He slipped out of his snow-stained woolens and after quickly scrubbing up and shaving in the small bathing chamber adjacent, Neb pulled on his dress uniform. Ordinarily, Rudolfo’s officers came into their training with no rank, but in light of his previous leadership, running the gravediggers’ camp for Pope Petronus during the worst of the war, Neb wore the scarf of a lieutenant wound around his upper left arm. He sat down to pull on his boots and looked up when there was a knock at his door.

“Come in,” he said.

The door eased open, and Aedric, First Captain of the Gypsy Scouts, peeked in. “You’re running late,” he said, grinning.

Neb tugged at the boot. “Sorry, Captain.”

Aedric came into the room, pulling the door closed behind him. “Does it have anything to do with a certain Marsh girl who happens to be accompanying her king?”

Neb felt his cheeks grow hot. He opened his mouth to speak, but Aedric’s chuckle cut him off. “She has you quite firmly in hand, I imagine.”

The double meaning wasn’t lost on Neb, and now his ears burned, too. But Aedric clapped a hand on his shoulder, his chuckle now open laughter. “Take heart, Neb,” he said. “It happens to all of us at one time or another. Just be careful-Marshers are a strange lot.”

He doesn’t know, Neb realized. He thinks Hanric is the Marsh King. Rudolfo knew the truth, though Neb wasn’t sure how he’d learned it. And Neb suspected that Aedric’s father, Gregoric, had known as well. But Gregoric had been killed on the night they liberated the mechoservitors from Sethbert’s camp.

The Marshfolk survived because the rest of the Named Lands either feared or discounted them. Legend had them coming to the Named Lands just after that first Rudolfo led his band of desert thieves and their wives and children over the Keeper’s Wall. Carpathius had certainly painted no pictures of that event. At one time, they had been the house servants of Xhum Y’Zir and his wizard king sons.