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to tell you
what I did to the eyes of the girl who—”
    “ For the
Dagda’s sake, Glaw,” came a voice—a whispered hiss—from somewhere
in the back of the group. “Just cut her throat and let’s get
on!”
    “ Not so
fast.” The man holding Dera—Glaw, she guessed his name must
be—answered before her heart could give more than four or five
panicked thumps. Which she supposed she could thank him for. “She
could be a spy. Iuan—Devlin.” Two of the crowd of men snapped to
attention as they were addressed. “Get out and scout the fortress.
See if what she says is true.” He tightened his grip on Dera’s arm
and dragged her backwards, away from the cleared path and towards
the trees. “Until they’re back, we all of us stay right
here.”

    * * *

    DERA WOKE to someone poking her in the ribs.
Sometimes when she woke, it took her a moment to remember where she
was and how she’d come there. But this morning—more was the
pity—she remembered right away everything that had happened the
night before. And when she opened her eyes, she found it was a
man’s boot that was jabbing her. And the man attached to it—a tall,
wild looking man with blue eyes and a gold-brown beard—was looking
down at her.
    “ Up,” he
grunted.
    Dera dragged herself upright, every muscle in
her body fairly screaming after a night on the cold hard ground.
“And a good morning to you, too, Sunshine,” she muttered under her
breath.
    The man gave her a long look, but turned away
without saying anything more. He was—so far as she’d been able to
tell from watching him and the other men the night before—some sort
of slave or servant here. He’d been put in charge of cleaning the
weapons, keeping the swords free of rust, clearing the ground for a
fire and digging the privy hole. He was young—not more than
twenty-five or so. And not bad looking. At least, so far as Dera
could tell under the beard. He was tall, well-built, with hair
between blond and brown tied back in a leather thong.
    But he’d a funny, vacant sort of look about
his eyes, and a stammer when he talked—and an awkward, jerky way of
moving, like a puppet on short strings. And the rest of the men,
the leader Glaw included, talked to him like he was some kind of
half-wit.
    Took a wound to the head in some battle,
maybe, and it had addled his wits. It happened, sometimes.
    Now he shuffled over to a traveling pack,
pulled out a hunk of bread, and tossed it into Dera’s lap, though
he didn’t look at her again.
    The bread was rock hard. And so coarse ground
there were bits of grit in it from the miller’s grindstones. And
she could scarcely get it up to her mouth, because her hands were
tied together at the wrists, and her fingers were so numb with cold
they felt ready to fall off. Not to mention a trip to the privy pit
would have been nice.
    But at least she was alive. Dera gnawed away
on the cold, stale crust. The scouts weren’t back yet, so Glaw
hadn’t—yet—slit her throat. And none of the men had even tried
anything with her during the night. Glaw had given orders that they
were all to be on strict guard in case of attack, and that if he
caught any man with his pants down, Glaw’d have his guts for dog’s
meat.
    “ Besides.” Glaw had smacked his lips. “All this’ll be over
soon enough. There’s surely plenty of fine women inside Dinas
Emrys, ripe and ready for the picking.” He’d jerked his head in
Dera’s direction. “And you can have her, then, too. Win the fight,
and then you can all have her at once for all I care. But not
tonight.”
    One or
two of his spearmen had looked at her like they might be thinking
about it, all the same.
But they’d lost interest after she’d started in with the cough Lady
Isolde had made her practice before she left—the one that made her
sound like she had the white plague.
    Now Dera
forced down another mouthful of the bread. She’d have been an idiot
to have thought that Glaw and his men would give