“Excellent. Any more questions, Duncan?”

“No. What are we going to do with them, though?”

“We’ll leave them here with the horses and a few false memories to explain how they got them.”

“You’re going to let them have the horses,” Duncan said incredulously.

Morgan touched the boy’s forehead lightly and caught him as he crumpled, then picked him up to move him beside the other children.

“We can’t take them with us, it seems.”

“But—you’re encouraging their thievery!” Duncan began.

Morgan shrugged as he laid the boy beside the other children. “You heard what he said about why he was stealing the horses.”

“Yes. So that their father can join the bishops’ army and maybe kill us later on!”

“Not if we win over the bishops.” Morgan smiled as he smoothed a lock of hair off the boy’s forehead and straightened up.

“Feisty little devil, isn’t he?”

Duncan gave a grudging smile. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he were the one who bit me.”

“Humph, I’d probably have bitten you, too,” Morgan said. He touched the boy’s forehead again for just an instant, setting the memories straight, then pulled the saddlebags from his saddle and slung them over his shoulder with a grin.

“Ready to go sliding, Cousin?”

THE sliding about which Morgan joked so lightly came very near to costing them their lives. The portion of trail affected by the slide, though shorter by a third than they had been led to expect, was also at least twice as treacherous and steep. Besides being slick with sand and shale, it was also muddy.

Nor was this a thick mud, which might impede motion, should a climber start to slip. Instead, it was a viscous quagmire, capable of turning semi-liquid in the twinkling of an eye. Duncan’s saddlebags were lost in the crossing, and very nearly Duncan himself. But once the slope had been traversed, the way onward was as easy as the boy had predicted. When, around midafternoon, they reached the Dhassa side of Lake Jashan, they found it a comparatively easy task to slip through the gates among a group of new arrivals just off the ferries. Today and the next were market days, and there were, indeed, many strangers in Dhassa. Dhassa’s newest arrivals had little difficulty making their way from the gates to the crowded market square outside the Bishop’s Palace.

Morgan picked up several pieces of fruit from a market stall and flipped a small coin to the proprietor, then pushed his way back into the crowd and continued to watch and listen. He and Duncan had been in the square for nearly an hour now, mingling with the local citizens and asking the occasional question; but thus far, they had been unable to discover a way to get into the Bishop’s Palace undetected. It was essential that they guard their tongues, for there were soldiers scattered all through the crowded marketplace. But they dared not wait too long to act, or the square would clear with the coming darkness and they would risk exposure. As things now stood, they had no place to go once darkness fell.