It was early spring—or tail end of winter, take your choice. Raw weather, in any event, the trees still leafless, though there were a few, far too optimistic for his way of thinking, that were swelling into bud. The snow was gone, but a bite in the air and the snarl of the wind suggested that it wouldn’t be too wise to tempt fate by rejoicing aloud that it was gone. Half the days were clear and cold, half raining, that miserable, dripping rain that would come up without warning and then stay a week, and by the time it crawled away, half the Collegium would be down with head colds. It never stayed clear long enough for things to dry up, in any event, and it was a good thing that the Trainees’ uniforms were gray, because you couldn’t help ending up with mud from the eyebrows down by midday, no matter what you did. Tail end of winter, he would call it, for all that the days were longer, and you could, if you searched diligently, find a few foolhardy crocus and snowdrops coming up in the gardens.

Spring, and he hated to see it, because it meant at least another season of war. And Spring came sooner, the farther South you went. True, in the mountains at the Border, it actually came later, but once out of the mountains, or when you stuck to the valleys, Spring was well on the way.

Spring was no longer a season of hope and renewal, and had not been for some time. But would this be the last season of war, or only the latest? That was the question that hung suspended over his head like a sword.

For the past fortnight, he’d been running a cross-class with the Horsemanship teacher, an accelerated course in fighting while mounted, and each day it had taken most of a candlemark to clean Kantor up afterward; all the Companions had been mired to mid-flank and spattered above that line. He was cold as a frog, tired, and every time he licked his split lip, he tasted mud and blood. There was no other way of learning how to fight in this kind of muck except to do it, though, no matter how much everyone hated it. He was looking forward to a hot bath with utter longing, and he trudged into the quarters behind the salle, expecting only to see Dethor and perhaps get a little commiseration before he went back to see about that long soak in hot water.