Adarc swallowed hard through the lump in his throat and peered around the corner of a vendor’s booth. Traffic through the market crawled past as the sun sank deeper behind the mountains, behind the black clouds of smoke that still rose from the southwest. Most of the stalls had closed for the day, but many people were still in the markets.

Adarc tried to keep Corentin and the mercenary Jôkull—conspicuous in the best of times—out of sight behind him.

“Hwâs we are doing exactly?” A booth displaying eight crates of fine white Madhyalôkan porcelain caught his eye. Corentin wandered toward it.

Frustration pricked at Adarc’s temples. He caught the merchant’s elbow and pulled him back out of sight. “Sure and we’re trying to get back to the men of Droma and Dolgallu.”

Jôkull nodded. “Sem lítan fróthr.”

Corentin stood up on tip-toe and squinted at the crockery, then gave the mercenary a sour look. “No one asked you hwâs seems wise.”

A cart rumbled down the lane, pulled on two iron-rimmed wooden wheels by a skinny man in a ragged tunic.

Corentin knuckled his forelock to the carter—“We are here fooling no one”—and tried to catch the pottery merchant’s attention.

Bloody foreigner. Adarc gave up and waved him away. “Go ahead then. Have a gander.”

The cart rambled past with its load of black iron scythes, hoes, and other implements of agriculture.

“Do not mind if I do.” Corentin turned his nose up, and took Jôkull with him over the lane.

The fairgrounds were a tangled maze of tents, booths, and muddy lanes. Adarc wanted to get them through to the Droma and Dolgallu camps on the other side, but they had stumbled somehow deep into the Belenosian pilgrims. Ahead, an orator in white drymyn robes under a long black over-tunic had seized a crate to stand on, and a crowd of Iveans, Celtairans, Cailech, and Larriochts gathered around him.

Sure and we should have taken that left turn at the salt dealers! But roaming bands of ruffians had driven them away from their chosen route.

A crowd had gathered in front of a large tent. Lambs, sheep, calves, and grown cattle were gathered among a thick knot of farmers and drovers. The stench made Adarc’s eyes water.

A handful of other white-robed men with black over-tunics, their heads shaved save for a tuft of a top-knot at the crown, moved among the crowd. They inspected the livestock one at a time, directed some toward the tent.

The orator shouted, “And I tell you, these Kârnites are dangerous. Do they care for you? Do they care for the common people? Who intrudes laymen into holy offices? Who steals food from your children's mouths to fatten themselves in luxury? Who robs you of your daughters so their kings can have five and seven wives?”

The crowd was restless. Several men in dark blue robes shouted agreement. Other men raised their fists and their voices grew in number. The speaker attracted more and more people—some merely curious, and others who agreed with him.

Adarc understood their anger. The tribes lived inescapably side by side, hated and being hated, killing and being killed.

The orator raised a bronze-plated wooden reliquary, shaped like an arm and chased with silver, and shook it over the heads of the crowd. “Is it any wonder your stock are afflicted?! Any wonder that vile sprites of evil move among you?!”

Thrown together too often, their jealousies and resentments rankled and grew, fed upon each other. Passions smoldered and burned, fueled by the impulses that set them a-light. His own father had been a man such as those.

Adarc stopped a man with a kid-goat cradled in his arms. “What’s this?”

Wails of desperate lamentation rose from the crowd.

The man tried to make a sign of protection with his occupied hands. The kid-goat coughed. Watery phlegm coated its snout and ran from its eyes. “Plague ‘tis, Brother.” He hefted his burden for example. “Overnight, Brother, all through me stock, like a scourge.” He jerked a chin at the orator on the box. “Heard said these drymyn been a-healin’. Like a miracle, they says.” The man clasped his hands together and looked skyward. “Oh, I hope so! Can’t afford to lose me cheese and milk, Brother.” The man moved on into the crowd with his burden.

Corentin stepped up to Adarc’s shoulder, munching on a fistful of strawberries. “Hwâs is it you are hoping to see?”

“I want to get where we’re going, without going out of our way. My master and the Lord Lorcán, they could already be in trouble.”

“Then hwê not just walk straight on?”

Adarc rubbed at the shaved front of his head, then drew his hand down the shoulder-length of brown hair that cascaded to his shoulders. “They’ll know me for a Kârnite. After what the Lady Eithne told us, I don’t trust them.”

“I told you, I am the Belenaíwisks. The sanctuaries of the Belenaíwisks receive pilgrims and travelers. They feed the hungry, heal the sick.” Corentin shook his head. “Have you not the trust for me? After all through which we have been?”

“I’ve no quarrel with you, sure and I don’t.” Guilt gnawed at Adarc. “It’s them I don’t trust.” He pointed at the orator in his monochrome robes, and the four others before him.

Two young drymyn in white robes and black over-tunics, barely older than Adarc himself, hurried away down a lane. Their heads were shaven, save for a top-knot at the crown.

Adarc singled them out as well. “And those others. The reformers. A man should have the freedom to follow his own conscience.”

“Conshehnsss…? Hwâs is this?”

“You would say, ‘ga-hugds.’”

