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It was quite convincing, actually, along with the rags she had layered over her dress, the dung-soaked head wrap- lest anyone decide they could overlook the craggy smile- and the walking cane. The cane was the worst; affecting a bad back was giving her one.
Twice, soldiers got it in their heads they could disregard her shortcomings in view of the scarcity of women. While they were handsome enough, in the savage brute sort of a way, she had to politely decline their offers. Rejecting such insistent invitations had been messy. Fortunately, what with all the commotion of camp life, no one noticed a man dying of a suddenly slit throat. Such a death among men like those of the Imperial Order would not even be questioned.
Taking a life was something A
Like the soldiers gathered around the next fire as they ate and told stories, none thought anything of her wandering among them. Most gave her a look-see, but quickly went back to their stew and coarse camp bread washed down with ale and bawdy stories. A beggar elicited little more than a grunt intended to keep them moving along.
With an army this.size, there was an entire culture of camp followers. Tradesmen traveled with their own wagons, or shared one with others. They followed in the wake of the army, offering a wide variety of services not provided by the Imperial Order. A
Peddlers sold everything from meats and vegetables to rare fruits from back home-A
In the guise of a beggar, A
In that week she could have managed to live reasonably well from what she gathered under her cover of begging-as long as she didn't mind eating maggot-infested, rotting meat and moldering vegetables. She accepted such offerings graciously, and then discarded them when out of sight. It was a cruel joke by the soldiers, giving her the garbage they had intended to throw out. There were some among the beggars who would salt and pepper it through and then eat it.
Each day when it got too late to search, she returned to the camp followers and spent a little of her own money to buy humble but somewhat more wholesome food. Everyone thought she earned the meager amount begging. The truth be known, she was not very good at the business of begging, and a business it was. A few of the beggars, feeling sympathy when they saw her act, tried to help her improve her technique.
A
She knew that by cruel fate people were occasionally thrust, against their wishes, into helpless begging. She also knew from hundreds of years of experience trying to give them help that most beggars clung tenaciously to the life.
A
Beggars, on the other hand, lived lives of lies. They lied from the time they opened their eyes in the morning until they told the Creator a lie in their bedtime prayers.
Of all the Creator's miserable creations, A
Trusting men who demonstrated a proclivity to lie proved you a fool, and such fools were nothing more to the liar than the dust beneath their boots-there to be trod upon.
A
Begging was proving to be time-consuming, so in order to cover as much ground as possible, A
In the mornings it was well over an hour after the leading edge started out before the tail began to move. At night the lead was cooking di
Beyond their purpose, A
A
Jagang was skilled in the fine art of patience.
The people of the Old World had always been anything but a homogeneous society. A
In the nearly twenty years she had been watching him, Jagang had methodically consolidated the seemingly ungovernable into a cohesive society. That it was brutal, corrupt, and inequitable was another matter; he had made them one and in so doing forged a force of unprecedented might.
What the parents might have been-independent and loyal only to their small place in the world-the children were not. A large percentage of the Imperial Order troops and command had been babes or young children when the Order seized power. They had grown up under the rule of Jagang, and as children always did, believed as they were taught by those who led them, adopting the same values and morals.
The Sisters of the Light, however, served a higher purpose than the affairs of governance. A