that, he knew about castles, their defense and bolster. Yet his cowardice still shocked her. In the hundreds of square miles surrounding, people were now starving in earnest, and each new set of refugees brought their own stories of misery: tenants eating dogs, tenants eating mud, tenants eating the clay walls of their dwellings. One village had even dug up its own churchyard in desperation. Aislinn and her people had taken Lady Andrews’s castle easily, for the servants had let them in, and now Eamon and the others would counsel her to bar the doors, to climb to safety and pull the ladder up behind them. But Aislinn couldn’t do that, not even if they all suffered for it. None of them were any better or braver than those who arrived on foot, starving and desperate; they had simply been lucky. They had no right to close the gates.
The three of them reached the top of the tall staircase and climbed through the open trapdoor to the roof. Eight men were spread across the western battlement, staring outward, spyglasses in their hands.
“Here, girl,” Morton said, offering Aislinn a spyglass. “Look and despair.”
Aislinn took the spyglass from him and stared outward, over the parapet and across the bleak, barren fields of Lady Andrews’s former acreage. It was late afternoon, almost dusk, and the autumn sun hung low on the western horizon. A haze of dust covered the ground out there, but Aislinn could see them clear enough: a wide line of men on horse, moving neither quickly nor cautiously, and behind them a broad, dark shadow, spread out over perhaps half an acre of the plains.
“Some two hundred men on horse,” Jonathan Charlton muttered, looking through his own spyglass. “And at least twice as many on foot.”
Coming for us, Aislinn thought. A pang of fear went through her chest, but she hid it as she put down the spyglass.
“What can we do?” asked Eamon. “My kinsmen have swords and bows, yes, and even know how to use them. But they are not soldiers. We will be easy pickings.”
“I can fight!” Baylor, the young hothead from Guy’s Creek, shot back. “And I will! We have seven hundred people here!”
“But how many women and children? Sword and horse make one man the equal of ten unarmed!”
“There is no help for it,” Charlton said. He was a stout old man, one of the few among them who had actually been in the army once. “An entire battalion, perhaps even two, and all of them bearing steel.”
They all turned to look at Aislinn then . . . some hopefully, some with badly concealed impatience. These eight men represented the leaders of their respective acreages, and most of them had been appalled to find, upon arrival, that the uprising they burned to join was being led by a woman, and a young woman at that. They would have liked to ignore her, Aislinn knew, or even oust her. But they dared not do that. Downstairs were four hundred and seventy-eight men and women who had been with her from the beginning, who would listen to no one else.
Our idyll is at an end, Aislinn thought. For more than two months now they had been holed up in Lady Andrews’s castle, comfortable and safe, with warm beds and all the food and water they needed. Even the onset of cooler weather had not been any cause for alarm, for they had raided the castle’s clothing chests as well, and found warm clothes, enough to outfit them all. Aislinn was wearing her first pair of real boots.
Perhaps it was the boots that lulled me, she thought now, staring down at their soft brown leather. She had deluded herself, and badly. She had truly thought that nothing would change, that they would be able to stay here forever, well sheltered and well fed.
“I’m going to go down and tell my people,” she announced. “Maybe they’ll have some ideas.”
“Ideas!” Charlton snorted. “They’ll only have panic, girl. You cannot conduct a rebellion by democratic vote!”
“How many rebellions have you conducted, Charlton?”
The old man’s face turned red. “You would do well to heed my advice, girl. The Tear army is not the Mort, but they are not tourists, either. If we don’t make peace, they will kill us all.”
“And even if we do!” Aislinn snapped back. “You heard Colin’s tales from the city! Lady Andrews has made her complaint, and this is the Queen’s answer!”
“But Colin delivered our message to the Blue