Food forgotten, all of the scouting party sat with hands clenched and eyes fastened on Amethyst, who relayed the encounter with the suspicious locals. Fortunately, it appeared that Amethyst was not one of those Dolls who never said a word unless they were asked a direct question. Maybe all of them listening with interest to her story emboldened her. For whatever reason, she literally recited everything that happened, every word Kordas and the strangers said, and even narrated the strangers’ reactions. And when she finally said, “And so they agree, and now the barges are moving again,” they all sighed with relief simultaneously.

“What are they going to do when they finally realize we outnumber them a thousand to one?” Briada Fairweather asked aloud, making Delia tense up all over again.

But her cousin Bart barked with laughter. “They won’t be doin’ a thing. But they’ll likely get a-feared, and Kordas will have to soothe ’em all over again.”

Of course he was right. And of course Kordas would, because Kordas, she was increasingly certain, could fix anything that had to do with managing people.

“Well, this isn’t getting us moving,” Ivar pointed out, and set the example for the rest of them by heading for his horse Manta. In a moment he had put the bit back in her mouth and mounted up. Sai cleaned up what little there was to pick up, tossing the bits of bread left to Bay, and the rest went to their horses—or, in the case of Delia, to the last barge.

Amethyst came with her. “This one can chop the wood that you Fetch, Delia,” the Doll offered. “And this one can carry it to be stacked on the next barge if we run out of room.”

Ahead of them, Tight Squeeze strained in his harness, and Buttercup did her best behind him; the first barge moved, then the second and third, and with a little lurch, the one they were on crept up the river, gradually gaining speed.

“That would be very kind of you, Amethyst,” Delia said gratefully. “Extraordinarily kind, in fact. Thank you. Are you going to be sleeping in the women’s barge?” she added, with a pause to Fetch a dead branch about as thick as her wrist from the top of a tree; it broke with an audible snap and landed at her feet. Amethyst took the hand axe out of her hand and began breaking the branch into neat sections about the length of her forearm.

“This one does not sleep,” Amethyst reminded her. “And this one sees very well in the dark. This one will be taking the night watch all night, alongside some of you.”

“Oh.” She blushed at her own forgetfulness. “I—hope that won’t be tedious.”

“Before the Dolls escaped, this one rarely saw anything outside the Palace,” Amethyst pointed out. “And when this one was a free Elemental, this one rarely paid much attention to the world.” She paused. “A mistake. If we had spent more time studying humans and less time in play with each other, we might not have been caught in that trap.”

Delia took care with her reply. This river was rather sluggish, which was just as well, but at least the horses weren’t having to pull against the current at the moment. Somehow, the water smelled cold and green; at least, that was how she would have described it. There must have been a hard frost along here last night, since on this section, the trees were every color between yellow and a dark purple-red she’d never seen in an autumn leaf before.

“Well, now you know,” Delia replied, after an uncomfortably long pause punctuated only by the thuds of branches hitting the barge and the thwack of the hand axe.

“Now we know,” Amethyst agreed. “But also, the senses these material bodies have are much different from our native senses. Everything is endlessly interesting to this one. And since the Baron has pledged to set us free, our time in using them is limited, so this one, at least, is observing all that is to be observed, and saving the memories.”

Delia was going to say something, but she was interrupted by Ivar shouting “Flush!” and looked up to see ducks coming her way.

Most of the irate locals had gone back to their village, but the blacksmith and two more burly fellows remained. And as the sun climbed higher in the sky and then headed into the west, and the barges didn’t stop coming, Kordas was paying careful attention to their faces.

When at last they displayed what he considered to be the correct degree of alarm—which was about at the point where the blacksmith probably figured that the adult Valdemarans outnumbered his villagers by at least ten to one—he slid down off Arial’s back, ground-tied her, and walked over to them.

“Now we can begin the real negotiations,” he said genially, while they eyed him with distrust. “Now, you take a look down that path—” he continued, pointing at the line of horses. “And pay close attention to all that nice, useful horse dung. That’ll be yours for the taking.”

At least one of the three men must have been a farmer, because his face lit up with understanding and a little greed.

“And we’ll have herds and flocks coming through here to add to that dung. And it’s all yours. Now, do you see what my people are doing up there? Raking it to the side so it doesn’t get trampled and made useless, then one of my mages will come along and make it as dry as if it had been baking in the hot summer sun for a seven-day. Easy for you to gather, easy to move, light as cured hay, and easier to stack.” The farmer nodded. He got the idea, and fast. “Dried out like that, you can break it up quick, manure your fields with it now without burning them, and plow it under to mellow over the winter.”

