To defend the weak and helpless—how much better could he do that by training others to do the same job? How could he allow anyone to send the weak and helpless—well, all right, the half-trained—out to throw themselves down and be trampled on, when he knew he could remedy the situation?

There was nothing dishonorable about taking that job. There was nothing honorable in refusing it.

Yes, but these are not your people… so where does your honor come into it? Or is there some reason why it doesn’t further break your vows to train Valdemarans?

But then came additional questions. When he already knew, from the evidence of his own experience, how utterly wrong some of the things he’d taken as truth were, why should it? When had that definition of “honor” ever demanded absolute adherence to the Sunpriests of Karse?

Just because the Sunpriests would have put any Valdemaran they found to the Fire and sword—well, he knew how wrong the Sunpriests could be. He had found a Sunpriest here, an upright man who everything in him cried out to trust, who had told him in no uncertain words that the Valdemarans were good and true, and that it was his duty to Vkandis Himself to ally himself with them. So where did that leave his vows and his honor?

He did not realize how fast he had walked, or how far, until an angry snort brought his attention back to his surroundings.

He looked up, and found he was in the middle of a meadow or clearing, ringed with trees. From where he stood, he could see some lights, a few, through the trees to his right, but otherwise he could just as well have been in the middle of a meadow in farming country.

The snort had come from a very large, white, four-legged creature just under the trees in front of him. It moved out into the moonlight, and quickly resolved itself into a familiar shape.

A Companion. It wasn’t Kantor; it wasn’t stocky enough, and besides, it didn’t “feel” like Kantor. There was, in fact, a disturbing absence of feeling about this Companion, as if there was a wall between him and it.

A moment later, it was joined by a second—then a third, a fourth, and a fifth. They moved toward him, slowly, but deliberately, and he hadn’t spent most of his life around horses not to recognize the menace in their movement. Every muscle was tense. They weren’t so much walking as stalking toward him, their narrowed eyes glittering in the moonlight. There was no mistaking their hostility, and he was the object of it.