He didn’t miss her smile of triumph, not that it mattered. She wasn’t going to get off as easily as she thought; there might not be fighting practice, but she was going to find herself training until she was in far better physical shape than she’d ever been in her life. There would be extra riding classes for one thing; if her Companion was going to be running, she had better be in shape to stick with him, no matter what he had to do to get away. And if she was going to count on being able to run away, Alberich was going to make her into a competitive foot racer, whether she liked it or not.

Some of that clumsiness, at least, can be trained away.

She followed him into his living quarters; Dethor wasn’t there at the moment. One of the Healers was trying a new treatment for his swollen joints, a course of bee venom, for beekeepers swore that the stings of their charges kept the ailment away from them. By now, Dethor’s bones were painful enough that he was more than willing to tolerate even the stings of angry bees in hopes of getting some relief.

As a reward for his cooperation, he’d get a massage with hot stones and a treatment for his hands of hot sand afterward, something that did give him consistent relief, even if it was only temporary.

Myste took one of the chairs in front of the window; Alberich sat opposite her. “We need to think,” he told her. “We need to find a way to make the things you can do into weapons. Running, for instance.” He pondered that for a while. “I’ll trade you saying for saying—in the hills in Karse there’s a proverb, ‘The hound that chases two hares catches neither.’ If you are going to run—we need to contrive a way that you can create more than one thing for your pursuers to go after.”

“Dropping my packs—” she began.

“But what if there is something in your packs that you’ve been entrusted with?” he countered. “What if it’s in the winter, with no Waystations near? If you drop your packs, you won’t have what you need to survive. It won’t do you much good to escape from bandits only to freeze to death in a blizzard.” He brooded over the idea for a moment, then the answer came to him. “I think we should add a bit of extra equipment specifically for you—packs and belt pouches that you’re meant to throw away.”

“What?” she asked. “Stuffed with straw or the like?”