Chapter 9: The Army's Fires

The gray-haired woman met me on the road before I reached the trucks.

She was tall and square-shouldered, with a scar over one eyebrow, and she looked at me for a long time.

"You came by yourself," she said.

"They voted," I said. "It wasn't a very good vote."

"I heard." She jerked her chin toward the camp. "I'm the general. Come on. You'll want to eat."

I had expected a cage or a rope.

Instead I got a folding chair by a fire, and a tin bowl of stew thick with potatoes.

The soldiers gathered around slowly, in twos and threes.

They were big, scarred people in black coats, and none of them said a word to me.

Then a boy not much older than my brother, maybe nineteen, came up and put a wool blanket around my shoulders.

"It's cold," he said, red to the ears. "Don't tell the general I gave you mine."

"I can hear you," the general said.

Everyone laughed, and it was a real laugh, quick and warm.

I ate three helpings and nobody minded.

"You're the first one he's followed in sixteen years," a woman across the fire said. "The King, I mean. The first voice he's chased."

"I don't understand it either," I said.

"Nobody does." She turned her tin cup in her hands. "But we saw his face on that road. We've never seen that."

The general sat down on an overturned crate beside me.

"You saw the red," she said. "At the parley."

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