“You think I have not have the ga-hugds?” Corentin jutted his jaw and turned up his aquiline nose. “I think for myself. I am the free man. What of you? The Kârnite practice, is this the way of your choice, or the way of your training?”

“Damn it, that’s not what I meant at all,” groused Adarc. “I just want to get to the Droma camp without any trouble. And without arguing with you.”

Corentin harrumphed. “It is, as you say it, easily done.” He marched off down the lane.

Jôkull’s eyebrows rose up on his head. “Hann munu aldregi fregna.” Then he followed after his charge.

“Wait. What are you—?” Adarc hurried after them, holding the hem of his robes up out of the mud.

Corentin snapped a finger to Jôkull. “Clear us a way.”

The Foreigner nodded and lumbered at their fore into the crowd. Cheers rose above the general din of the market.

Corentin shouted to men in their path. “Let us through!”

Cheers and the sound of wood banging wood.

An ugly man—sure and his red complexion, pimples, boils, and scaly, infected skin would frighten children—looked them over, then jutted a chin and turned a shoulder to them. “Hmph. Go ‘round.”

Indignation colored Corentin’s cheeks. “I am the Belenaíwisks, like you, and them. I am Corentin, son of Winoc, of the House Pelan of Aukriath. Stand aside.”

He eyed Adarc, his brown robe, and the cut of his hair, then answered Corentin. “Oh, is ‘at right? Whoot-dee-doo.” The ugly man circled a lackluster finger in the air, then reached that finger to poke Corentin in the chest. “Go round, I says.”

Jôkull grabbed the ugly man’s finger and wrenched it. The man went to a knee with a yelp, his finger, hand, wrist, and elbow bent at painful angles.

A gat-toothed woman in bright, scarlet red stockings turned on them with wide eyes, a gasp, and raised eyebrows.

“But I—Agh!”

Jôkull twisted.

Angry mutters went back and forth between three nearby men, one huge and uncouth, one drunken, brash, and vulgar, and another with a chancre sore that ran with pus.

Corentin walked on through.

Jôkull shoved the ugly man to the mud.

Adarc bustled along behind them as fast as he could. “This is your grand idea?” He overtook the merchant and cajoled him. “Come on, come on! Sure and whatever’s going on here, let’s get clear of it.”

Ahead, men in the crowded square of tents cheered and jeered. Fists shook poles, rocks, rotten fruit, daggers, and sloshing cups of ôl in the air. Adarc couldn’t see over the mob. “What’s going on?”

Three women—blonde, black-haired, and red-headed, in dark blue robes with scourges wrapped like girdles around their waists—stepped into their path. Two of them crossed arms and set hips at jaunty, insouciant angles, but the black-haired woman sauntered toward them.

Corentin stopped where he was. Jôkull’s face went slack, and he whistled low and quiet.

She was twenty or so, small and delicately put together, but she looked—durable. She wore an ankle-length woolen blue robe, cinched tight around a narrow waist. It looked—

Adarc swallowed and pulled at the collar of his robe. Sure and it looks well on her.

She walked as if she floated. Her hair was a fine, dark wave cut much longer than was fashionable. Her eyes were slate-grey, with almost no expression as she looked at Adarc.

She came near them and smiled with her mouth. She had little sharp predatory teeth, as white and shiny as the porcelain on the lane. They glistened between her thin, taut lips. Her face lacked color and didn’t seem healthy.

She looked away from Adarc, took in Corentin from nave to chops, then settled her gaze on Jôkull. “Tall, aren’t you?”

“Ek a-gera gegna vera.”

Her eyes rounded. “Handsome too,” she said. “And I’d wager you know it.”

Jôkull grunted.

She looked at Corentin. “What’s your name?” And when he told her, “That’s a funny name.” She bit her lip and turned her head a little and looked at him along her eyes. Then she lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and raised them again. “You seem like honorable gentlemen.”

Corentin blushed uneasily. Heat and a cold sweat rose into Adarc’s cheeks.

She put a thumb up and bit it. It was a curiously shaped thumb, thin and narrow like an extra finger, with no curve in the first joint. She bit it and sucked it slowly, and turned it around in her mouth. “I need men of honor. And discretion.”

Adarc shook his head. “I’m afraid—.”

She leaned in to them and whispered. “I wouldn’t want it bandied about, a girl’s reputation is everything, you know.”

Corentin straightened his collar and bowed slightly. “We the souls of discretion are, meins qêns. Bidjan, continue.”

“Well, you know, this plague, it’s just terrible don’t you think?” Those slate-grey eyes looked up and down the street. “We’re looking for some volunteers, to help His Reverence. Men we can count on. Men willing to do whatever’s necessary to put an end to all this suffering.”

Adarc knew they had to get back to the Droma camp, had to find out what had become of Lorcán and Medyr and the other Droma-men.

But the black-haired woman seemed earnest. Desperate even. Despite what Adarc thought of the Belenosian reformers, she seemed—seemed— like a friend. An ally. Someone to be trusted, heeded, and protected…

“Won’t you good men help me?”

White surcoats bearing the wreath-of-mistletoe device of the village guard moved in behind them.