“Where did I come from? Places of which you have never heard the names. So there would be little point in my reciting them,” Cnán said, in answer to Feronantus’s first question.

Amusement around the table, only a little strained. She was nervous that the one named Raphael, with the close-cropped black beard and the Syrian look, might call her bluff. A Crusader, she guessed, born and bred in one of the few surviving fortress-cities that the armies of the West still garrisoned in the flyblown hellhole that they styled the Holy Land. But such a man might know the deep parts of Asia better than, say, Taran, who was Irish and probably considered Dublin to be part of the exotic Orient.

Or perhaps she was being unkind. Hunger, and being hunted like an animal, had a way of shortening her temper. She tore into a piece of bread while the three senior knights enjoyed a chuckle.

“But most recently,” she went on, chewing and talking at the same time, “in the last few days, I have traveled from Czeszow. East of here.” She swallowed. “In the forest.” And again. “Where Mongols don’t like to go. There is a man there, a Ruthenian of noble birth, from the city of Volodymyr-Volynskyi—you probably know it as Lodomeria. He says he knows you.”

A serious, pained look came over Feronantus’s face. “Illarion,” he said.

“A member of your Order?”

“No,” said Feronantus, “but he could have been, were it not for…religious controversy.”

“Wrong kind of Christian?” Cnán asked, still chewing.

“Yes. Please go on. Illarion is alive, you say?”

“You seem surprised,” Cnán observed, “which tells me that you must have heard tell of what happened at Lodomeria.”

Feronantus’s silence implied assent. But Taran only looked provoked. “I have not heard,” said the Irishman.