"Aye, another redcurrant bitter for me."

	"Sorry. We're all out."

	"A wild sour, then?"

	"Coming right up."

	"Another oatmeal ale for me, darling!"

	"Me as well!"

	Egeleht squirmed and side-hopped her way back to the cellars, remembering what orders she could. But they were many, and like when she grabbed too many tankards at once, at every step they tottered further from the grasp of her memory. She could not reckon it mattering much, of course. To men who had marched a month or more, liquor was liquor, and they all knew it far superior to the dilute they received with their flour and bacon.

	"I can't believe this," muttered the servingwench, who hadn't even a moment to push away the bangs prickling her eyes, never mind to wipe down her apron or chat with the regulars, wherever they had sat themselves in this throbbing horde. Egeleht's fingertips were going pruny; blisters screamed from the insides of her knuckles. Nevertheless, a wry grin kept her cheeks afloat.

	"And what are [i]you[/i] so chipper about?" It was Ihdrun asking. She had limped in from the back stores-room.

	"Nothing, ma'am, nothing at all." The server stared furiously at the spigot now, her smile sent away. Why couldn't it pour faster?

	"Don't want to let an old hag in on your secret? Gah!"

	"Are you all right?"

	"Fine." Ihdrun had let out a yelp as she sat herself down on a quarter-cask.

	"Your gout is flaring up again?" asked Egeleht.

	"Something's always flaring up. Do yourself a favor: don't grow old."

	The swelling and the spasms had not spared the rest of her body, either, the way pregnancy only swells the belly, and mourning only the eyelids. Ihdrun fanned herself with a soaked rag (the one which had never left her apron-string in all the years Egeleht watched her work the brewery). She was hunched over and heaving like a dog about to vomit, and the sweat was a drizzle from her moon-shaped face. The entirety of her had come up to the shape and color of a salmon egg, and that cask looked about the only thing stopping her from popping, one joint at a time, from the toes up. The vents in the roof should have been letting the evening breeze through, when it was angled just so against the rafters; they should have smelled warm yeast and barley germ wafting from the fermenting room. Instead the stale air carried only sweat and breath to the brewer-women's skin.

	"Well, I need to get this out to the tables."

	"Pardon me. We're still talking," said Ihdrun. "What were you smiling for?"

	"Hah, uhm, it's just ..."

	"I'm only curious."

	"I've just never worked this hard before," Egeleht panted out. "What an incredible crowd!"

	But Ihdrun had stopped fanning. Worse, she braced herself to stand, to torture her swollen feet once more. This sign never bade well, for Ihdrun could not shout, scold, or waggle her finger while sitting. But most egregiously of all, this done, she waddled to a cask to fill her own cup, having snatched it first from the wash basin.

	"Ah, to be young again," she said between gulps, feeling the fresh foam as it sprayed her upper lip, clicking the pleasant bitterness against the roof of her mouth. "So what does he look like?"
	
	"Hold on. That's not what I—"
	
	"I know what you said. I've still got one good eye, sweet girl, and it can spot a lie from any hilltop in town." With two fingertips Ihdrun stretched out an eyelid til the pink showed.
	
	Egeleht's reply was drunk. It stammered and stumbled from a slurry tongue, and it grasped for meaning with groping hands. Her proprietor didn't care to hear the half of it; insistence and excuses. These girls would have bedded any mustache that twitched at them if Ihdrun looked wayward for too long, an inevitability of living where there were more goats than decent lads. So she didn't take her good eye, the cloudless eye, off of them, and that had been an elegant-enough solution in the past. Now the soldiers had come, far too many soldiers, and the one eye was no longer enough. Scarred men, lean, wolfish men, men with beards and top-knots, braids and sideburns, a horde of leery glances and drooling grins. Ihdrun had to protect her flock; from themselves, and their own bad tastes. They couldn't wait for a Kerentanam or a Swutgerþ to sweep them off their feet when the attention this pack lavished on them was already so thrilling. Ah, Swutgerþ—Ihdrun had heard the name out by the hamlets some hours ago, so his master must have brought him along. Tell be true, she would have ridden [i]that[/i] stallion til week's end. Not that the girls needed to know that she, too, had once been young.
		
	"Whoever he is," Ihdrun sighed. "hope he's not much of a temper. We're closing early."
	
	"What!" The news left Egeleht agape. "But there's so much we're yet to sell."
	
	The old woman was still standing, still clutching her cup in a raisiny hand which stunk of wort. "No, dear, there really isn't."
	
	"We're the only alehouse in town. I know they'll buy, no matter the price. You're the one always saying you wish you could charge 'tunic and trouser' for first fill."
	
	"That's one thing when it's just old Argiz and Sifgir in here. Men like these, Egeleht, that'll go one of two ways." They embraced, the old woman and the young. "Trust your elders. You haven't seen it like we have—these 'soldiers.' When they run out of silver they draw iron. When we've got no more ale to hand over at swordpoint, they'll take other things from us, things far more terrible to lose."
	
	Egeleht had no response for that.
	
	"I'll tell them. You and the others start corking the bungs. Do not, [i]do not[/i], pour another drop for anyone, even if he follows you back here. We have to ration it, for as long as it will last."
	
	"How long is that, Ihdrun?"
	
	"That depends on our brave chieftain. Somebody has to tell these mongrels—somebody has to send them home."
[hr][hr]
	Ah, Arlanna—the northstar of his heart, the cooling brook of his soul; douser of its flames, polisher of its sharpest stones. Doubtless the table could see her whispering, the breath warm against his ear, but Kerentanam could not but sit there and marvel at the gratitude he knew then.
	
	What did you mean to gain from this gathering? He would ask her later, but her temperance, her virtue, already they had unlocked for him an answer of his own: something he now knew about Aedþel; something he would not have noticed blazing down the path he chose for himself, the scorn and the indignation both a blinding fog.
	
	Any fool could see the priest could not swing his own sword, wear his own shield and mail, march his own miles. But these disciples—no, these slaves, drug along by the chains of dogma—when they weren't wiping his arse they even apologized for him, like humility itself would have profaned those withering lips. What Aedþel would not admit, or could not, from his own mouth, was that a true leader is responsible for the dispositions of his men. He alone burns away the laziness and the stupidity and fashions the goodly servant from the remnants. The dispositions of the men relay the dispositions of the commander ergo, and to behold what the high priest had wrought in his men, as they spoke out of turn, and derided each other, and trampled each other for the cheap approval of their lord ...
	
	Thank you, Arlanna, said Kerentanam to himself, thank you again and always. Tomorrow I will show you what I have learned.
	
	His mouth however said something else. It was curling up, pushing gleeful wrinkles up into the corners of his eyes. "No, no, I fear he may be quite right," said the chief of the Rhaeads, who pushed a skewer through his first morsel of beef. "But enough delaying. I must try this for myself."