The crowds were less then, and below the limit of the citadel, in ordinary streets, the wind was chill; the cobbles of the lower town were still wet from last night’s rains and the overhang of buildings shaded them from the sun. Idrys had asked him for good weather, a jest, yet he wondered in a small, guilty thought whether his own wishes had anything to do with the clearing of the sky. He had certainly wished the lightning remote from doing further harm. Wishes, too, had more potency when something like the lightning stroke had already set the ordinary world askew. Difficult as it was to move things that were well set and deep in their habits, things now were prone to change: like the leaf he had dislodged and let fly a second flight on the hill, things once shaken could be budged again.
One had then to be cautious. Once gone sailing on the winds, leaves were prey to any waft of weather.
Any whisper of magic.
And he mustbe careful for days, until the world settled again.
So he thought, as urchins in their brash innocence waved or chased along beside the column of guardsmen. So they might do on any day of their rides. He smiled at them, thinking such thoughts, waved a black-gloved hand at a small cluster of better-kept children who ducked aside and hid. It might have been any morning they had ridden out for pleasure, except the scarcity of people about their work, except the banners and the number of men behind him.
At the town’s outer gates, the same gates they had gone out and back again so many times for their rides, a handful of the Dragon Guard had already made sure of their way. No last-moment oxcarts barred their way out this morning, no inopportune gaggle of geese or other flapping fowl met them in the gate. The gate stood open for them as a last curious few craftsmen came out from the smithy and the chandler’s shop nearby.
Then a foolish, yapping dog, escaping all precautions and evading the Guard, ran out to trouble the horses. Gery cow-kicked and threw his head, but the yellow dog was a veteran, one that had attended their morning rides a little distance from the town, and he did so today, driven to complete frenzy by the unusually long column behind them, racing up and down as they passed the thick walls of the gate.
But this time the yellow dog would wait in vain for their return.
Good-bye, he wished the creature, who was a familiar, a known hazard. Fare well and safely back to your own door and a warm fire.
Live long. There are too many dangers. Too much is uncertain in the world, and winds are blowing today you know nothing of, silly hound.
In a single stroke he became sure of it. Wizardry was working in the whole event and a yellow dog had convinced him of it by doing nothing at all out of the ordinary, a measure against which to see all the extraordinary things that had happened in a handful of days, from doubt of his welcome to surety he belonged elsewhere. He drew a deep breath and gathered up the reins of magic as warily as he held red Gery’s, resolved to let nothing else slip.
“Fair day for a ride,” Uwen said, as they passed under the darkness of the last gate arch, and it seemed Uwen had been as worried as he, only then daring speak. “Not a cloud left in the sky, m’lord, and us almost on our way in good order.”
“Let us all hope for fair weather,” Tristen said. Beyond the town main gate they faced the sprawl of the dwellers outside the walls, the untidy mud of stables and henyards and poor men’s huts, and few here came out to greet them. Their road was straight as an arrow past the maze of unplanned lanes and dwellings, and at gathering speed, until they faced no more of Guelemara than apple orchards, plowed barleyfields with furrows standing in water, and a slop of mud on the roads.
Then:
“There’s Captain Anwyll, m’lord, waitin’ for us.”
Indeed, a band of men and wagons was arrayed beside the crossing, that of the first honest road between the outlying fields and the nearest orchards. The inflowing band stretched out of sight among the apple trees, and they brought the remounts from the stables outside the town walls, a large number of horses. As the head of their column swept past, Tristen looked to the head of Anwyll’s group in a moment of anticipation, immediately slowing his pace and that of the rest of the column to the amble they would generally keep on the road, a pace which allowed the riders behind to close up without being spattered by riders in front.
The influx of horses brought the grooms, too, notably Aswys, with his particular charge, black Dys, and also with Uwen’s heavy horse, Cassam, and the boy that tended him. There was Petelly, a weed among the nobility of horses—and, yes, Tristen was very glad to affirm, there was Liss. He had told Uwen to go to the Guard Master of Accounts, who was getting no more sleep than they last night, and to buy the mare before they left. He was determined Uwen should have his honor, andthat horse, in front of every man in Amefel.
“There she is,” Uwen said. “ Thereshe is. Gods, she moves.”
“She is beautiful,” Tristen agreed.
“Too fine by far for me,” Uwen said for the hundredth time.
“Not too fine. I have three horses. You have two. You’ll be my captain in Amefel, and my right hand. Do you say not?”
“Aye, to standin’ beside ye, m’lord, wi’ my heart’s blood. Better your shieldman than your captain.”
“I say otherwise.”
“M’lord, captain of Althalen’s one thing. The field mice out there don’t much need a captain, and they don’t set great store by ciphering.”
“Ciphering.” This was the first mention of ciphering as an argument.
“A captain’s got to have ciphering, m’lord. Myself, I need to look at a warehouse to know how many men’s provisions is in it, none of this ciphering.”
“But you can reckon the grain for the horses. And the clerks write it down. Is that not ciphering?”
“Oh, aye, on my fingers, but the clerks come back wi’ their accounts writ down and I still need to see the warehouse in front of me. So ye can’t ever make the likes of me into a captain of the Dragons, m’lord, so there, ye can’t, on a fine horse or not. I ain’t but a good sergeant of the Guelen Guard, what’s had more luck than I was ever due, and I’m more ’n content to be at your side, m’lord. Ye should take a man like Anwyll.”
He had made up his mind regarding Uwen’s post in Amefel as surely as if it had simply Unfolded. It was so, that was all. On this day of magic trying to escape his will, he still chafed at Anwyll’s being in charge this morning. He was resolved that the man should go back to Guelessar by spring, with compliments to Idrys, since he was sure Anwyll was intended to be Idrys’ eyes and ears in Amefel. He took no offense in Idrys’ having spies. That was not the issue.
The horses came in without incident. The next ring road about Guelemara, that from Dary village, showed a long line of wagons and carts from beyond the gray-brown haze of the young apple trees, all lumbering toward that crossroads, to intersect with those they had already collected. They were to come in just behind the first hundred of the mounted troop… or so they should, but they were arriving too soon.
“They’ll sink to the axles if they slow down,” Uwen judged. “Get ’em into line will they, nill they, m’lord, an’ no stopping. That lane’s a damn bog.”
“Say so,” he bade Uwen, after which Uwen rode immediately aside to talk to Captain Anwyll, and after that, back in line to shout orders to move the standards and the Guard ahead at a trot, making room for the wagons. In that way the vehicles came in with no hindrance and no slowing down.
“All the wagons are here, except master Emuin’s,” Captain Anwyll reported then, riding up in the line from the crossroads. “He sends word he’ll join us at our lodgings tonight.”
“Tonight.”