Everyone worked their way backwards until they were well below the crest of the low ridge, and then Ritva went down on one knee and smoothed a patch of dirt. There was enough starlight and moonlight to make out the diagram she drew.

"Their horses are rested now; there's good water there, if you don't mind hauling it up on a long rope, probably four or five saddle lariats linked together. It looks like they're going to have a quick cold dinner, give the horses the last of their feed pellets and then ride east in the darkness, to get past the Boise pickets."

Rudi nodded. The Church Universal and Triumphant had pushed an army into the territory claimed by the United States-the one head-quartered at Boise-and gotten beaten rather comprehensively. But President-General Thurston had been killed in the fight-by his own eldest son, Martin, who'd been conspiring with the CUT. He hadn't liked his father's plan to finally call elections, and to keep his own children from running for the office. Now he was lord of Boise… and Rudi and his friends were the only ones who knew the real story.

And in the meantime, we have a problem that isn't politics, Rudi thought. Namely, how to get Ingolf and Matti and Odard free.

Or it wasn't entirely politics. If you had the right-or wrong-parents, the way he and Matti had, everything you did was politics. And whoever did it, fighting was always about politics, whether it was this or an Assembly of the Clan shouting and waving their arms or two rams butting heads in a meadow; he'd grown up the Chief's son and absorbed that through his pores.

"Sentries?" he asked.

"Mounted," Mary said.

And I know it's you, Mary, he thought; they did that verbal back-and-forth thing to confuse people, but he could tell their voices apart. And your faces. Well, usually.