Alaric was awake before her whisper had finished.

That was the first thing she noticed, and the one she would remember. There was no gasp, no start, no groggy confusion. One moment he lay beside her with his arm across her waist, breathing slow and deep, and the next he was perfectly still and perfectly alert, his eyes open in the dark, the tension coiling through his body like a drawn bow. He did not speak. He only turned his head and looked at her, and she pointed, once, toward the gap in the canvas.

He eased himself up on one elbow and looked through the seam for what felt like a very long time. Then he lowered himself back down, and his mouth was against her ear.

"How many?"

"I saw one. There will be more."

"On horseback. Circling the camp at bowshot." His breath was warm on her neck. "They are watching the sentries change. They are learning the pattern."

"Why do they not strike?"

"Because they do not wish to strike at night, against a camp of thirteen hundred men." Something flat and cold had come into his voice, the voice of the commander rather than the man. "They are waiting for something. A signal. Or a change in the morning."

"Then we do not give them one."

"No." She felt him smile in the dark, the faint hard curve of his mouth. "We pretend to be asleep. And we have a very long conversation with Kaelen."

They did it in whispers, in the black hour before dawn, in the tent that smelled of cold canvas and horse. Kaelen came without a lantern, with his boots in his hand and his sword across his back. Orsen followed, wrapped in a bearskin, looking like a thundercloud wearing a nightshirt. They crouched on the floor in a close, grim circle, and Alaric described what Valeria had seen in six sentences. When he had finished, Orsen sat back and rubbed his jaw.

"Bounty hunters," he said. "It is the only thing it can be. A company of professionals, hired by the crown. They will have scouted the camp for three days."

"They will not attack a force this size directly," said Kaelen.

"Not with swords." Orsen grunted. "No. A professional does not fight a man he can sicken. They will go for the water, or the grain. There will be something in the stream."

Valeria sat very still.

She had not thought of it. Or rather, she had thought of it so long ago, in another life, that it had slipped under the surface of her mind like a stone under ice. The Crimson Empire's agents had done precisely this, in the border wars, poisoned wells, tainted rivers, left bundles of reeking leaves in a camp's upstream. She had been taught every one of their methods as part of her education. She had been made to identify them by taste, blindfolded, until she could do it in her sleep.

"The stream," she said. "The one we crossed yesterday. Where is the camp's water drawn?"

"A half mile upstream," said Kaelen. "At the ford."

"Then I want to go there. Before the men wake. Before anyone drinks."

"My lady, it is dark. It may be a trap."

"It is certainly a trap." She was already reaching for her boots. "But if I am right, thirteen hundred men will wake with a thirst, and the first cups they fill will be the last thing they do on their feet. Kaelen, please."

He did not argue. She would be grateful for that, later. He only rose, and signaled two of his steadiest men, and the five of them slipped out of the tent into the thin gray dark.

*

The stream ran fast and clear over a bed of stones, with a small stand of alders on either bank. It looked entirely innocent. Valeria knelt at the edge and cupped a little water in her palm. She smelled it, once, and held it for a moment on her tongue, and spat it carefully on the stones.

"Oleander," she said. "Leaves, steeped. Thrown in, I think, perhaps an hour ago. It is faint at this distance. Upstream, in the narrow bend, it will be stronger." She wiped her hand on her skirt. "It would not have killed anyone. Not at this dilution. But it would have turned every stomach in the camp, made the heart race and the vision swim. A man cannot swing a sword when he cannot stand."

Alaric crouched beside her. He had not touched the water. His eyes were on the dark line of the alders, moving slowly along the far bank, and she knew he was counting the places a man could hide.

"They are waiting for us to be sick," he said quietly.

"Yes. Then they will come at midmorning, when the camp is at its weakest. They will cut down the stragglers, take what they can. And in the confusion..."

"They will take you."

"That is what the proclamation says."

His jaw tightened. For a moment she thought he might say something rash. Instead he drew a long slow breath, and when he spoke again, his voice was perfectly level.

"What do you need to make it safe?"