Now the other two got it. The blacksmith stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Aye, but—how many on ye are there? Ye’ll be a-breakin’ down yon bank, be ye ever so careful, yer flocks will be eatin’ the verge bare, an’ how ye gonna make up for that?”

“That’s what you and I are here to decide, without every man of your village wanting to put in his own opinion,” Kordas replied, which got a snort from the farmer and a dry laugh from the blacksmith. “We have cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. We’re prepared to part with some. So, what do you reckon that damage is worth? Remember, these are all stock of breeding lines you’ve never seen before. You’re going to get a great bargain out of this. It’ll renew your herds with one breeding season.”

The blacksmith looked to the farmer. “Well,” the farmer said, grounding his pitchfork. “As to that—you’ll know that every family in the village is going to want a bit of that new blood—”

The price they settled on was perfectly reasonable by Kordas’s opinion, and he had the Doll relay the numbers, the kinds, and whose herds they were to come from. Mostly his, which seemed fair, from the herds of his manor farms. The time would probably come when they’d have to bargain like this again, and when it did, he wanted people to remember that he had been the one to part with his stock before anyone else did.

The important items in this trade were, as he had expected, males. One female could only produce so much in a season, but one male could and would happily service every female of his kind in the village, producing a new crop of beasts with half new blood in them. The third man ran back to the village to bring herders. And when the first boar, ram, billy, bull, and stallion came through the Gate, they were greeted, for the first time, with the admiration and approval of the native villagers who came to accept them. It was literally the first time Kordas had seen any of them smile. There was a pause while Dole took the spell off that kept them tied to the boats, and then Kordas turned them over with a flourish.

All of the animals except the stallion were young. The boar was out of one of the Empress’s litters, and was two years old. Like all of the Squire’s male shoats that didn’t get castrated with an eventual end as bacon, he had been raised not unlike a dog. So, like a dog, he obeyed the instructions of his handlers, including “Stay.” At some point in his family’s history, the Squire’s pig-raising forbears had gotten tired of charging, rage-filled boars and decided to try training them. And it had worked.

Kordas could not help but wonder how much of this lesson the villagers would take in.

The natives looked at the boar and his handler as if they were both mages. This was a greater wonder to them than Rose the Doll was.

The ram and goat were not so amenable, which troubled the shepherds not at all; they had brought their dogs. The stallion was a five-year-old cobby bay fellow that had been one of the “failed” False Golds—not gold, and not the size of a Tow-Beast. But he was a beefy lad, with broad feet and broader shoulders, perfect size for plowing. Of course he was mannerly, but that was not the marvel a boar that obeyed directions was.

There was some time while the handler mastered words in the speech of the Empire that he’d need to make the boar obey. But plenty of directions were just a sound and a gesture, including “Follow,” so Kordas was pretty certain they’d get the pig to the village and into a sty without issue. Especially since the villager evidently knew his pigs, and had brought a sugar beet with him. The boar probably had not seen one of those since he’d left the Duchy, and it was very clear from his body language he would have learned to sit up and beg if that was what it took to get that beet.

It took most of the daylight for all this to be agreed on (and meanwhile, the barges kept coming through), and through all of it, Kordas could not keep himself from thinking of those Poomers and Spitters in their barges at the end of the tail, and how much easier it all would have been if he settled things “Imperial fashion.” And he allowed himself those indulgent and dangerous thoughts, just to purge them out of his head. All he needed to do to make them fade away was to remind himself that “Imperial fashion” always ended in people dying. Always. Force never bred anything but force, and bullying never bred anything but resentment. And he’d had more than enough of all of that.

Now, let’s hope I don’t back us away from fights we should take on.

Finally the last of the locals left, the last of the sunlight left, and that was an end to the expedition movement for the day. Everyone up the line stopped, moored their strings to the bank, unharnessed the towing animals, and staked them to graze. Flocks of chickens and geese were bribed into the “coops” with grain, flocks and herds settled to eat and sleep. And Kordas went back through the Gate, leaving Rose to keep track of what was going on. Amethyst was with the scouts, Rose would stay at the Gate, there was Pansy on the first barge through the Gate, and other Dolls with other barges on either side of the Gate, either as night watchers or night herders. Ivy would keep him informed of what any of them observed.

