There was a silence, but not a particularly long one. Karis said, “I have with me a very small assassin. Who shall I kill?”

Clement finally brought herself to say reasonably, “If the woman isthe G’deon, she may not be easy to kill. Isn’t that right, Gilly?”

“Not easy,” said Gilly morosely. “And certainly we would not be wise to try.”

Cadmar said, “But we are soldiersand I don’t see why this storyteller’s scars convince you of anything other than that she’s had a dangerous and lucky life.”

“A recovery from paralysis,” said Clement. “Regrown body parts.”

Cadmar snorted. “Impossible.”

“Well, general, that’s exactly my point.” Doomed to keep repeating the arguments that Cadmar would not ever become able to hear. Clement said, “This Lost G’deon may be able to do anything!”

“But we don’t know that.”

“If we let her demonstrate her power so that we become certain, then it will be too late to negotiate,” she said impatiently.

“What would you have me do?” His voice, gaining volume again, had also gained an edge of sarcasm. “The first woman who tells me she’s the G’deon, should I bow to her and give her the keys to the garrison?”

Clement cried recklessly, “General, if she is the G’deon, you’ll wish you had!”

Cadmar loomed over her, his face flushed red with anger.

Fists clenched, Clement forced her voice to plead rather than shout. “Talk to her first,” she said. “General, just talk to her first.”

“General!” The gate captain looked in the door. His expression was one of bafflement.

Cadmar’s big hand clenched Clement’s shoulder painfully. “What is happening at the gate?”

“General, three people are asking to speak to you. One is that cook who deserted some years ago.”

Of course it would be the cook, thought Clement wildly.

“He says one of the people with him is Councilor Mabin. And the other he introduces as the G’deon of Shaftal.”

Cadmar’s not inconsiderable strength was crushing Clement into her chair. “What do they want?”

“The cook says they are here to make peace.”

Cadmar snorted. “Captain, have someone fetch Gilly’s horse. Tell those people that I am coming. Do they have weapons?”

“I don’t see any, General, but I haven’t searched them–they’re still outside the gate, of course.”

“Don’t let them in. And Captain, let your soldiers be prepared for action.”

“We are always prepared,” said the captain stiffly.

As he left, Cadmar explained to Gilly, “I need you to translate.”

He was going to talk to the Lost G’deon.

Perhaps, thought Clement, we mightyet survive.

It’s a little late to be wishing I’d never heard the sound of Karis’s ax that day,Garland thought, as he stood beside Karis at the garrison gate. Or he should have left these odd people the day the raven first talked to him, when Karis gave him money and told him to go his way. But he had fallen in with them instead, and now here he stood, with a half dozen guns and crossbows trained on him by the armored guards in the towers.

“Ridiculous!” said Mabin, stiff and impatient at Karis’s other side. “How much weaponry do they think it takes to kill three unarmed people? Have they no skill, or art?”

She was comparing them to the stylish Paladins, Garland supposed. Certainly, these armored killers seemed no more subtle than an angry bear or a deadly avalanche. But he could not imagine why Mabin found this fact surprising or worth commenting on. Perhaps, he thought, she was covering up her fear. He did not find this reassuring.

Since announcing she was going to the garrison, Karis had hardly spoken at all. Now she waited silently, with a gloved hand gripping one of the gate’s iron bars, as if she were about to utter a disparaging comment on its workmanship. She gripped the iron a bit too hard, though. Garland could see the tense muscles swelling under her coat’s heavy wool.

The dozen guards inside the gate, who bristled with guns, blades, and other weapons, and stood in a formation that seemed poised to go barging through the gate, snapped themselves into rigid attention. “The general is coming,” said Garland shakily.

Karis looked at him and then, very lightly, lay her left hand reassuringly on his shoulder. “The war is over, Garland.”

“I don’t think these soldiers have heard that news.”

“A big man, isn’t he?” commented Mabin skeptically as General Cadmar strode into view, with several soldiers trailing him, and his crippled Lucky Man riding behind on horseback. “Which one is his lieutenant?”

“That hungry woman,” Garland said.

Mabin peered through the gate at the rigid, hollow‑eyed, weary woman, who kept a few reluctant paces behind her superior. “Hungry,” she agreed. “And worried. Very worried.”

By contrast, the general, though he kept his face schooled to an expression of grim severity, showed no sign of having suffered lately. “He is complacent at his good fortune,” said Mabin, with no little sarcasm. “He can hardly wait to see us die.”

Karis’s hand had tightened on Garland’s shoulder. He glanced at her worriedly, for his frail courage was entirely propped up by hers. She was breathing too fast, her face was pale, her expression startled and dismayed. She stared at Cadmar.

“Karis?” said Garland.

Mabin glanced at Karis. “What is it?”

Karis pressed her lips together and gave a slight shake to her head. The general was approaching, his people holding a few paces back. Lieutenant‑General Clement was staring at Karis now, seeming to share her mysterious startlement. Baffled, Garland turned his attention to the general who so many years ago had demanded that Garland cook badly. His glance passed over Garland without any sign of recognition. “General Mabin,” Cadmar greeted his old adversary.

Mabin looked distinctly disgusted.

Garland said in Sainnese, “General, this is Karis, the G’deon of Shaftal.”

The bottom half of the gate was solid iron, but, like Karis, the general was so tall that the metal shielded less than half his body. The iron bars divided his upper body into vertical segments: gray uniform under a heavy coat of wool‑lined leather, a furrowed face that may once have been handsome. Karis’s thicket of hair curled manically while his was straight and thinning, but his hair may have once been bronze like hers. Karis had his broad shoulders. He had her big hands. They stood eye to eye, and those eyes were blue, an eye color scarcely ever seen in Shaftal outside the southern grasslands.

“Gods of hell!” breathed Garland in disbelief.

Cadmar glanced blankly at him.

In Shaftalese, Garland said to Mabin, “He is her father.”

“Well, what do you have to say?” said Cadmar impatiently in Sainnese.

Mabin said, “Tell the general he’ll wish he’d been less careless with his sperm!”

Karis said, very quietly, “What difference does it make? Just tell him why we’re here, Garland.”

What differencedoes it make? Garland looked back at Cadmar. How could this dolt not see what stood before him? Cadmar had carelessly, indifferently, obliviously spawned his own salvation, the bloody fool! All he had to do was recognize what a great and terrible thing he had done!

But Garland, dizzy with wanting to shout at the man, desperately holding back the horror that lay behind his anger, forced himself to say, “General Cadmar, Karis G’deon and General Mabin are here to make peace with the Sainnite people.”

Looking amused, Cadmar gestured to the crippled man, who rode his horse up to the gate. The Lucky Man gave Karis a sharp, inquiring glance: the look of an intelligent man who desperately wished for the answers to the questions he could not ask. But, in stiff Shaftalese, he said, “Madam, the general wishes to know your terms.”

“Karis,” she corrected him. “Gilly, willhe make peace? On any terms? Or is he just playing with us?”