They clattered through the gate of a low farmhouse, mean wooden buildings around a yard of rain-hammered mud, wind thrashing at the trees. A dog ran wild, barking at the horses, and a soldier hissed curses as he kicked it away. Savine peeled herself from the saddle and Jin helped her down. A family watched from under the dripping eaves of a barn, presumably the unfortunate owners of the place, as dozens of soldiers, wagons and one heavily pregnant woman crowded into their churned-up farmyard. Probably Savine should have felt sorry for them, but her pity was soluble in heavy rain, apparently, and what she had left she needed for herself.
The low-ceilinged front parlour of the house swarmed with men in mismatched uniforms, all gabbling at once, the windows misty with their breath. Antaup had dragged a table into the middle of the room and upended a case of damp maps onto it, rooting through them with the expression of a man trying to solve a riddle in a language he did not speak.
“Damn it!” Leo held one up to the inadequate lamplight, set flickering as someone shoved the door wide and wind whipped through the room. “Can we get a decent light in here? Is this map accurate?”
“None of them are bloody accurate—”
“Do we know where the king’s forces are?” grumbled Lord Mustred, rain dripping from his bedraggled eyebrows.
“I heard two days’ march away.”
“What? We were told he was fleeing south!”
Savine winced. In business, few things went entirely to plan. In war, plans and reality barely noticed each other in passing. Panicked guesswork was the best one could hope for. The sheer scale of it. Thousands of men. Tons of supplies. Oceans of misinformation hiding infinitesimal grains of truth. Savine was used to taking charge, but how could anyone take charge of this? Especially someone who could scarcely control her own bladder.
Not for the first time, Savine wished Jurand was with them. He was the only one of Leo’s friends who could really organise, who had an eye for the details, who thought less about what he wanted to do and more about what had to be done. The man was like a wagon’s axle. You paid little mind to it when it was there, but take it away and things plunged rapidly off the road.
The door banged open and another cold draught swept in. A man shook water from a fur-trimmed cloak, huffing and blowing. An old white-haired Northman, with gold on his mail and rain in his beard and broken veins on his bulbous nose.
He looked about, realising all the soldiers had stopped their business to look at him, and nervously cleared his throat. “Nice evening for it.”
“Hardbread!” said Leo, grabbing the old warrior by the hand and giving it a shake fit to tear his arm off. “At last! Where’s Rikke?”
“Still in Uffrith.”
“What?”
“Well, she was when I left. She should’ve left herself by now. Be here soon, I guess. There was a storm. Boats couldn’t leave the harbour. Good thing it didn’t come an hour later or we might’ve all drowned.”
Leo had lurched from the heights of relief to the depths of disappointment without taking a breath. “How many men did you bring?”
“For now, just the ones rowed me here. ’Bout thirty?”
“Thirty?” A shocked mutter ran around the room. An officer from Angland and one of the noblemen’s retainers had begun shouting at one another. A punch was thrown, they wrestled, barged the table, bellowing insults. Jin grabbed them around their necks and bundled the pair of them out into the night. The clamour and the panic and the wild eyes reminded Savine too much of Valbeck. She felt that horribly familiar sour taste, the gorge rising in her throat, her heart thudding and her head spinning as she backed into the shadows, wondering if among all these half-glimpsed faces she could see the men who had chased her through the streets—
“Are you all right?” asked Zuri, taking her gently by the elbow.
“Never mind Rikke,” Savine forced through her gritted teeth. “Just find me a fucking bucket.”
“This way,” said Zuri, slipping through the madness to a side door.
Savine shuffled after her, one hand pressed into her back and the other under her swollen belly, into a little kitchen on the side of the building with a time-blackened fireplace and a smell of bad cooking. She pushed the door shut and leaned back on it, tried to ignore the mad babble of raised voices from beyond, fix on the rattling of the ill-fitting window, the steady drip-drip of water from a leak.
Zuri stood with hands on hips, looking down at a pair of empty milking pails, yoke still attached and propped on top.
“More than adequate,” said Savine, waddling over.
After much fumbling, she finally wriggled her drawers past her knees and with Zuri half-holding her up managed to squat over one of the pails, skirts gathered around her hips and the cold metal brushing her arse. When she heard the metallic spattering, she almost cried with relief. She shuddered at the last trickle, tried to bend down to fish up her drawers between two fingers, but could not quite reach.
“Hell,” she gasped, legs trembling with the effort. In the end, she had to stand before she fell, let Zuri drag her rain-sodden skirts out of the way and pull them up for her.
She flopped back exhausted onto a stool with a flapping of muddy cloth, shoulders against the damp plaster, boots stretched out wide in front of her.
“So much for leading an army. I can hardly get my drawers up without help.”
“A good thing for your reputation as a general that I am here,” said Zuri. “Rabik and Haroon should be along soon with dry clothes and dinner.”
Savine shut her eyes, tears of gratitude prickling the lids. “What the hell would I do without your family? I’ve no idea how you can stay so calm.”
“I was not always a lady’s companion. I have seen my share of storms.” Zuri frowned off into the corner of the room, as though bad memories lurked there. “They pass, in time.”
“If the lightning doesn’t find you out,” muttered Savine, giving Zuri’s hand a squeeze.
The door rattled at a thudding knock, and she gritted her teeth and worked her way into a slightly more presentable position, bladder aching again already. “Yes?”
The door wobbled open and someone dipped his head under the low lintel.
“Broad!” The name almost came as a gasp of relief. Here was a man she had seen deal with a crisis. A rock to cling to in a storm.
“Lady Savine.” He frowned down at her, eye-lenses dotted with beads of rain and an ugly scab on one side of his head. “Are you all right—”
“I should not have ridden and it should not have rained. Tell me you have some good news!”
He did not look like a man with good news, it had to be said. Even in Valbeck, during the uprising, even when things got bad, he had always seemed hopeful, at least. Now he looked grim. Brows wrinkled, fists clenched. For a moment, the sight of him, scabbed head nearly brushing the low ceiling, gave Savine the slightest twinge of fear. An echo of the terror when she first saw his great silhouette on the barricade in Valbeck.
“The Breakers’ll join us,” he said, after a pause. “And the Burners. They’ve been armed, like you told me. Aiming for uprisings all across the Union on the last day of summer.”
“They should already be underway,” murmured Zuri.