The next morning, Lenny woke Greg up way too early. Greg wanted to growl at him, but the old man looked just too excited – both elated and insecure at the same time.

“You said you’d come with me,” he said when Greg just yawned.

“Come where?” Greg asked groggily.

“To see my daughter!”

“Oh,” Greg said. “Yes, sure. You’re going today?”

Lenny nodded so eagerly that his whole body wobbled. “Miss Thoko was kind enough to speak to the Relentless – to your brother, Sir David, for me, to ask him if he would ask the duke, I mean. And he said I can go today!”

Greg nodded, a little bit confused. Thoko must have asked David yesterday, while he had been still asleep. And David had already talked George Louis into letting Lenny go?

Well, he had been at the duke’s war council long enough.

Greg pushed himself upright and yawned again. He reached for his shirt but froze when it finally registered what Lenny was wearing.

“Well, don’t you look dashing,” Greg said.

“I do, don’t I?” Lenny asked excitedly. “One of the quartermasters gave it to me last night. He said Lord David suggested it. So people will know I’m not the bad kind of werewolf.”

Lenny was wearing the same uniform all of George Louis’s men wore: A red coat, grey trousers, the conical black hat known as shako, and black boots. The only difference was that his looked like it hadn’t seen battle yet. He wasn’t clean-shaven like the regular troops, but he had cut what little remained of his hair and also groomed his beard. If it hadn’t been for his yellow eyes, he could have passed as an extremely senior soldier.

Greg grinned when he noticed a detail. “I see you got promoted to Lance Corporal straight away. Congratulations.”

Lenny actually blushed at that. “Quartermaster said that it had to be that way, seeing how as a werewolf, I’m a specialised kind of soldier.”

Greg nodded and stared at his own shirt, which was more brown than white by now. “Well, let me see if I can round up some clean clothing, too.”

Andrew was willing to part with some of his stuff, but warned him: “If you bleed on that, I’m not sharing again.”

“Funny,” Greg muttered, but he got dressed quickly, with an excited Lenny hovering around.

Lenny wasn’t the only werewolf already decked out in the new uniform. Fenn and Boris wore it, too, if not quite as proudly. Bernadette and Fleur hadn’t been given new clothes, and neither had the younger werewolves Greg could see around. The situation was hotly discussed all around.

“A skirt with the uniform?” he heard one soldier say to another. “Are you mad? Make them wear pants like that girl who came with the new elders.”

Greg smiled to himself, happy that this wasn’t an issue he needed to solve. He did have a hard time picturing Ragna in a skirt, and good luck to the man who tried to put her in one.

Thoko was waiting for them downstairs, outside the open door to the large mess hall. She held out a cup of hot, strong tea for Greg and some bread.

Greg eyed the dry bread unhappily but didn’t complain. The soldiers all around didn’t get anything better for breakfast.

“I see you’re dressed up, too,” Greg noted. “Looks good. What did the nuns say?”

Thoko wore the same grey trousers as the soldiers, which fit her a lot better than Greg would have expected, with the prim white blouse the nuns wore. Somehow, the contrast managed to look quite elegant and drew a lot of stares.

“Thank you.” Thoko smiled. “Funny you ask about the nuns,” she added. “One of them helped me make the pants fit. She pointed out that nowhere in the Book of Mithras does it actually say that women have to wear skirts.”

“Really,” Greg said. He had never read the Book of Mithras. You had to be a priest to be allowed to do so. Technically, a nun wasn’t allowed to read it, either, as far as he knew.

Thoko smiled. “Let’s just say that a lot of the nuns at the hospitals aren’t nuns because they necessarily love the Church so much.”

Greg opened his mouth and closed it again. He had almost asked why a woman who wasn’t deeply religious would join a convent, but the answer wasn’t that hard to guess, was it? For any Valoisian woman, “marrying herself to Mithras” was the only option if she wanted to avoid the husband her father chose for her. And the nuns at the Imperial hospitals were well educated and comparatively independent.

“You look good, too, Lenny,” Thoko said, making the old man turn beet-red and mumble something into his beard neither of them understood. He waited restlessly for Greg to finish his breakfast, assuring him that he had already eaten.

Thoko wisely insisted on bringing some provisions. “We won’t get there until almost noon,” she pointed out.

Greg was certainly glad that they brought water. The sun was still quite warm for autumn.

“Is this your only daughter we’re visiting?” Thoko asked when the village came into view.

“My oldest,” Lenny said. “She helped me get away, after I got bitten, even though she was seven months pregnant at the time. The others were too scared to come near me, then.”

Lenny shrugged. “Her name’s Dorothy, not sure if I mentioned before?”

Greg nodded.

As Thoko had predicted, they reached the palisades around the small fishing village maybe half an hour before noon. They weren’t guarded, and nobody stopped them when they took the main road into the village. It was built right at the water’s edge, with the first line of houses built on stilts. The tide was out when they got there, but apparently, half the village got flooded when it came back in.

“Built on the sea’s sacred ground,” Lenny said. He sounded proud but looked around anxiously. “Only consecration that actually stops the Rot. We even had our own butcher. It was right there.”

His face fell when he pointed out a building. Nets hung between poles to dry in front of it, but no animals in sight.