Kordas was tired, chilled, and hungry, and if he got back soon enough, his dinner would be warm. He reached the middle of the lake just as the last light faded in the west.

Isla was watching for him from the prow of the barge, and offered her hand up to the deck. “What happened out there?” she asked. “I got bits of it from Ivy, but she was doing most of her talking to Dagger, the Doll with your guards on this side. They wanted to raid the armaments barges, and Dagger had to keep talking them down.”

He squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose. “What we would do without the Dolls, I do not know. That could have been a disaster. They’d have had good intentions, but they probably would have come through ready to attack, just as I was making the passage deal. Which went well, really.” He followed her into the barge, where a plate of sausage-stuffed rolls and a hot cup of tea waited for him. Ivy was just shutting the door to the boys’ room.

“Good work, Ivy!” he said, as he sat wearily and reached for a roll. “I was just telling Isla that I don’t know what we’d do without you. But—” he added hastily, lest she think that meant he was thinking better of his pledge to free them, “—we’ll have to learn to do without you eventually. Maybe I should start a concerted effort to find the folk with Mindspeech. There have to be some of those among our folk . . .”

“That is a brilliant idea!” Isla exclaimed. “I’ll get to work on that. We’ll pair them with Dolls for redundancy, and practice on their part.”

He took a bite from the still-warm sausage roll and sighed. One potential problem derailed. Millions more to go. There would probably be no more than a handful of people with useful Mindspeech, but as long as they were spaced out along the convoy, the problem of getting messages around without the Dolls was solved. He was already dissatisfied with the necessity of the tow animals working along an unprepared bank. In old Valdemar, the towline courses were well prepared, with paved ground or hard clay pack. Now, their beasts were putting themselves at risk with every step into the mud, or foothold of a root. Only the guidance of their handlers gave them an advantage.

“You may do that, Lord Baron,” Ivy said placidly. “But we will not leave you until you have a home, regardless of when you learn how to free us.”

He had absolutely no doubt that Ivy spoke for all of the Dolls. Bless them. “Then thank you, Ivy,” he said. “It’ll be a good idea to have two ways to send word up and down the line; what if something comes along and—I don’t know—drains you of magic?” His temple throbbed. “The Healers will be able to tell who has Mind-magic; they probably already know.”

“And Doll Panacea is asking them about it now,” Ivy replied. “She says to tell you that your Healers will have the names by morning, and we’ll have some of us talk to the people in question to explain it all to them. We assume—” and by her body language, “we assume” meant “we expect or you’ll regret it,” “—that those with the Gift you require will be kept secret to avoid exploitation, and will be compensated well.”

Did Ivy just get—crafty? Was I just intimidated? I suppose if anyone would be conscientious about exploitation, it would be the Dolls.

“You see?” Isla said to Kordas while retrieving their butter jar. “It’s not all on your back.” She patted his hand. “Remember back on the estate; you were never the sort to try to manage every little thing in the Duchy. You knew who to trust to do their jobs, you told them what we needed, and you left them to it. Just do the things no one else among us can do. Like negotiating with potentially hostile people. That was a very shrewd move of yours, to wait to offer livestock until just before they might have turned on you.”

Well, that wasn’t quite how things had gone, but—near enough, he supposed.

“Meanwhile I’ve enlisted the boys into what they are calling the ‘Page Army.’ I don’t suppose you remember a retired Imperial Army lieutenant named Sol Adrescu? He’s organizing all the children into groups to run errands and forage, with a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old in charge of each group, and a Doll to keep track of what they are doing. He recruited our lot. He’s running them off their feet, in a good way. It means they are tired and happy and willing to go straight to bed once supper is over.” Isla gave him a sharp glance. “Speaking of which, please eat.”

“Oh. Right.” He finished the now-not-quite-so-warm rolls, and his tea. “I have concerns about them being too easily accessible as hostages for somebody desperate, but I should trust you all to be watchful. As for the river, I’m just glad I thought to put the Poomers and Spitters and their ammunition at the end of the convoy. That way, they won’t be the first thing anyone thinks of when we run into trouble. And hopefully, most people will forget they exist. And if we end up losing a few boats at the tail, it will be something we don’t need, and hopefully, something no one else knows how to use. I’d sink all of them right now, but . . .”

