"Untie my blindfold, would you?" Clara asked. "Then we can admire the scenery together."

"Oh," Wes said. "Sorry." She sat down on the floor. He untied it. She stood up again and he started picking at the knots fastening her hands. That was just a length of rag, too, not a rope. It came loose pretty easily. Somebody hadn't belonged to the Boy Scouts. Either the soldiers who tied them up weren'ttaking this very seriously or they intended to be back pretty soon. He preferred the first thought.

"It's a pantry. See the shelves, over there in back. Somebody's been living in here, I think," Clara commented after her eyes had adjusted.

"Why?"

"Because," Clara said, "there is a table. With a pitcher on it. She walked over and stuck her finger in it.

Half full of water. She took a drink and handed it to Wes.

"A chair. And a bed. A cot, but a real, live, genuine, bed with ticking and a stuffed straw mattress."

"Fleas and bedbugs?"

"Probably those too." She stood there, looking at the bed. "After this kind of a day, I'll risk it."

"I'll sleep on the floor by the door, in case someone should . . ."

Clara had enough.

"No," she said. "You won't."

She started to take her clothes off.

"I am getting ready to finally get into that bed with you. Before that nasty little man cuts me up in all the pieces he spent the afternoon telling us about so meticulously. So there. Even if it is too dark for you to see my body before it gets sliced and diced, at least you can feel it. And I can feel yours while it is still all there, since he is threatening to pull your fingernails out, too. And other things."

"Ms. Bachmeierin . . ."

"The name," she said, "is Clara. And you are Wesley. Now . . ." She pulled him down to sit next to her on the bed.

"Clara," he said faintly. "We aren't married."

She sighed with exasperation.

"Here," she said. "Your left hand in my left hand. My right hand in your right hand. Now you say, in the present tense, 'I take you for my wedded wife.'"

He complied.

"Now. I take you for my wedded husband. That makes us married. Do you have anything that we can divide and share for a token. A coin or something. That makes it stronger."

"I'm not the kind of strongman who goes around bending coins with his bare hands." Wes felt around in his pocket. "Would two links from my watch chain do?"

"Superb." He pulled them off. They solemnly exchanged them.

"Now," Clara said. "We are fully and completely married, to the entire satisfaction of ninety-five percent of the population of Europe." She kissed him again and kicked off her last petticoat. It was midsummer, after all, so she was only wearing three. All of them linen. And a pair of blue jeans under them, of course, since when she rode she now kilted her skirts and petticoats up around her waist.

Wes started to unlace his shoes.

"Ah, who are the other five percent of the population of Europe?"

"Lawyers and bureaucrats!" Clara exploded. Then. "Wesley, if you stop unlacing those shoes, I am going to be very, very, annoyed."

Joel Matowski started to wiggle his way out of the ditch and up onto the path, thinking that if he got out of this, he might just make a visit to the pilgrimage church up on top of a hill that Wes had handed back to the abbot. He hadn't always thought it was wonderful to have a mother who was a ballet teacher. If he got back to Grantville, he would apologize to his mom, ten times over, for all the occasions when he had been cranky about going to lessons or practicing. There were times in life when a lot of ballet training came in really useful. It turned a guy into something of a contortionist, not to mention developing stamina.

Wiggle, hump, stretch. He fell back to the bottom twice, but kept pushing. The second night, it rained.

He lay there on his back, his mouth open. Over three days after those guys had taken the abbot, by the time he had his legs onto the path and was making pretty good progress pushing the rest of himself upwards with his shoulders and elbows, a good Samaritan came along. Who happened to be a tenant of Ruprecht von Ilten.

"Berlepsch, I think. Tann, Schlitz, and Buchenau for sure. The ones who let the Irishmen use their soldiers. So those castles should be where you will find your various officials. Of course, some of them have more than one castle, and they might use storage barns or other buildings." Von Ilten was looking very anxious.

"None of the others?" the little lawyer asked.

"Not as far as I have been able to determine."

"Damn it, I'm not an invalid," Joel Matowski said. "Just a bit bunged up there and there. I'm riding out with the rest of them."

