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sighed.
    “We trust you. When will you go north?”
    “Soon,” said Orisian, and hoped it was true. “There is a great army here now. The Black Road will be defeated, and your way home will be opened. I will take you to Glasbridge myself. Soon.”
    “It must be soon. The enemy is on Fox land. Our spears are needed.”
    “We didn’t want to come here any more than you did,” Anyara muttered, ignoring Orisian’s warning glare. “We’d be back in Kolglas now if that Tal Dyreen hadn’t taken fright and shipped us down here instead.”
    Edryn Delyne, the captain who had given them passage away from Koldihrve, was long gone now, running across the west winds back towards the comforts of Tal Dyre. Their parting had not been on the best of terms. In the first day or two of the voyage he had exuded charm and solicitude. Everything changed once they encountered a boatload of fearful fishermen, who told Delyne that the Black Road had reached the sea and burned Glasbridge. He turned the ship towards Kolkyre and was deaf to all argument against his chosen course. Nothing, clearly, mattered to him save the safety of his precious ship and cargo. After that, Anyara had plagued him with accusations and invective, until Orisian had begun to worry for their safety.
    “It doesn’t matter how we ended up here,” Orisian said firmly. “We’re here now, and that’s the end of it. It won’t be for much longer. Ess’yr, tell me if you want anything. I’ll get it for you if I can.”
    She regarded him for a few moments, and he felt a familiar surge of pleasure and nervousness at being the object of that intense gaze.
    “Water,” she said at length. “Clean and fresh. They bring us wine. What good is wine?”
    “Somebody’ll have to find the cleanest of clean wells, if we’re to get them the kind of water they’re used to,” Orisian mused as he made his way downstairs with Anyara and Rothe.
    “Maybe so,” said Rothe. “I’ll sort out some proper food for them, though. I know what it is they’re wanting: roast meat, nuts, dried fish, that kind of thing. I’ll get the kitchen folk thinking straight about it.”
    Orisian smiled. His shieldman, once as suspicious and hostile towards Kyrinin as anyone else, had undergone a surprising transformation. He had fought alongside Varryn, and for a warrior that perhaps made all the difference.
    “What about Yvane?” Anyara asked. “Is she any happier than they are?”
    They stepped out onto the street, into the sharp, blustering breeze.
    “Not that I’ve noticed,” Orisian admitted. “She still hasn’t come out of her room in the Tower, as far as I know. Now there’s someone who really is sulking, I think.”
    As it sometimes did once Winterbirth was past, Kolkyre’s air in the next dawn had the tang of the sea on it. A salty mist settled over the roofs and alleyways; all the timbers and the stones of the town were damp with it. The sailors and fishermen called it the moir cest , this breath of the sea that drifted in off Anaron’s Bay, its name in the ancient language from which that of the Aygll Kingship, and later the Bloods, had grown. Its arrival in Kolkyre was held to be an ill omen for any undertaking. The longer the leaden fog persisted, the more downcast and querulous would the superstitious seamen who filled the dockside taverns become.
    Such concerns did not deter Old Cailla as she made her careful way down towards the quayside, a long yoke across her shoulders. She knew without doubt that a body’s fortune, whether good or ill, depended upon things other than the weather. She had lived more than three score years in Kolkyre, and seen the moir cest come and go hundreds of times. For the last thirty of those years, she had made this same journey every week, in rain and shine and storm alike: out from the servant’s quarters in the grounds of the Tower of Thrones, around the edge of the garrison’s barracks, then down the long straight slope of Sea Street