“Only so, I alert and awake will be, when first arrives the class,” Alberich replied dryly. Dethor chuckled under his breath, got stiffly out of his chair, and shuffled off into the shadows. Alberich sagged back into his own chair, but in the next moment, he was on his feet, staring broodingly into the fire. He wasn’t tired, not even physically—that single workout with the young Guardsman had been good, but he was used to that sort of exercise all day long. When he wasn’t drilling or actually fighting, he was riding, in all weathers, without the luxury of hot meals and showering baths. He was used to going perpetually short of sleep; riding before dawn and not finding his bedroll until after he’d stood first watch. When he got a bath, it was usually out of a stream or a rain barrel. When he got a meal, it was field rations augmented by whatever someone had managed to shoot or buy from a farmer.

No, he wasn’t tired, not physically, and certainly not mentally. He hadn’t heard anything in the back of his head from Kantor for a while, not since that class of children at archery practice. On the whole, that suited him. Kantor was very facile, very persuasive, and he didn’t want any interference with his own thoughts right now. He wanted to work through them on his own.

He turned away from the fire, clasped his hands behind his back, and began to pace up and down the long sitting room. He didn’t trouble to light any of the lamps; he was used to firelight, and his night vision was very good.

A suite of rooms—even a bed—I haven’t slept in a bed for so long that it’s going to feel strange. The last time he’d been in a bed—the one at the House of Healing didn’t count—had been just over a year ago, and he hadn’t had possession of it for more than a single watch before he’d been turned out by the man he was relieving. It hadn’t been much of a bed, just a sack filled with straw in a box on four legs, but it had been better than sleeping in the mud that had passed for ground around there.

Beds, hot meals, willing pupils to teach. Pupils who, with rare exceptions, were singularly devoid of “attitude.” Oh, this place, these people—they were so very seductive! If he could have said, “This is what is wrong with my life, and this, and I would change this, and this is what I want above all else—” and then have all of that come to pass in a single stroke, this is what he would have picked as the way to spend the rest of his life.