"How about," Gus Szymanski suggested, "that before you ride out you make a little tour giving speeches to the different groups. First Fulda Barracks. Then the "Hearts and Minds" team. Then the militia. They'll fan out and cover the villages."

Joel gave a pretty dramatic speech. Ballet didn't require words, but it was really heavy on interpretive gestures. Shortly after Joel finished the third repeat, he fainted. The Barracktown school teacher held him on his horse, took him to St. Severi's and put him in the sacristy for the little artist to look after. It was either that or the nuns, since the up-timers' "EMT" was going to accompany the other soldiers, and Biehr didn't think that nuns would be a good idea. Not that he had ever met one, but Calvinists had their doubts about nuns just on general principles.

Then he hurried back to the barracks. The regiment would be marching out and he needed to be there to direct the anthem. When the men rode or marched, they would just sing the melody, but for when they were in barracks, he had set it up as a chorale and divided them into tenors, baritones, and basses.

Sergeant Hartke had not gone along with Biehr's suggestion that he should reassign the men to the different companies on the basis of which part they sang, although it would make scheduling rehearsals easier. In fact, Sergeant Hartke's answer had been unreasonably brusque. Biehr thought with frustration that sometimes he just needed to work with them on one part. He saw no obvious reason that all the tenors should not be musketeers and all the baritones pikemen.

He was vaguely dissatisfied, but he had done his best with the translation. Major Utt, of course, had as usual been overly busy. The only guidance he had given was, "Leave out the line about 'we feebly struggle; they in glory shine.' It projects the wrong image."

Butler, Deveroux, and MacDonald interviewed Fred Pence and Johnny Furbee at Berlepsch's. They had planned to put the next three days to good use, riding from one castle to another and interviewing the captives the other parties had picked up. All of a sudden, though, every country road and cow path in Fulda was crawling with people. Soldiers, militiamen, farmers, kids, and a terrifying squadron of women.

People who were, clearly, looking for other people.

By mutual consent, they picked up Gruyard from Schlitz's and headed back toward Bonn. They were, after all, practical men, in this for money rather than glory.

Fulda, August 1634 "No, I am not too proud to ask for help. I am also not too stupid to ask for help. I do not care whether some galloping Rambo thinks I am a wimp because I ask for help. Somebody go down to Wuerzburg with this letter and get us some help. Now."

Andrea had been on her feet for almost twenty-four hours for the second time in three days. Her hair, which usually got a half-hour of attention every morning before she let it appear in public, had gone limp.

She had tried to pull it back into a pony tail. It was too short. Exasperated, she had parted it and put it into two pigtails, one behind each ear, tied with pink ribbons. There were three pencils and a pen stuck into various parts of it.

Wes' speech writer-cum-gofer looked at her. The hairdo's effect was remarkable. The closest classical analogy that came to his mind was Medusa.

"I will take it myself," he said. "I don't know anybody else who knows the road and is still in town.

They're all out looking for the others."

Wuerzburg, August 1634 Steve Salatto frowned. "Has Andrea gone off her rocker?"

He meant it as a rhetorical question.

Louis Baril, which was the speech-writer's name if anyone had ever been able to remember it, took it as serious. "It is quite true," he said. "All of it. At least, to the best of our knowledge in Fulda."

"If I send a half dozen people up to Fulda, who's going to be available to help Anita in Bamberg?"

Louis realized that the second question was rhetorical. He shrugged.

"By the time I can get anyone up there, they will probably have already straightened things out. But I guess that the onus is on my shoulders."

He looked at the man. Not much more than a boy, really. "The day's half gone. Are you prepared to start back this evening, or do you need to wait for morning."

"This evening. The daylight is still long."

"Fine," Steve said. "Weckherlin, find him something to eat and drink and a place to sleep, while I pull together a team to send."

Fulda, September 1634 "Who do you have back?" Saunders Wendell asked. He was Wuerzburg's UMWA man. Steve had sent him up as head of the emergency assistance team. "Is that supposed to be whom do you have back?"