“But we might encounter something that nothing else will work on.” She picked up his cup and plate, wiped them off and put them away, and took his wrist. “Tomorrow will be another long day.”

“It’s all going to be long days, for quite a while,” he agreed, and followed her to their bed, while Ivy went out to take a watchful position on the roof of the barge, serenely gazing up at the stars from time to time.

The next day ended with both him and Isla in the saddle. Isla, to go interview all of the people with Mindspeech that the Healers had identified, and him to ride up and down the lakeside, making sure that things were going as smoothly as possible.

When much of your command is because of personal charisma and trust, a wise leader makes himself seen and has personal visits whenever possible. It reminds followers that they are important for more than their tasks, and it replenishes their morale. Nobody wants to dare the wild following someone fifty leagues away, but they’ll follow the leader they saw last week. When appealing to the heart, make it personal and keep it personal, and apologize for when you can’t. Those were the words of his father, and wise ones. Certainly nothing he learned in the Imperial hostage school.

The impression wasn’t hurt when an elderly couple gifted Kordas with a basket of warm, morning-baked twisted breadsticks, explaining they were their grandparents’ recipe from home. Kordas shared the bread with minders, headmen, and guards along his route, passing the story along. Being seen giving food personally was good, but being talked about doing so was even better.

His quick check to the other side of the Gate told him that the flotilla was on the move again. Or at least the front part of it was. There was no sign of the native villagers, although, of course, they could have had one of their number up a tree keeping watch from afar. Rose assured him that all was well with the scouts, that the leading barges of the convoy had matters well in hand and had picked up speed, and that she would make sure he heard about it if any of that changed. So he took Arial back through the Gate to fret his way along the lakeshore, imagining all the things that could go wrong, and trying to think of solutions before they did. Passing through the Gate was a matter of timing, when boats were in motion. They came through at a steady pace, but returning to Crescent Lake meant jumping Arial onto a moving barge, rushing to the end before it came through, and leaping off on the other side of the Gate’s shimmer to the waiting jetty. Fortunately, head-on collisions were very unlikely; the laws everyone knew about Gate travel were good ones, and directional travel safely went through from opposite sides of the uprights. Similarly, the vessels came through with the same protocols they’d left old Valdemar’s canals by—straight through the Gate, then immediately break starboard to clear the way for following traffic, siding outward by half beam. If that hadn’t been ingrained in everyone who brought a boat through, they’d never have gotten a dozen barges to Crescent Lake.

The remaining mages had set up a camp just out of the way of the convoy, and before he could look for any of the Six Old Men, Ceri strolled up to his side. “We’ve each got our personal barges ready to attach to a string, and we’ve already calculated how many barges need to pass before one of us joins the string,” he said, without waiting for Kordas to ask him anything. “Kordas, you’ve spent every minute since we got to Crescent Lake organizing things so that each section of the caravan can pretty much manage itself. You want some advice?”

Kordas had pulled himself up a little when Ceri had said that—because it was absolutely true. Every village was in its own section of the group. People who didn’t have a village—like the Squire’s offspring—had organized with neighbors. Every group had a designated cook and a portable kitchen, and a common supply barge. Every group had a leader. Every group had more than one Doll. Even if some disaster separated the groups, they all had the means to communicate, get help, and survive until they met up with, or were rescued by, others.

“Yes, please,” he said.

“Let them. Tell your subordinates to think of all the ways things could realistically go wrong, and to work out solutions.” Ceri grinned, showing a set of surprisingly white and strong teeth for someone his age. “That way, we narrow down the number of ways we can be unpleasantly surprised, and you don’t exhaust yourself.”

“But—” he began.

“Yes, yes, I know,” Ceri said dismissively, sounding, in that moment, exactly like Sai. “We will still be unpleasantly surprised at some point. But you will have narrowed down the number of times that can happen by anticipating it and having solutions on hand. What you’re needed for are emergent situations, and leadership. Not spinning yourself up with anxiety solving every possible problem, which you probably won’t be there for anyway. Now go away.”

Kordas knew better than to argue, and sent Arial back to the family barge. When he wasn’t riding her, she would be giving a hand—or a hoof, as it were—to Dasha, the enormous False Gold mare he’d selected to pull his string of barges. A filly foal—Delia’s personal horse—was with Dasha as well, but she was much too young to do anything other than amuse the boys and be made much of. Each barge-string was going to be responsible for its own towing beasts, whether they were horse, mule, set of ponies or donkeys, or the infinitely patient oxen. Their little homing talismans were now attached to the first barge in their string, as opposed to a herdsman or corral. As far as he was aware, pretty much every animal that could be put into harness was towing a vessel of some sort.

