Melusine Dreizack was indeed livid with her offspring. Franz had returned home late last night with a poorly bandaged arm and spilled everything to his worried mother. As Dielte walked in the door that morning, Frau Dreizack first embraced her daughter, then wiped the tears from her eyes and laid into her.

"I know exactly where you've been and how you got there. I thought you and Franz were up to no good, and I didn't want to know, but this does it! Both of you were almost killed last night. I'm almost glad your father isn't alive to see how you've become a pair of thieves!"

"But we're not like that, Mom, we do it for the common people, against the rich and powerful..." Dielte protested.

"You and your bandit friends might think that, Dielte, but nobody will agree with you. Any authority can see that the Schwarzwind are rebels, vandals, and highwaymen. Lord Gozzo would like nothing better than to see you all hanged, and you could have been the first! Do you think I raised you for the gallows?"

Dielte slumped onto the bench at the table, next to where Franz was sitting. "Franz! What happened to your arm?"

"This is exactly what I'm talking about!" Melusine interrupted, exasperated. She sighed, then continued in a softer tone. "I should have stopped you two when you started all this, but I turned a blind eye because of the money, and for that I'm ashamed." She bent to put a hand on each of their shoulders. "I know things have been hard for us since your father died, but we've always made it through the honest way. Just because Gozzo and others don't treat us fairly, it doesn't give us license to do the same."

So saying, Frau Dreizack sent Franz back to bed and whacked some porridge into a bowl for Dielte, who ate her breakfast in cowed silence.

Siegfried didn't see Dielte for several days after her capture and the ensuing incident at Kurtstadt. He himself was laying low, along with the rest of the Schwarzwind. Gozzo was, of course, furious, and all the towns in the area were littered with posters calling for the people to turn any members of the group in to the authorities. The woods, too, seethed with soldiers looking for them. Siegfried staid busy making sure that all their tracks were covered and all their strongholds remained hidden.

After some weeks with no sign of the Dreizack siblings, he decided to pay them a visit. He took Dielte's trident with him, as she had left it at the camp so as to avoid more trouble with her mother.

Dielte and her mother were at work in the garden when Siegfried came upon them. He stashed the trident behind a tree before approaching. "Good morning, Frau Dreizack..." he attempted to greet their mother, who stopped working to glare at him. Dielte blanched and ushered him out of sight.

"Sorry, you're not exactly my mom's favorite person now," she explained.

"She found out what happened?"

"Yeah, we got a pretty good bawling out over it. Come to think of it, doesn't your mother ever do anything about you?"

Siegfried shrugged. "She used to try, but she doesn't like yelling at me and I usually just ignored her when she did. Anyhow, I brought your trident over." He took it from where he'd left it. "Funny, it seemed to get easier to hold on my way over here. It seems like a good weapon. You should give it a name."

Dielte took the weapon from him. "I was thinking about that. I'm calling it Harfe, because it looks a bit like a lyre." She sighed. "I guess I need to tell you...Franz and I are kind of backing out of Schwarzwind for a while."

He was taken aback. "Why?"

Dielte's voice dropped. "Well, for one thing, Franz got cut pretty badly. Mom had to stitch him up, and it'll take a while for him to recover."

"I heard about that. But why do you have to leave, too?"

"There's also the fact that Mom's really unhappy with the whole situation right now. We don't mean to leave forever, it's just a break until things settle down here. I mean, she doesn't even want us being friends any more. That's what I'm really supposed to be telling you now, otherwise she wouldn't have let me talk to you at all."

Siegfried's heart sank. "So I'm not going to see you anymore?"

"No, don't be silly." Dielte scoffed. "I'm not that obedient. I'll still come over your house from time to time. I have to have someone to poke at with this new fork. As for Schwarzwind, I'm sure we'll be back soon."

Siegfried caught sight of Frau Dreizack coming to look for them. "I'd better get out of here. I don't like the idea of facing your mother, she might kick me out of Schwarzwind, too."

While making his way home, Siegfried was surprised at how disheartened he was over the withdrawal of the two Dreizacks. He had come to be truly good friends with them. Still, he was sure they would be back as soon as Franz was well enough to. He'd never seen much point in listening to his own mother, and figured that they wouldn't, either.

As he entered the yard of the Schtauffen house, the youth caught sight of Grosselmeier leading a horse away to the stables. His heart skipped a beat as he realized that it was a proper knight's mount. Siegfried flew to the front door, but the man talking to his mother inside was not his father. He hid his disappointment quickly as Margarite turned to introduce the man.

"This is Otto Kubal, he's from your father's division. He's on his way home to Altenham, and he's staying the night here."

Siegfried reached out to shake Otto's hand, asking, "My father sent a letter back with you, didn't he?"