"Who cares? About who and whom, I mean. We have Harlan and Roy. They were a team. Von Ilten and his men found them walking back from von Buchenau's. It sounds like when the interviewer didn't show up, von Buchenau started to get cold feet. You tell them." Andrea waved at a down-timer.

He introduced himself. "I'm Ruprecht von Ilten. Buchenau was expecting an Irishman to do the interviewing. When no one had shown up two days after someone was supposed to, Buchenau fed them and let them loose. We gave them mounts and an escort back to Fulda. By the time we got up to the castle, Buchenau was gone."

Wendell shuffled through his notes. "Any idea where?"

"Not according to his wife."

"Any recommendations?"

"She's a second wife. The first one was childless. About seven months gone with her first child. Set herfather in to manage the place, I would say."

Andrea pulled herself up straight again. "Only if all of you guarantee to back the kid's succession if it's a girl against more distant claims in the male line."

Von Ilten blinked first.

Wendell looked back at Andrea. "Go on."

"Fred and Johnny. They were a team, too. Our friends here had to buckle a bit more swash to get them out of Berlepsch's hands. Dramatic armed confrontations and all that. Gus Szymanski has the casualty list. Johnny's quite a bit the worse for wear. According to Fred, he put up a good fight. Gus has splinted, salved, set bones, and the like. He should be okay, but he's not going to be on his feet for quite a while.

Once it won't hurt him too much to ride in a wagon, I want to send him back to Grantville to recover. He married Antonia Kruger from Barracktown and their first baby was born and died earlier this year. I expect he'd like to take her to see his folks. His parents were left up-time, but he has a sister. Simon Jones is his uncle. Just get away from Fulda for a while."

"I don't see any problems with that," Wendell concurred.

"Joel you know about. He was with the abbot."

"Yeah. You haven't found the abbot?"

"No. But Joel says that the men who grabbed him were speaking English to one another. Three of them, speaking English with an Irish accent. How many Irishmen can there be on the loose in Fulda? I've been here for close to two years now and there's never been one here before. Not that I know of. And we haven't found Orville and Mark." Andrea caught a sob. "Or Wes and Clara. I'm sorry."

"Who's out hunting now?"

"Mostly the Fulda Barracks Regiment. They've apologized for you know what."

Wendell frowned. "No, I don't know what."

"Derek can explain it to you when they get back. It's just too complicated, and I'm too tired. He has Lawson and Denver with him. Dave Frost is with Captain Wiegand and the Fulda militia. They've combined and split up. Does that make sense? Some of each group are beating their way systematically through every nook and cranny of the von Schlitz properties. Jeffie Garand is with Ruprecht von Ilten's people, heading for Tann. They're all still looking. Everybody's been out. The granges. Even the League of Women Voters."

Wendell rolled his eyes heavenward. "We have one of those down our way, too. With a sheep named Ewegenia as a logo. She's a caricature of Veleda Riddle."

Andrea stared at him. "Please don't tell Sergeant Hartke's wife."

Last VisionsBonn, Archdiocese of Cologne, September 1634 "Where is everybody?"

The servant at the boarding house where Walter Butler kept rooms looked at the roaring man as if he were a ghost.

"Fighting, if they are fighting men. Fled, if they had someplace to go. Waiting, if they are the rest of us."

"Do I have any messages? And get me something to eat."

Deveroux came in. "There's no place safe. Looters are out in the town, already. I left MacDonald watching the horses."

Butler turned to the servant. "Pack up all the food that isn't perishable for us." Back to Deveroux. "I'll read these while we're riding."

"Damn," Butler said. "Triple damn."

"What?"

"The archbishop of Mainz went back. The up-timer who is now supposed to be the cardinal-protector of the USE got the Swede to give him asalva guardia ."

"No way would Gustavus Adolphus give him a safe conduct."

"According to Hatzfeldt, he did." Butler handed the paper to Deveroux. "We may have to reconsider our options."

"We need to catch up with our regiments. Or whatever may be left of them by now. What good is a colonel without a regiment?"

"Hatzfeldt didn't write what he was going to do himself. That's sort of odd."