The trail lay dusty and level as they walked along, following the path of an irrigation ditch half overgrown with weeds. Everywhere she saw the legacy of conflict: ripe barley unharvested, fallow fields that should have been sown with winter wheat instead grown waist-high with weeds, a distant herd of cattle trampling through a stand of oats. Adelheid’s people could not come out; Ironhead either had sufficient supplies, or he chose to leave the fields to rot as a message to the people trapped within the walls.
The young noblewoman said nothing as they walked, kept her hood down over her face to disguise her Wendish features. The loose robe disguised her body but could not hide her height. Even here, alone, she kept silence: practiced it, Rosvita supposed, for the time when Rosvita’s skill at dissembling would see them through the lines or find them exposed and taken prisoner.
John Ironhead might be merciful and take a ransom for them, or he might be stubborn. Rosvita knew better than to dwell on such thoughts. Yet she was glad enough of Leoba’s silence and the careful way she concealed herself from view. As they walked, Rosvita rehearsed her speech, trying quietly on her tongue the slurs and lisps with which these northern Aostans disfigured the clean sounds of Dariyan.
Ironhead’s main encampment lay to the west. Here along the northern wall where only a postern gate opened along the river, his guards had set up watch posts. They had been here long enough that some had built shacks, and there was a brisk business with prostitutes who now left those same shacks in twos and threes to slip back into town, hands clutched over coins or gripping scarves wrapped around bread and cheese. A few vendors had come from town, too, cloaked by night, and now here at dawn they packed up their wares, gorgeous silks, linens, silver spoons, such luxuries that, in the face of dwindling food supplies, might not seem so important when children cried with hunger.
“Here, Sisters! Where have you come from?” The guard who stopped them had greasy hair, and a thread of meat had caught in his yellowed teeth.
“Which kind of sisters?” cried another guard, snorting with laughter as he grabbed roughly at their hoods. He yanked back Rosvita’s hood and they all exclaimed over her northern paleness; then, with a stick, he prodded back the hood that concealed Leoba.
Rosvita’s heart curdled with fear. It was not Leoba at all. Yet surely she should have known what would happen when the princess acquiesced so graciously as Rosvita insisted that it would be too dangerous for Theophanu herself to attempt to slip through the lines. If Ironhead’s men caught them, he would have a noble prisoner to ransom and a sharp blade to hold over her father’s head. Obviously her words had fallen on deaf ears. Theophanu neither flinched nor showed any expression as the guards poked at her with their sticks. Clearly they had not been in Ironhead’s camp yesterday: they did not recognize her.