"Marshal Yordenas will send someone back to make sure those mercenaries leave. I am pretty sure Horas will volunteer, say he knows the situation best, so best he be the one to supervise. I admit, a lot of the plan depends on it being him who returns. It's a gamble. But we've only got one throw before we're ruined, so we may as well be reckless."

"I still expect this is all a ploy to catch me off my guard, or capture my eagle."

"If you say so. Had I known you were so full of yourself, I'd have known I need only wait until you fill up with the poison of self-love and strangle on it."

Seeing that he had begun to lose her interest made him try harder by shifting ground. "What do you gain from this gamble?"

Her expression was closed to him. She drew her horses aside as Crow's Gate was opened and the first folk were allowed to pass. Riding away, she spoke a last comment over her shoulder. "Nothing so different from what's in it for you."

He was flushed, and bothered. He let all the other traffic go ahead until the early tide of traffic had flowed out. Their party was released to pass Crow's Gate, and they headed out on West Track, riding due south toward the escarpment while the sun rose east over the Olo Plain and the river's meander. For a while they rode in silence. Farmers had set out into their fields. Early-morning peddlers trundled their goods out toward distant villages. Joss wanted to tell them all to turn back, to hide within the safety of the walls, but he could not. The reeves of Argent Hall must not suspect that Olossi's council had learned the truth about their alliance. And so, in the service of their desperate gamble, they sent folk out unsuspecting into the lands where wolves were already on the prowl.

The four guardsmen were likable young men who could not, in fact, stay silent for long. They had the confident bearing of those granted youth and health and strength, but the least of Captain Anji's tailmen could, Joss supposed, take all four out without a great deal of effort. These were not hardened men. They were not honed. They were like a sword made for show, not for fighting, pretty in their dyed linen jackets and loose trousers and bright silk sashes of teal or crimson or sea-foam green.

"Did you see the incomparable Eridit last night?"

"No, she was engaged with another man. I went to the arena to see that new troupe."

"Were they at the Little or the Big?"

"Oh, at the Little. They came out of Mar. It wasn't much of an audience."

"It wasn't much of a talking line, I heard."

"That's true. But there was one girl… still, you know how they are, they will say they are sworn to purity until their tour is done."

"They say that if they aren't interested. What they say to a handsomer man is quite another thing."

"That's not what your sister said."

"Hey! That's not funny. You know she's getting married at Festival."

"Stop it, you two! Or I won't cycle you off duty on Festival First Night."

The chatter changed course into safer channels: the upcoming new year's festival; a jeweler who gave good deals on trinkets suitable for wooing jarya companions; a flower seller who had given good advice about a certain herbal that gave off an arousing perfume; the cockfights and horse races meant to take place on Festival Third Day; the demise of their favorite rice-wine seller in an unexpected fall from the upper story of his warehouse; the preparations of one of their party for his appearance in a talking line on the last night of the festival, which mostly had a great deal to do with properly gathering and sewing together stiff nai leaves to make the traditional bristling wrist guards.

These young men, like all the rest of the early-morning travelers and indeed most of Olossi's population, were ignorant of the magnitude of the threat that stride by stride marched nearer. It seemed Olossi's council really did like to hoard its secrets, even when knowledge might save lives. It did not, on the whole, make him trust them, neither the Greater Houses or the Lesser.

"Look! There!" said the fourth young man, who up until now had said the least.

They had gone a ways up the slope and could look back with enough command of the height that the wide plain and the curves of the river winding through it made a striking scene. Sunlight glittered on the river. The sea was a vast sheet of calm water, bluest beyond the delta's mouth. Over Olossi, a reeve circled, dipped, and descended for a landing.

Joss swung around to look up along the road. A fair stretch ahead of them, where the going got steepest, a rider moved at a leisurely pace. The rider was leading two spare horses, one of which had the bulky outline of an animal laden with supplies. As he watched, she reached the turn where the road bent sharply right to run east parallel below the escarpment.

To his companions he said, "Let's get moving."

43

Horas spent a dreary evening stuck in hall while Master Yordenas made him repeat his report twice like a simpleton who couldn't understand two words rubbed together, and while the party of four argued. At length it was agreed that someone really had to go back to Olossi to make sure the mercenaries got the hells out of town and well away from anyplace where they might have a hand in disrupting the larger plan.

"There aren't many of them," said Horas. "I don't see why they're such a threat."

"Ten would be too many," said Toban. "You were given strict instructions."

"We'll have to send a reeve to oversee their departure," said Weda. "You ought to go, Horas. You know the Olossi council master better than the rest of us do."

"You just don't want to stir your fat ass out of here," he retorted. But he thought of the Devouring girl, and stirred restlessly in his chair. Yet those thoughts drew up from the well of his memory the stark gaze of that woman under the awning, the clerk with her brush and blank scroll. Her gaze had left him raw and shriveled. "Let someone else go. I'm due a break from running messages."

He pushed back from the table and took his leave. He thought of checking in on Tumna, but there were loft masters, the hall's chief fawkner and his assistants, to tend to injured birds. Anyway, he was tired and cranky. Before the lamps could burn dry, he retired to his usual cot in the barracks. The musty smell of his mattress, the angle of the wedge propped under his neck, the feel of his beads wrapping his wrists: these brought sleep and chased away bad dreams.

In the morning, he woke with a clear head and a niggling sense of disgust with himself. What a fool he was to have let that Devouring girl get away without paying for her passage! Thinking of her got him stiff all over again. He was no better than a child, flinching at shadows. Indeed, he could not really identify what had gotten into him yesterday. Likely it was sour wine curdled in his stomach whose gassy effusions had made him believe that a gaze from a meek clerk had power beyond what was natural. Strange how a good night's rest and a comfortable meal could set things right.

He rose early and told Toban that it was best for he himself to go back and personally supervise Master Feden and the council. "I'll even follow the troop for a day, make sure they're really getting gone."

"No matter to me who goes," said Toban. "You might think about giving that eagle of yours some rest, though."

"Yah. Yah."

Toban was a withered stick who hadn't any juice left in him. He wouldn't understand about lusting after a woman, the kind you didn't get a chance to gorge on more than once or twice in your life. Tumna was ragged, surly, and slow from the oversized feeding the chief fawkner had stupidly insisted on last night, but she was strong enough for another day of flying.