His subordinates sprang to their feet when he strode into the dining room. All three of them bowed low. “Your Grace!” they chorused.

“Gentlemen.” Thraxton returned the bow, not quite so deeply. He sat down in the empty chair at the head of the table. Once he was comfortable, the other officers sat down again, too.

“May I pour you some wine, your Grace?” asked Leonidas the Priest, who sat at Thraxton’s right hand. Instead of the blue tunic and pantaloons that uniformed Geoffrey’s men, Leonidas wore the crimson vestments of a hierophant of the Lion God, with a general’s sunburst over each shoulder. Not only did he worship his chosen deity, he fed him well.

“Blood of the grape,” Thraxton said, and Leonidas smiled and nodded. Thraxton nodded, too. “If you would be so kind.” Maybe wine would let him see something he couldn’t see sober. Maybe, at the very least, it would help ease his griping belly.

On Thraxton’s left, Baron Dan of Rabbit Hill filled his own goblet with red wine. He was younger than either Thraxton or Leonidas, and waxed the tip of his beard and the ends of his mustache to points, as if he were a town dandy. Fop or not, though, he made a first-rate fighting man. Dan offered the bottle to the officer at the foot of the table, who commanded Thraxton’s unicorns. “Some for you, General?”

“No, thanks,” Ned of the Forest answered. “Water’ll do me just fine.” The harsh twang of the northeast filled his voice. Thraxton wasn’t altogether sure he could read or write; one of his lieutenants always prepared the reports he submitted. He was a gentleman only by courtesy of his rank, not by blood. Before the war, he’d been a gambler and a serfcatcher, and highly successful at both trades. Since the fighting broke out, he’d proved nobody could match him or his troopers-most of them as much ruffians as he was, not proper knights at all-on unicornback.

Baron Dan withdrew the wine bottle. Leonidas the Priest clapped his hands a couple of times in smiling amusement. “Any man who drinks water from birth and lives,” he observed, “is bound to do great things, much like one who survives snakebite.”