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accurate imitation of Fargin Graw feeling sorry for himself.
    Rudy sighed and slumped against the bricks of the beehive hearth. “You ever ride north into the lands of the Ice?”
    The young warrior elevated a frost-pale brow in mild surprise. “Life among the tribes is difficult enough,” he said. “Why would anyone ask further trouble by going there?”
    “People do,” said Seya, an older woman with short-cropped gray hair.
    “Not my people.”
    “Well,” Rudy said, “slunch is obviously arctic—at least it started to show up when the weather got colder.…”
    “But never was it seen near the lands of the Ice,” the White Raider pointed out logically. His long ivory-colored braids, weighted with the dried human finger-bones thonged into them, swung forward as he chaffed his hands before the fire. Like all the other Guards, he was bruised, face and arms and hands, from sword practice. It was a constant about them all, like the creak of worn leather harnesswork or the smell of wood smoke in their clothing. “Nor did our shamans and singers speak of such a thing. Might slunch be the product of some shaman’s malice?”
    “What shaman?” Rudy demanded wearily. “Thoth and the Gettlesand wizards tell me the stuff grows on the plains formiles now, clear up to the feet of the Sawtooth Mountains. Why would any shaman lay such a … a limitless curse?”
    The Icefalcon shrugged. As a White Raider, he had been born paranoid.
    “As for foods that will grow in the cold,” he went on, settling with a rag to clean the mud from his black leather coat, “when game ran scarce, we ate seeds and grasses; insects and lizards as well, at need.” Constant patrols in the cold and wind had turned the Icefalcon’s long, narrow face a dark buff color, against which his hair and eyes seemed almost white. Rudy observed that even while working, the Icefalcon’s right hand never got beyond grabbing range of his sword. All the Guards were like that to a degree, of course, but according to Gil there were bets among them as to whether the Icefalcon closed his eyes when he slept.
    “Sometimes in days of great hunger we’d dig tiger-lily bulbs and bake them in the ground with graplo roots to draw the poison out of them.”
    “Sounds yummy.”
    “Pray to your ancestors you never discover how yummy such fare can be.”
    “We used to eat these things like rocks.” Rudy hadn’t heard Tir come up beside him. Small for his age and fragile-looking, Tir had a silence that was partly shyness, partly a kind of instinctive fastidiousness. Partly, Rudy was sure, it was the result of the subconscious weight of adult memories, adult fears.
    “They were hard like rocks until you cooked them, and then they got kind of soft. Mama—the other little boy’s mama—used to mash them up with garlic.”
    The Icefalcon raised his brows. He knew about the heritable memories—an old shaman of his tribe, he had told Rudy once, had them—and he knew enough not to put in words or questions that might confuse the child.
    Rudy said casually, “Sounds like …” He didn’t know the word in the Wathe. “Sounds like what we call potatoes, Ace. Spuds. What’d that little boy call them?”
    Tir frowned, fishing memories chasms deep. “Earthapples.”He spoke slowly, forming a word Rudy had never heard anyone say in the five years of his dwelling in this world. “But they raised them in water, down in the tanks in the crypt. Lots and lots of them, rooms full of them. They showed that little boy,” he added, with a strange, distant look in his eyes.
    “Who showed him, Ace?”
    Melantrys, a curvy little blonde with a dire-wolf’s heart, was offering odds on the likelihood of Graw finding a reason not to send up any of the hay that was part of the Settlements’ tribute to the Keep come July—betting shirt-laces, a common currency around the watchroom, where they were always breaking—and there were shouts and jeers from that end of the room, so