"Charcoal. A great deal of it, ground fine. A cloth filter. Time." She was already pulling the ties of her pouch. "The camp's cooks will have it. If we filter the barrels through three layers of cloth and charcoal, and boil everything twice, we can strip the worst of it."

"And the men who have already drunk?"

"None, I hope. If it was thrown in an hour ago, the camp is only now waking." She glanced at the east. The sky was the color of a pearl. "We have perhaps forty minutes."

They did it in thirty-five.

It was the strangest sort of battle, fought with ladles and barrels and clean white cloth, in the gray light before the sun cleared the ridge. Valeria directed the cooks in a low urgent voice. Malakor, summoned from his cart, appeared in his nightshirt and a tangle of wool, took one look at the stream, and dropped without a word to his knees beside the first barrel with a sack of crushed charcoal. By the time the first bugle sounded, the camp's entire supply had been drawn, strained, boiled, and sealed. A dozen men who had slipped away early to drink at the stream lay retching on the grass, pale and sweating, but alive, and Valeria went to each of them in turn, put a cool hand to their foreheads, and gave them a few drops of the bitter tincture Malakor had made for the purpose.

"It will pass in an hour," she told them. "Drink slowly. Do not lie flat."

By the time the sun was fully up, thirteen hundred men were awake, fed, armed, and entirely well.

"Very well," said Orsen, buckling on his sword with a bark of grim satisfaction. "Let them come."

*

They came at the second bell of the morning, out of the alders, on foot and horse, in a long thin line that spread across the ford like a net.

Valeria watched from the edge of the camp, with Orsen at one shoulder and a cordon of twenty pikemen around her. She had been told, very firmly, to stay behind the lines. She had agreed, with a sweetness that made Kaelen narrow his eyes. She had every intention of keeping the letter of the promise, and she watched with her hands folded and her pulse hammering and her gaze fixed on one tall figure moving through the front rank of the defenders.

Alaric fought as she had never seen him fight.

She had watched him at the gate, in the confusion of the siege, and she had thought she understood. She had not. That had been the fury of a man protecting someone. This was the cool, practiced precision of a master of his craft. He moved through the line of attackers like a man wading through a field of wheat, economical, unhurried, every stroke finishing before the last had faded. He did not shout. He did not rage. He fought in silence, and men fell away from him on either side, and the front of the bounty hunters' charge broke against his sword as water breaks on a stone.

"Gods preserve us," murmured Orsen, at her shoulder. "I had forgotten."

"Forgotten what?"

"What he was before. I trained him, you know. For a year, when he was sixteen." The old man's pale eyes were fixed on the distant figure. "I told his father he would be the finest swordsman of his generation. And then Cedric ruined him, and I thought it was lost." His voice thickened. "It was only waiting."

Then she saw it.

At the edge of the fight, in the thick of a knot of hunters, Alaric lifted his left hand to parry a blow. And the hand was not entirely a hand. For the space of a single heartbeat, it was black at the nails, the knuckles faintly swollen, the fingers a fraction too long. He struck. The blade of the man opposite him snapped like a twig. And the hand, as quickly as it had changed, was ordinary again.

Valeria's stomach dropped. She saw him falter, saw him glance down at the hand with a look of naked dread, saw the hunters surge forward to press the momentary advantage. She took one step, and Orsen's hand closed hard on her arm.

"No, girl."

"He is turning."

"He is fighting. There is a difference." The old man did not release her. "You can do nothing from here but get in his way. Watch. Trust him."

She watched. She trusted. She stood with her heart in her throat while Alaric recovered his guard and drove into the knot of hunters with a ferocity that made them break and scatter. She did not breathe until the last of them were running, until the ranks of Orsen's garrison had closed around the ford, until the horns sounded the retreat and the field fell silent, scattered with the dead and the groaning, and the tall figure in the center sheathed his blade.

He did not turn. He stood with his back to her, his shoulders heaving, his left hand hanging at his side. Then, slowly, he lifted his head and looked across the field, over the heads of the soldiers, until he found her.

