Her thought of them might have summoned them; they made no noise on the stairs with their soft boots, but she heard their distinctive chatter echoing up the shaft of the staircase long before she saw them.

“Heyla, cousin!” Istren, one of the two horse-trainers along this year and the only one of the three who was actually related to her by blood, sprang into the room as if he were taking it by storm. He was followed at a more sedate pace by the other trainer, Sa‘dassan, and the shaman-in-training, Kra’heera. Where Istren boasted the dusky-gold skin of his Shin‘a’in father, and his father’s black hair, his mother’s startling green eyes flashed at Kero with excitement.

“Second cousin, to be precise,” Sa‘dassan said mildly, her Shin’a‘in blue eyes as tranquil as a cloudless sky. “And both a Captain of the Company and your elder. A little more respect, youngling.”

Istren ignored her; when a normally reserved Shin‘a’in became excited, it was pretty hard to get them calmed down. “Have you heard, Cousin Kero? Have you seen? What do you know about these North men, these Valdemar men?”

For one startled moment, Kero thought he was talking about her dream and Eldan, and her tongue seemed glued to the roof of her mouth. But Kra‘heera solved her dilemma for her, by snorting, “What, do you think she is a mage, like our uncle? She can’t possibly know anything—these Valdemar men have only just arrived.”

She shook herself out of her paralysis. “What Valdemar men?” she asked.

“We have heard, heard only, that there are men from the North come to buy all that we will sell them,” Sa‘dassan said, with a fine precision of speech. “We wish you to come and look at these men. You can speak their tongue and say the things that will call the thoughts that we wish to read to the surface of their minds like little fish to crumbs on the stream. Kra’heera can then judge of their thoughts. And, perhaps, you also, for you had converse with one of their kind before, not so?”

“I did,” she said, slowly. “The man that I knew, if he is a good representative of his people, was a good and honest man, and one who would treat your jel‘sutho’edrin as children of his own heart and hearth. But he was only one man.”

“Exactly so,” Sa‘dassan replied. “Will you come with us, cousin?”

“I think I had better,” Kero replied, catching up her weapons-belt from the back of her chair, and buckling it on. “There’s a saying among the meres, you know—‘When the wind blows folk out of Valdemar, prepare for heavy weather.’ They tend not to stray too far from their borders.”