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mare, but for me to be spending…”
    “I say you should,” Tristen objected.

    Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles
    “It’s very good in ye, m’lord, but ’at’s household money, which I ain’t for spendin’.”
    “You need another horse.”
    “If I need another horse, it’s a good stout-legged gelding I’d be usin’ next spring an’ not bring Gia across the river. An’ I can wait for a foal of hers when things settle. ’T is pure folly to be buying any forty-silver mare, m’lord, the likes of me—”
    “A captain.”
    “As ye say, m’lord, but a poor ’un.”
    “You like her,” Tristen said, and true, Uwen’s hand had stolen to Liss’s neck, and his hands said yes while his look argued glum refusal.
    “Ain’t practical,” was Uwen’s word on it. “Ain’t in the least practical.”
    The argument always came to that.
    “She moves well,” Lusin said.
    “Aye,” Uwen said, sighing, “but too fine for me.”
    And so it usually went. Uwen fell to discussing a foal from his bay mare, and her fine points, and the mileposts came. Tristen, distracted, let the conversation slip past him.
    It was not that the world in general had taken on that hollow grayness of wizardry at work. He felt no insistence of ghosts, and his perceptions stayed anchored easily and solidly to the road while the men talked of horses. All signs assured him that the world was in good order. Yet since his flight on the hilltop, his furtive peek Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles from moment to moment into Amefel, he kept slipping just slightly toward that grayness both he and wizards could reach.
    He had begun to look for something, he knew not what, searching with an awareness dulled by doubts and distracted by colors and movement and the occasionally puzzling discussion of foal-getting around him. That gray place was wizardry, or something like it, and he was reluctant to use it. Emuin strongly warned him against it. He ought to take interest in the business of mares and foals and all the disturbing questions of life beginning—but this summer , Uwen said, and this summer remained gray to him, without detail or shape or substance. He felt afraid when he thought of it—he felt guilty at treading into that gray space that waited there—guilty at any use of the Sight he did have. Emuin had forbidden it.
    True, Ylesuin would surely have gone down to defeat by sorcery if he had not been on Lewen field at Cefwyn’s side, and if the other lords of Ylesuin preferred not to acknowledge that fact as yet, he knew in his heart that the danger to the realm was not done. Sorcery might not rear up again into the threat they had faced at the end of summer, when shadows had gathered thick and threatening under the leaves of Marna Wood. The enemies they faced in Elwynor now were only Men, not shadows, but they were still fierce enemies who might at any moment resort to wizardry to prevent a Guelen incursion into Elwynor, and the uneasiness that had assailed him on the hilltop nagged at him like a stealthy movement at the edge of his sight.
    Such ventures, free of Emuin’s witness, were rare and brief. He worried at the gray space with some furtive sense of need, for if he Cherryh, C J - Fortress 02- Fortress of Eagles was distracted by the men around him now, the town toward which he was riding all but blinded him. With its noise and its strangeness, its textures, its smells, its clatter and its truths and its pretenses, it posed a barrier surer than Emuin’s prohibitions.
    He had been afraid on the hilltop. He asked himself now was there a reason for the fear, or was it only the realization of so many questions, so many, many questions about the world which would never find an answer if this year was all he was to have, and if all of the days he did have left were to be spent either sitting in his room or taking brief rides in the company of these men, on permitted roads?
    He longed for a wider freedom. In his