She nodded. He nodded back. And a little of the tension left his shoulders.

It was then that the hunter came out of the reeds.

She saw him too late. He had been lying in the mud at the water's edge, motionless, a mud-colored cloak thrown over his armor, and he rose with a crossbow in his hands and a face contorted with greed. He was not aiming at Alaric. He was aiming, with perfect deliberate care, at the cordon of pikemen around her. A shot to the guard, a rush through the gap, a hand on her collar. She saw the whole thing laid out in her mind like a map.

She did not wait.

The leather pouch at her belt was in her hand before she knew she had moved. She flung the contents in a thin gray cloud, straight at the man's face, and the powder burst against his cheek and nose. He staggered. The crossbow dipped. His eyes rolled up, glassy and surprised, and he folded at the knees like a man put to sleep, and fell on his face in the mud.

Orsen stared. The pikemen stared. A very long silence followed.

"Valerian root," said Valeria, a little shakily, brushing the gray dust from her fingers. "And poppy. Ground fine. It works almost at once. He will have a very bad headache, and he will not wake until noon."

"You carry a sleeping powder," said Orsen, in a voice of slow awe.

"I carry several things." She tried not to look at the hand she had used, which had begun, very gently, to tremble. "It seemed wise."

The old lord threw back his head and laughed.

*

They took forty prisoners, and she treated every one of them.

She did it quietly, without being asked, kneeling in the mud beside the wounded while the soldiers looked on in baffled disapproval. She stitched a slashed arm. She set a broken wrist. She bathed a deep gash in a young man's thigh and bound it with clean linen, and when he stared up at her with the white, frightened eyes of a boy who had expected to die, she smiled and told him he would live.

"Why?" he whispered. "We came to take you."

"I know." She tied off the bandage. "You were hired. You did not choose the work, I think, any more than I chose mine. I do not hold it against you."

"The king said..."

"The king says a great many things." She rose, brushing off her skirt. "Rest. Someone will bring you water. I think you will find it clean."

She came to the leader last.

He lay on a pallet near the edge of the field, a big heavy man with a graying beard and a deep cut across his forehead, his hands bound before him. He had been awake for some time, she suspected, and he watched her approach with a flat, calculating stare that she recognized instantly. She had seen it on a hundred faces in the Crimson Empire's cells. It was the look of a man weighing what he could get.

"Garrick Dole," said Kaelen, at her elbow. "Captain of the Free Company. A mercenary of the old school. He has taken the king's coin before."

"A witch," said Dole, in a voice like gravel. "I should have known. They said you were pretty."

"They said a great many things." She knelt beside him and took his chin in her fingers, turning the cut toward the light. "This will need stitches. I will do it myself. You will not struggle."

"And if I do?"

"Then it will hurt considerably more." She selected a needle. "I would prefer not to have to explain that to your men."

He did not struggle. She worked quickly, with small neat precise stitches, and when she had finished she cleaned the wound and laid a clean cloth over it, and sat back on her heels. Dole watched her the whole time, and something in his weathered face had changed.

"You are not what I was told," he said, grudgingly.

"No one ever is." She wiped her hands. "Captain. I should like to ask you some questions. If you answer them, I will see that you and your men are released at the border with your horses and your gear. If you do not, you will remain our guests until the war is done. It is entirely your choice."

"Generous."

"I am a poor judge of cruelty, I find. I have had too much of it."

He studied her for a long time. Then he looked past her, at the tall figure of Alaric standing at the edge of the pallet with his arms folded and his face like stone. Something in that stern, steady presence seemed to decide him.

"Ask," he said.

"Who hired you?"

"The king's chancellor. Four weeks back. He wanted the woman, alive, and the traitor's head. Twenty thousand crowns for the pair." Dole shrugged. "It was a good price."

"And the oleander in the stream?"

"Not my idea. I would have hit you at night." He jerked his chin. "It was the other one's. The southerner."

Valeria went very still.

"What southerner?"