And for as long as grass could still grow this late in the year, the Six had solved the problem of forage. Each mage had been taught the spell that made the grass grow unnaturally fast. When the column stopped for the night, the first thing each mage was supposed to do was hop out and start growing the grass. Even gorging themselves, the herds wouldn’t be able to eat it all—with this spell going, you could quite literally watch the grass grow.

Even if the spell drains the ground with the growth, the herds should replenish it as they digest. At least partly. It would not do to render the soil useless after promising we would do no harm. We’re doing more than enough harm just by being here.

When he got to the family barge, the whole family except for Delia was there, with Isla directing servants, children, and a couple of his Guard as if she was an Imperial Officer. Dasha was waiting patiently in harness, tethered to the family barge, and Isla greeted his arrival with the command, “Get Arial out of her tack and in harness. Our supply barges just arrived and we’re not that long from moving.”

“Yes ma’am!” he said, laughing so it wouldn’t sting. “I’ll be right back.”

It was kind of a relief to be in a position to be ordered around, instead of the one doing the ordering.

Funny how affection can take the edge off of anything. Anyone else and I’d frown over that. It must be love.

With the long caravan of barges now coming through the Gate, the scouts were on the move. According to everything that Amethyst had relayed, Kordas had the situation with the rightful dwellers of this land well in hand, so there was nothing stopping or delaying that ever-growing snake behind them. Of course he does, Delia thought, without any irony. I really think there is nothing that Kordas cannot handle, and he’s just letting us do things so we feel special and wanted.

There could be something to that, actually. Finding this river must have been a huge relief for Kordas.

For her part, she was getting into the rhythm of exploration. And making sure to enjoy what she could about this part of the journey, because things could and probably would get a great deal more difficult. Certainly it was already colder, and none of them knew anything about the climate of this part of the world. So expect the worst, and prepare for it.

She’d done the little she could by catching extra birds every day, stockpiling the firewood, and taking on the chores that anyone could do, as opposed to the more specialized things only a mage or Ivar or Briada could do.

That let her concentrate on traveling for literally the first time in her life, knowing that decent, if plain, meals were right at hand, and a comfortable bed awaited her at the end of the day. She didn’t even need to take a turn at night watch! Consultation between Briada Fairweather and Ivar had led to the conclusion that, since Doll Amethyst could, and had indicated she would, spend the entire night on watch, Amethyst would stand watch on the lead supply barge where the horses were going to be left to graze and sleep in the night. Meanwhile, the two Fairweather cousins, Ivar, Hakkon, and Briada would divide up watches on the rear barge carrying the Gate uprights, which was where anyone trying to sneak up on them would probably come from. For now, Ivar’s dog was sleeping on the roof of the women’s barge in the middle, and that was a third set of senses all night. From Delia’s experience, it was impossible to sneak up on Bay. Even when he looked like he was sound asleep, if you moved, an ear would point right at you. And his bark could wake the dead.

That is something I will miss about Crescent Lake. The noises. All the wildlife, stock, pets, and children sounding off, bits of music, the occasional whoop or howl from storytelling, or chants during chores. I may never hear that again. It might never happen again. This is the real here-and-now, but it’s also history. I heard that with my own ears, and I couldn’t even have imagined it as a concept a year ago. The idea of so many of us, who were spread across hill, dale, and meadow, put all together in one place? Incredible. This is scary, but it’s amazing, too.

Meanwhile, she was cheerily getting on with the two jobs she had been assigned: wood gathering, and hunting for dinner.

Or, in this case, fishing for dinner. She had discovered just by trying it that what worked in the air also worked as long as she could see through the water to her target object. She had no idea what kind of fish she was catching, she only knew that they looked nice and fat, and Sai had approved of the first one. She was belly-down in the stern, watching the wake, where it seemed fish liked to gather and snap at things jumping into the water from the bank. There were five fish in the basket hung in the water at the prow of the boat, and Delia was hoping to add a sixth, so everyone would get half a fish for dinner tonight. As she narrowed her eyes against the light on the water, she heard footsteps on the walkway behind her.