Instead, in front of many buildings, men and women were mending nets. They stared when the three walked by, but nobody made any attempt to get a closer look or speak to them until they were two houses past the building Lenny remembered to be a butcher.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” a man, at least as old as Lenny, called out at them. He was mending his nets like so many other fishermen. “Is that you, Lenny?”

Lenny swerved over but kept his distance. So did the old man, who had gotten up from his stool, squinting at them.

“Thought we had you run out the village for good,” the stranger said. “What do you want here?”

“I’m looking for Dorothy,” Lenny said.

The stranger looked Lenny up and down. “You been fighting at Oldstone Castle? Or did you steal that uniform off a dead body?”

“Actually, we fought the Rot giant that was about to tear down your matchstick palisade,” Greg said.

There was a moment of silence. “You all three werewolves?” the stranger asked.

Greg was about to correct him, but Thoko was quicker. “How many women wearing pants do you know?” she asked.

The other guy stared at her as if he noticed her attire for the first time. Then he turned around and quickly walked away, slamming the door behind himself.

“What?” Thoko asked when Greg stared at her. “I never said I was a werewolf, did I?”

Lenny laughed at that, his voice shaking. He stared at the closed door and finally said: “Let’s go. It’s just two houses further.”

“Who was that guy?” Thoko asked.

“Merv’s his name,” Lenny said. “Big name in the village. His family claims they founded it.”

They should have brought an entourage. On the other hand, this was a very personal visit, and a bunch of soldiers standing around probably wouldn’t improve the situation.

“Thanks for coming,” Lenny said. He walked all the way up to the front door of one house, but then froze without knocking.

He didn’t have to. Before Greg or Thoko could think of anything to say to encourage him, the door opened and a woman stared at Lenny. She probably wasn’t much older than deLande, but her face already showed the first wrinkles. There was a toddler on her hip, and an older boy standing half behind her.

“Father?” the woman asked. “Is that really you?”

“Hello, Dorothy,” Lenny said softly. He stepped forwards slowly, as if he wasn’t sure if he would be allowed to hug her. His daughter was quicker, pressing the toddler into his half-raised arms.

“This is Leonard,” she said, putting her now free hand onto the shoulders of the older boy, pushing him forwards. “And you’re holding Roland.”

“Where’s their father?”

“At sea,” Dorothy said. She took a deep breath, and added: “Since last year.”

“I see,” Lenny said. He juggled Roland around a little, and then reached out properly to hug his daughter. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he added.

“You never did like Henry.”

Lenny shrugged awkwardly. “But you did.”

Dorothy smiled, looking down at her feet. After a second, she stepped back into the small hut, and said: “Come inside. You already ran into Merv?”

Lenny nodded and followed her. When Greg looked over his shoulder before entering, too, Merv was standing a little down the road. Greg thought he saw him scowl.

“Looks like he’s getting braver,” Thoko said, and firmly closed the door.

Greg nodded and looked around the hut, feeling embarrassed. There was only one room, with a ladder leading up onto a platform in the rafters. Greg could see blankets up there. The fire in the small fireplace didn’t quite manage to warm the whole room, and it smelled of fish and salt and dried seaweed. Dorothy was already ushering Lenny to sit down at an ancient table, once probably roughly hewn but worn smooth by countless years.

Her two boys were staring from Lenny to Thoko to him.

“Are you a pirate?” the younger one asked Thoko.

“Roland!” his mother snapped, but he went on: “Only pirate ladies wear pants, right? Cause they don’t need to follow the law.”

Thoko smiled. “I’m not a pirate lady, but thank you.”

“Are you a werewolf?” the older boy asked.

“I’m not a werewolf, either. But don’t tell Merv that. Greg here is a werewolf,” Thoko added because the boys were still staring.

“But why do you wear pants?” the younger one asked.

Thoko hesitated only a second. “I work like a man, so I wear trousers like a man.”

“Mummy works like a man, too! She takes Daddy’s boat fishing!”

“You go out by yourself?” Lenny asked.

“Have to, don’t I?” Dorothy replied. “It was damned lucky it got washed ashore.”

“What about your brothers?”

Dorothy shrugged. “They barely make ends meet themselves. Harry’s got his mother in law to take care of, and Dick has eight kids to feed. Two pairs of twins, if you can believe it.”

She smiled, though it looked tired. “We’re doing all right on our own.”

As if to change the subject, she looked Thoko up and down. “What kind of work do you do?”

“I work on the railway,” Thoko said. “Well, I used to work with a crew of navvies. Recently, Greg and I travelled into the Argentum Formation to find more werewolves.”

“And the navvies don’t mind a woman in men’s clothing?”

Thoko looked at Roland. “He wasn’t too far off the mark,” she said. “I’m not a pirate, but our crew, well, we were the first to try and take on the Rot without major alchemy at our side. The last thing anyone cared about were the laws about crossdressing. Well, and after a year of having me around, people sort of got used to it. Not even Duke George Louis said anything.”

Dorothy nodded, without saying anything.

“Is there a way out back?” Thoko went on. “I haven’t been on the beach in ages, and the weather is nice.”

Greg opened his mouth to protest before he realized that Thoko was just trying to give Lenny and his daughter some space. There was indeed a way back out, and a moment later, they climbed down a ladder at the back of the house, until they were standing on the mudflats.