Near him, two others sparred with carved wooden sticks while another paced around them, sidestepping as necessary. To her left, in the green shade of a sapling oak, two men sat at a table assembled from half-rotted lumber, sharing refreshment from battered brass cups. Both wore trim dark hair. One sported a dark beard and had black eyes to match—a kind of Saracen, she thought—his Syrian heritage apparent also in the cut of his clothes.

The other, rounder of face and lively, flashed pale eyes as his nervous fingers fidgeted, and he whispered in short bursts as if laying out plans he knew the dark-eyed one would not approve.

Nine that she could see, then. A strong crew, but mostly young—and not the sorts of men usually found in close company. This was either good and expected or very bad indeed—for in the Land of Skulls, this region that had been devastated by the passage of the Mongol hordes, desperation and evil intent often united the most diverse stragglers.

Still, they seemed to be the ones she had been sent to find.

Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae now claimed to be Christian, so hiding near a monastery would come naturally to them. There were stories, however, of how, in older days, the knights of Petraathen had practiced a cult of death, harboring strange ideas about the benefits accruing in the afterlife to warriors who went down bloody and swinging. These brethren then might also take comfort from sharing quarters with the heroic and blessed warrior dead. From where she squatted, she counted seven big granite Crusader crosses in the monastery’s overgrown graveyard, erected perhaps a century and a half before.

Cnán picked at her teeth with a twig, then shifted on her knees, practicing quiet breath, quiet heart—confident in her stealth, contented to watch unobserved.

Or so she told herself until she heard a flicking noise behind her head. A twang, a hiss, and something jerked her off her feet, slamming her head against a tree with a thunk that rang her skull like a bell.