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miles yonder.” I waved my knife along the trail. “About a mile of it up.”
    “A king is it?” He smiled. Handsome like Galen too, in that square-jawed blond manner that will turn a girl’s head. “Old Renar didn’t count himself a king.”
    I started to hate him. And not just for the pun. “Count Renar held only the Highlands. King Jorg is heir to Ancrath and the lands of Gelleth. That’s enough land to make a king, at least in these parts.”
    I made show of peering at the fellow’s breastplate. He had dragons there, etched and enamelled in red, each rampant, clutching a vertical arrow taller than itself. Nice work. “Arrow is it you’re from, my lord?” I asked. Not waiting for an answer I turned to Makin. “Do you know why that land is named Arrow, Makin?”
    He shook his head and studied the pommel of his saddle. The need to say “this is a bad idea” twitched on his lips.
    “They say it’s called Arrow because you can shoot one from the north coast to the south,” I said. “From what I hear they could have called it Sneeze. I wonder what they call the man who rules there.”
    “You know a lot about heraldry, boy.” Eyes still calm. The manbeside him moved his hand to his sword, gauntlet clicking against the hilt. “They call the man who rules there the Prince of Arrow.” He smiled. “But you may call me Prince Orrin.”
    It seemed rash to be riding into another’s realm with fifty men, even fifty such as these. The very thing I had decided against for my own travels.
    “You’re not worried that King Jorg will take the opportunity to thin the field in this Hundred War of ours?” I asked.
    “If I were his neighbour, maybe,” the Prince said. “But killing me or even ransoming me to my enemies would just make his own neighbours more secure and better able to harm him. And I hear the king has a good eye for his own chances. Besides, it would not be easy.”
    “I thought you came looking for a count, but now it seems you already know about King Jorg and his good eye,” I said. He came prepared, this one.
    The Prince shrugged. He looked young when he did it. Twenty maybe. Not much more. “That’s a handsome sword,” he said. “Show it to me.”
    I’d wrapped the hilt about with old leather and smeared that with dirt. The scabbard was older than me and shiny with the years. Whatever my uncle’s sword had been, it wasn’t handsome now. Not until I drew it and showed its metal. I considered throwing my dagger. Old blondie might not see so clear with it jutting out of his eye socket. He might even have a brother at home who’d be pleased to be the new Prince of Arrow and owe me a favour hereafter. I could see it in my mind’s eye. The handsome Prince with my dagger in his face, and us racing away across the slopes.
    I’m not given to should haves. But I should have.
    Instead I stowed the knife and drew my uncle’s sword, an heirloom of his line, Builder-steel, the blade taking the light of the day and giving it back with an edge.
    “Well now,” Prince Orrin said again. “An uncommon sword you have there, boy. From whom did you steal it?”
    The mountain wind blew cold, finding every chink in my armour, andI shivered despite the heat pulsing from Gog at my back. “Why would the Prince of Arrow come all the way to the Renar Highlands with just fifty knights, I wonder?” I dismounted. The Prince’s eyes widened at the sight of Gog left in the saddle, half-naked and striped like a tiger.
    I stood on one of the larger rocks by the roadside, on foot to show I had no running in me.
    “Perhaps such reasons are not for a bandit child by the roadside clutching a stolen sword,” he said, still maddeningly calm.
    I couldn’t argue with the “stolen” so I took offence against the “child.” “Fourteen is a man’s age in these lands and I wield this sword better than any who held it before me.”
    The Prince chuckled, gentle and unforced. If he had studied a book devoted to the art