"Of course he did." Otto rummaged through his haversack. The letter was barely out of the bag when Siegfried snatched it from his hand and made off to his room with it. Otto shook his head at the retreating figure. "I'd be just as impatient. All Frederick ever talked about was that boy. He's very proud of him."

Margarite's brow creased faintly. "He's his father. He couldn't do otherwise."

Siegfried tore the seal off the letter on his way to his room, leaving a trail of crumbled red wax along the floor behind him. He sat on his bed and began to read, skipping over 'my beloved Margarite' and 'how is Frieda growing up'. He always started with the war information first.

'Things are not going as well as hoped. Since our defeat at the Battle of Mezőkeresztes, all we've been doing is capturing fortresses, losing them, recapturing them, and so on. This war has become a tedious one, and morale is suffering because of it. Desertation is becoming a problem for us. I've resorted to sending some of my own men home before they take that course themselves. I hate to see them sink so low, but I know things are hard. I myself am getting lonely for home, but I'll have to wait until I can do so honorably. I hope to make you both as proud of me as I am of you.'

Siegfried took the time to read the letter more thoroughly, from the beginning. A frown fell across his face as he read the last paragraph again. Deserters! In all the tales of heroes he'd grown up with, there was no worse form of life than a coward. My father fights valiantly in the face of hardship, and people are running away and leaving him! The idea was galling. I would never do that. I should be out there, with him.

The boy leaning against the window pane, not really looking through it. He longed for the day that he could go out and fight alongside his father. All his deeds with his gang of thieves helped him feel like he was the hero he wanted to be, but it was frustrating being stranded in Ober-Getzenberg. For now, he had to fight his own little wars, close to home. Surely someday soon, he would be called to the field of battle where he belonged. Leaving the letter on the bed, he abandoned his room for the training ground, in preparation for that time.

Otto Kubal found himself the object of Siegfried's cold calculation at dinner that night. The boy pried all sorts of information from him on the war. What the youth received was a good many frustrated accounts. "Things have been going neither backward nor forward for a while now," Otto said, summing it all up. "We do have a few victories here and there, but they're petty ones. We take a road, a town, a fortress, then those damn Turks take it right back, and we start all over again."

"Where's Michael the Brave then?" Siegfried asked, naming the man who was the hero of the war, albeit a foreigner. "What's he trying to do now?"

"The Wallachian prince? Waiting for help from his allies, as we are. The Emperor may send more our way, but this has happened before. He makes good headway up until he hasn't got enough troops to carry on with, and it's wait for the allies to catch up. Meanwhile the rest of us are stuck holding our positions."

Siegfried began picking his bread apart absently. "And that's when the soldiers start deserting, right? The war doesn't seem to be getting anywhere, so they give up and go home."

"That's more or less so." Otto agreed with the boy's observance.

"So where do you fit in?" Siegfried asked carelessly.

"Fit in what way? What do I think? I think we've got too many countries in the pudding, if you want to know. Our allies all have their own interests. Even Michael the Brave preys on some. That, and our Holy Emperor doesn't care about the war at all, only his own hobbies."

"You don't think the war's going anywhere." The Schtauffen boy looked up from his bread crumbs. "So you're going home."

Margarite frowned. "Siegfried, you know your father gave him leave."

Otto began to fiddle with his own food. "That's true. My daughter is getting married, and Frederick was good enough to let me come home to see it."

"So you're getting a personal holiday while your division's struggling in somewhere in the Ottoman Empire?" Siegfried continued, ignoring a reprieve from his mother. "If people are deserting, you should have staid there. My father's done it, he's been gone years without seeing us, because he's fighting for us. How can you back to your family like that?"

"Now don't go getting your feelings about your father being gone all misplaced, boy." Otto growled.

"He only let you go because he knew you'd run off anyway." Siegfried shot back at the man.

"Siegfried, that's enough!" His mother shouted. "I'm ashamed of you! I won't have you insulting our guest."

Siegfried upset his dinner plate as his got up, spilling half eaten food from it. "He's not my guest. He's a coward, and I won't sleep under the same roof as him." He stormed out of the dining room, intending to fetch his things and spend the night at the camp. He gathered up the few things he needed from his room, stumbling over things in the dark. Then he headed to the armory to get his sword. Siegfried adjusted the halter of the sheathed blade upon his back and stepped out of the house. He found his mother waiting for him there in the yard, a thin, tired figure against the dark.

"I thought you'd be going out." She said. "Sieg, I don't know why you do this. You're always sneaking around in the dark, spending nights away from home, always so angry. Can't you tell me why? I only want to understand."

"What's there to understand? I've got a life of my own, I can do what I want with it." Siegfried answered shortly. He brushed past her, dismissed her as he always did. It was something he'd gotten very good at over the past several months. Besides, he was right, he thought. If his father couldn't come home, then neither should anyone else.