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stared at Günter, an evil snarl on its lips. Hopeless, Günter raised his dagger, closed his eyes, and prepared to die.
    After several moments, when the attack didn’t happen, he opened his eyes again.
    The beast was gone.

iv
    ldolf wasn’t having a good morning.
    He had already checked five of his snares, and he hadn’t caught anything. One would think that if he was going to risk his freedom trapping game on the Order’s land, he might, just once, capture
something
. However, it had been a hard winter, and it seemed that the game had been picked thin even on the land directly under the Germans’ keep.
    So when, in the early dawn hours, he approached his sixth snare, hidden in the underbrush by a lightning-uprooted hemlock, and saw a hint of fur, he almost cried out in triumph, despite the risk of being caught.
    Instead, he just allowed himself a smile.
    His breath came out in a puff of fog as he knelt down next to the snare. He had a hare—a thin beast with patchy fur, but still a hare. His sister was recovering from a fever. She needed the meat and Uldolf wasn’t about to be choosy.
    He glanced around the woods on the off chance someone else might be around. This was the most dangerous part of his crime. Even if he was found on this land with a hare in his bag, he couldprobably protest effectively that it came from elsewhere. Unlike elk or bear or any other large animal, there wouldn’t be the automatic assumption that he was stealing from the Order. At least, as long as no one saw him setting these snares in the woods below the Johannisburg castle wall.
    Uldolf didn’t see anyone, but that was unlikely in the sliver of time before sunrise and Prime. The maze of thickets, steep hills, and ravines that rolled out from the eastern edge of Johannisburg was not inviting to casual foot traffic. It was thick and treacherous enough to be part of the town defenses from the time before the town had a Christian name or a stone keep lording over it. If he wished, he could have easily come within a hundred paces of the castle itself without being observed—all the way to the narrow frontier where the woods were cleared before the lower wall.
    Because of the steep character of the land there, there was no village between the east side of the castle and the lower wall—just the mound of earth shrugging up from the hillside to support the smooth gray walls of the castle. The town itself unfolded west of the castle, where the slope of the land was more gentle and even.
    Few people came down here, and fewer still now that the old modes of worship were suppressed and the groves sacred to Perkûnas were destroyed, ignored, or forgotten. Uldolf remembered, though. Not because he honored the old gods—he was a baptized Christian like every free man in the Order’s domain—but because it was one of the few parts of his childhood he could remember without feeling pain or loss. He had known these woods since before the injury that had claimed his right arm. He knew it better than the German, Dutch, and Polish tradesmen, clergy, and farmers the Order had brought in to swell the ranks of Christian Johannisburg.
    Once he was certain he was unobserved by any immigrant Christians, he bent to retrieve his bony prize.
    Long practice allowed him to quickly retrieve the hare and resetthe snare faster than many people with two arms might have been able to do. The dead rodent found a home in a leather pouch that Uldolf wore around his shoulder.
    The pouch had enjoyed a prior life as a set of plain saddlebags that had once belonged to one of the knights of the Teutonic Order, until they’d seen ruin in battle. The man who had taken possession of them had known better than to try and sell his looted prize openly in the Johannisburg market, and Uldolf had been able to buy the remnants in one of the secret Prûsan-only markets for a pittance, back when he had pittances to spare.
    He had used it to help perfect his leather-working skills. He had