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world’s stage, looked off into the distance. He forced himself to simply observe. Wringing his hands wasn’t in his nature.
    Then again, neither was interfering. The world was full of good and evil and both were necessary. After all, if there were no evil, what would there be for good men to fight?
    He had already interfered more than he could bear to, even if his only contribution to the upcoming events had been a casual remark about the desirability of sword skill, made to a man who certainly would have agreed. But it had been more interference than he was comfortable with, which meant that he would be stringently limiting himself to nothing more than observation in the future, no matter what hung in the balance.
    It was up to others now to see to the measure.

T wo

    T he carriage lurched to a stop, but given that it had lurched almost continually since Aisling had climbed inside it, breathless and convinced she wouldn’t live to see the end of the night much less the end of the journey, another bit of jostling wasn’t terribly surprising.
    The door was wrenched open.
    “Last stop,” a deep voice said shortly. “Everyone out so as I can be cleaning the seats ye’ve no doubt befouled.”
    Aisling found herself taken by the arm, pulled from the carriage, and sent on her way.
Sent
was perhaps too polite a term for it. She was hurled away from the door. She caught herself before she went sprawling, then turned around, intending to protest her treatment, only to find her arms full of her pack that had been sent her way from its recent position on top of the carriage.
    Perhaps
sent
was still the wrong word to be using. It had been flung at her so forcefully that she had caught it out of instinct, then found herself knocked off her feet by the weight of it. Perhaps thatwouldn’t have been so bad in and of itself save for the fact that she had been knocked not only upon her backside but upon her backside in a puddle of—
    She looked down, then decided perhaps it was best not to examine too closely what she was sitting in. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t seen muck and horse leavings in the street before. Somehow, though, sitting in it and wiping it from her eyes whilst trying to recover from a journey that had seemed to go on forever left her wondering why it was she had been so desperate to leave the Guild.
    After all, she had been weaving for so long that it took no thought. She could have been sitting comfortably—well, uncomfortably, actually—on a hard wooden bench, creating rough cloth for equally oppressed seamstresses who would in turn fashion it into equally ugly clothes to be worn by those who couldn’t afford better. At least she would have been warm—mostly—and dry—definitely—and not hungry. Well, not too hungry. It was true that after years and years of nothing but gruel and the occasional bowl of rather nasty vegetables to stave off scurvy that she had begun to crave even the cheapest of pub fare. It was astonishing, actually, that somehow that seemed preferable to sitting in the middle of a muddy street that was sporting smells she couldn’t—and didn’t want to—identify.
    Not to mention the fact that the weaving mistress would have still been alive…
    Aisling heaved her pack aside and crawled to her feet. She was in Istaur and there was no turning back. All she could do was press on, see to her quest, then take the rest of her life and do something with it worth the sacrifice that had been made on her behalf.
    And when she was capable of thinking on it, she would wonder why the weaving mistress had been near the border at just the moment when she had been most needed.
    She thought without fondness about the events that had followed that bit of unexpected aid. Just getting herself and her heavy pack to the carriage had been almost impossible. She’d run along a deeply rutted road in utter darkness, cutting her hands and knees when she’d fallen, wrenching her back when she’ddragged