThen suddenly the town lords were out in front of us, asserting their ancient right of command, so-called. Longeau gave a rousing speech about how we had to attack at once. And most of our people went charging forward, obedient as dogs.”
    Gaétan paused. His face twisted briefly. Rob could only guess at the pain from his wound stabbing through his chest.
    â€œI wanted to go with them,” Gaétan said. “I really did. But Karyl ordered us to hold back. I obeyed.”
    The audience recoiled, with a joint hissing inhalation. “Stop helping us,” Rob muttered under his breath. “Any more such favorable testimony and the mob’ll forget all about hanging or beheading and jump straight to pulling us apart with nosehorns.”
    â€œAnd Karyl was right,” Gaétan said. “We felt the awful terremoto that broke our brothers before they got within bowshot of the enemy. Watched them stream back over the rise toward us in panic flight. Watched them ridden down by a couple dozen of Salvateur’s cavalry and a handful of dinosaur knights. With nothing in the world we could do.
    â€œYou all know Lucas, the genius lad who painted this place? He was Karyl’s special student at swordsmanship. He learned fast and well. I saw him empty a courser’s saddle of a Crève Coeur knight. Then another one killed him.”
    Seeing an opening, Sister Violette slid in words like a silver knife. “So Karyl lured our greatest painter away on this mad errand of his, got him killed—and didn’t even avenge him?”
    Rob saw Karyl flinch as though struck. His face tightened, went pale and stark. A scar Rob hadn’t noticed before glowed like a white thread down the right side of his forehead.
    Grief throbbed in the silver-haired Councilor’s voice as well as anger. And they’re both genuine, he thought in surprise, or she’s as great an actress as ever Lucas was an artist with a brush.
    He wasn’t sure he liked knowing what that told him. Easier by far to think of Sister Violette as nothing