“If you can catch a sixth fish, everyone will get half a fish for dinner tonight,” said Sai, in an echo of her thoughts. “Fish and flatbread with that watercress I found where we camped last night. I’m shocked the geese hadn’t been at it.”

She didn’t ask him if he had tested it to make sure it actually was watercress; he’d already lectured everyone about how they could not count on plants that looked like something they knew was edible actually being that thing. She sighed, but quietly; she didn’t want Sai to ask her why she was sighing, because it was . . . pretty trivial. She missed the battered, fried fish the cook had made back home, when there was always plenty of everything and no need to worry about using up the last bits, and there were so many kinds of fat, from lard to butter, that one could waste it frying battered fish.

“And I’ll use a little of that goose fat you got us to fry up the dried mushrooms that are soaking in the kitchen,” Sai continued. “Now, there’s something even the late unlamented Emperor wouldn’t have turned up his nose at.”

A dim form slowly rose up through the green river water. Delia tensed, waiting to make sure it looked like the rest of her catch. It rolled up to the surface, and she identified the little telltale arrowhead in dark gray on the top of its head that all the other fish had. She reached, imagining she was snatching for the fish with two invisible hands—

And the fat silver fish lay flapping on the walkway just at Sai’s feet. Before she could move, he seized it in both skinny arms and trotted to the front of the barge where the netted fish-basket was, cackling with anticipation.

She rolled over and looked at the sky, waiting for the pain behind her eyes to ease, and grateful that it was cold and the chill could soothe the ache. She had used her Gift more since she had joined the Scouts than she had in all the time she’d lived with Kordas and Isla. Thankfully, when she had explained that using her Gift too much made her head ache and she sometimes needed to lie down and rest, everyone had understood.

Am I that desperate not to be thought to be slacking?

She stared at a puffy little cloud.

Well, yes. She was that desperate. Because she wanted everyone here to actually want her here. She wanted to be thought well of for herself, to be thought of as a valuable part of this expedition. She wanted them to think of her first as herself, and not as the Baroness’s sister.

And if Kordas sent me along to get me out from underfoot . . . I want them to think that if they’d had a choice, they would have asked me along themselves.

Because as they had all been camped around the lake, practically in each other’s pockets day and night, it had become increasingly obvious, at least to her, that something had changed between Kordas and Isla. They weren’t acting as they had at home. In fact, if she’d been forced to put a name to things, she’d have said they were in love with each other. They weren’t just friends and partners anymore.

And surely one of them had noticed her feelings about the Baron. She probably wasn’t any good at hiding her feelings . . .

A face interposed itself between Delia and the sky. “Rested up, yet?” Briada asked, with a half smile.

“More or less. Do we need more wood?” She clambered to her feet. Briada stepped back to give her room.

“Good gods, no. I was just curious about something. That thing you do—can it push as well as pull?” Briada tucked her thumbs in her belt and stood in a deceptively relaxed stance as she waited for Delia to reply. Delia knew it was a “deceptively relaxed stance” because Delia had seen the woman go from this exact pose to ready to take someone apart in barely the time it took to blink.

But Delia had to take a minute to work out what Briada meant. “Um . . . I’ve thrown stones with it?” she finally said.

Briada considered that, as wavelets lapped against the hulls of the barges, and the steady, dull clopping of hooves on the bank marked their continuous passage. There was an actual path here, which suggested that people used the riverbank as a sort of road, but so far none of those people had put in an appearance.

“Well,” Briada said, finally. “What I had in mind was . . .” Her face screwed up as she sought for words. “Could you magic an arrow into a target? Guide it, or shove it there or something.”

Delia did not correct Briada to say that what she did was not precisely magic, at least not as the mages practiced it. Over the last few days she had at least learned not to over-explain things. The Fairweather cousins made no attempts at concealing their thoughts or feelings, and their exaggerated expressions of boredom when she started to explain something had soon cured her of doing so. Instead she shrugged. “I’ve never tried,” she admitted. “It’s called ‘Fetching Gift,’ not ‘Arrow-Guiding Gift,’ after all.” She eyed Briada with speculation. “You want me to try it, don’t you?”

“Well, hell, if we ran into trouble, you could do us all a hell of a lot of good if you could send an arrow into a target no matter how much it dodged,” Briada pointed out—inadvertently adding another layer of difficulty to what Delia had proposed. But what could she do? She didn’t actually know what her capabilities in that regard were, and saying she couldn’t do it without first trying would be—

—well, it would probably sink her in Briada’s eyes.