"A man in white gloves. Thin as a rake, voice like a cold hand. He joined us two weeks ago at the river crossing." Dole's eyes narrowed. "He said he knew you. Said he used to be your keeper, back in the old country. Said you would not poison a stream if you could help it, so he did it for you."

The world seemed to tilt a very little around her. She heard, as if from a great distance, Alaric draw a sharp breath. She heard the soft ring of a sword half drawn.

"His name," she said. Her voice was perfectly steady. "Do you know it?"

"Orlan. Physician Orlan." Dole's lip curled. "A cold fish. He did not stay. He went on ahead with the supply wagons, said he had business in the south. At the old ruins."

Silence.

Valeria rose to her feet. She did it slowly, with great care. She smoothed her skirt. She looked at the big mercenary, at his bound hands and his wary face, and she inclined her head, a small courteous nod, as she would have to any patient.

"Thank you," she said. "That will be all."

She walked away.

*

She did not shake until she reached the tent.

She had been very careful. She had walked at a measured pace across the field. She had spoken, in her normal voice, to a dozen people. She had given orders, and received reports, and washed her hands in the basin, and she had done it all with the same dreadful calm, the old mask settling over her face like a second skin. Only when the tent flap fell shut behind her, only when she was alone in the dim canvas silence, did her knees give way.

She sat down on the edge of the cot and stared at her hands.

They were trembling. They would not stop. She pressed them between her knees, hard, and shut her eyes, and tried to breathe.

Orlan.

She had not heard the name in ten years. She had not allowed herself to. He had been the chief physician of her chamber, a thin pale polite man with long careful fingers and a voice that never rose above a murmur. He had been, in his way, the kindest of them. He had never raised his hand. He had addressed her as Subject Seven, and in the last years, as the Valued Subject, and he had said it with a faint cold courtesy that was somehow worse than any shouting. He had measured every hair on her head. He had recorded, in a small neat leather notebook, every reaction to every compound she had ever swallowed.

He had been the one who stood at the foot of her bed on the day she turned eighteen and said, quite gently, that he regretted to inform her that the empire's research was proceeding to its next stage.

The tent flap rustled.

She did not look up. She knew the sound of his step.

Alaric did not speak. He did not ask if she was all right. He only crossed the narrow space and knelt on the floor in front of her, and took her trembling hands in both of his, and held them. His palms were warm and rough and steady. After a moment he bent and laid his forehead against her knees.

"I would like to kill him," he said, very quietly.

"I know."

"Very much."

"I know." She drew a shaking breath. "I do not want you to."

He lifted his head.

"I do not want him dead," she said. Her voice cracked. "I want to look at him. I want to stand in front of him, in a room with a window, with the sun on my face, and see what he is when I am not afraid." She laughed, a small raw sound. "I do not know if that is possible. I only know I cannot keep running from a man who is smaller than my memory of him."

"Then we will go and look at him," said Alaric.

"Together."

"Together. I will stand behind you. Or beside you. Or in front, if you permit it."

"Beside," said Valeria. "I think beside."

He rose and sat next to her on the cot, and drew her against his side, and she buried her face in his shoulder and let herself shake. He did not say anything gentle. He did not tell her it would be all right. He only held her, hard and close, and stroked her hair, and when the worst of the trembling had passed, he said, in a low, steady voice, "You threw a sleeping powder at a man with a crossbow."

A choked laugh escaped her.

"I have never seen anything so magnificent in my life," said Alaric, with great gravity.

"It was valerian."

"It was a masterpiece."

She laughed again, harder, helplessly, and the last of the cold fear loosened its grip, and she lay back against him with her eyes closed and felt, for the first time in an hour, something like peace.

It did not last. It never did. At dusk a scout rode in, mud-spattered and breathless, with a small folded paper in his glove. It had been nailed to the post of the old border station, he said, ten miles to the south. Neither he nor his men had seen who left it. The ink was still wet.

Alaric took it and unfolded it. He read it once. Then he handed it, without a word, to Valeria.

It was a single line, in a small neat hand she would have known anywhere.

Welcome home, Subject Seven. Your room is exactly as you left it.