“When would you like me to try?” she temporized. “And where?”

“You could move back to the rearmost barge, I can give you a hand-crossbow, and you can plink at trees. I’ll retrieve your arrows—”

“No need,” she said, with a slight smirk. “I can Fetch them back myself, remember?” And the more she thought about this idea, the more she wanted to try. It was one thing to contribute to the scouts in a sort of passive way; it was quite another if she could actually be of use in a fight.

“Well then, I’ll just get you a hand-crossbow.” Briada chuckled, and hopped barges until she got to the supply barge. She was remarkably agile, and the bobbing and swaying didn’t seem to trouble her even a little bit.

For the remainder of the afternoon, Delia perched on the four Gate uprights strapped to the top of the barge and experimented with the lightest of the hand-crossbows. She didn’t want the bolts to stick too deeply into the trees she was shooting at; just as there was a limit to how much she could Fetch, there was a limit to how hard she could pull.

At first her results were no better than just aiming, but she had a kind of . . . pulling or reaching sort of feeling, the kind she got whenever she tried something new that actually was going to work. Like when she had first tried assisting at the difficult birth of an animal on the manor farms. In that case it had been a lamb, and eventually, after a lot of sweating on the parts of both her and the shepherd, she’d gotten the little creature out before something dire happened.

So she persisted, sending the same crossbow bolt into trunk after trunk, while the horses clopped along up ahead, Hakkon and Jonaton brought up the rear, and the three Fairweathers perched on the middle barges with heavy mankiller crossbows in hand.

About the time that Ivar and Bay came back from scouting ahead to let them know he’d found a good spot to tie up for the night—

Something in her just felt like a tile falling into place. And in the next moment, she planted the bolt exactly where she wanted it to, in a barely visible canker in the bark of what looked like a walnut tree. She yanked it back into her hand, riding on a surge of elation, and picked a new target.

She’d managed to repeat her shot a little less than a dozen times when she felt the pressure-bordering-on-pain that meant she needed to stop if she didn’t want to regret it for the rest of the night.

At that point, Alberdina was slowing the horses so as to bring the barge-string to a gradual stop, and Delia hung the crossbow beside its quiver on her belt and ran to help set up the land side of the camp for the night.

It was only when they were all enjoying Sai’s fish around the cookfire that Briada cocked her head and said, “I asked Delia to see if she could use that magic of hers to think an arrow into the target this afternoon.”

“But that’s not m—” began Venidel, when Sai elbowed him.

“Don’t go off on a meaningless tangent,” Sai scolded him, then looked to Delia across the fire. The last light was just leaving the sky and the temperature had dropped down to the point where Delia’s nose was definitely getting unpleasantly cold, so she answered the question before Sai could answer it.

“It actually worked!” she said. “I wasn’t sure it would, but it did!”

Ivar perked up at that. “That’s good news!” he exclaimed. “When it gets colder, you can come up ahead with me, and we can guarantee we’ll bring back a deer or something like one!”

“Why wait until it’s colder?” Delia asked, at the same time that Briada put in, “Well, that wasn’t what I was thinking of—”

“We haven’t encountered any hostiles yet, Sergeant,” Ivar replied to Briada first. “The most useful thing she can do is bag us a deer.” Then he turned to Delia. “Because right now we’re doing fine with the geese, ducks, and fish you’re catching, but when it gets colder, the geese and ducks will be gone, the fish will sink to the bottom of the river to sleep because there are no insects to eat, and we’ll need to find game that is active. Rabbits, yes, but a man can starve eating rabbit, even if he stuffs himself.”

She looked at him dubiously. Surely he was joking. . . . Briada had the same expression on her face.

“It’s true,” Alberdina verified. “There’s not enough fat. In about a week living only on rabbit, or on rabbit and grains, you’ll get sick, and if you don’t get some fat, you’ll die.”

“Huh.” Bret and Bart looked as stunned as if Alberdina had declared that she was the Emperor returned. Briada didn’t looked stunned, but she did look surprised.

“That’s why I am hoarding all the goose and duck fat,” Sai said.

“It’s your job to think about that,” Briada finally replied, as the flickering light illuminated all their faces. “It’s my job to think about defense. And now, in Delia, we have something better than all the Poomers in the world.” She grinned.

And Delia said nothing, but her heart swelled.