“If she will talk to me,” Kieri said. Bitterness flooded him again. “She can always hide there, in the elvenhome … and she has been doing just that.”

“It must be settled,” the Seneschal said. “It must be settled for the good of the realm … that is what the bones want, I am sure.”

“I will speak to Orlith,” Kieri said. “Or any elf I can find.”

But when he looked, he found none. Not Orlith, not Amrothlin his own uncle, none of them. His half-elven Squires, when he asked, said they thought all the elves were having a meeting in the elvenhome.

Vonja, in Aarenis

Three days before the contract was over, Arcolin camped outside the walls of Cortes Vonja and went into the city to deal with the Cortes Vonja Council. As he expected, they were not pleased that he hadn’t eliminated the threat, but after some hours, during which he showed the maps, the daily journal of activities, and the number of enemy killed, they agreed that he had done as well as a small force could. He turned in the money taken from the fallen brigands and the counterfeiting dies they’d found, as well as the ten Cortes Vonja pikes. They stared at those last as if they were vipers, not needing to be told what it meant that their weapons had shown up in enemy hands.

“We could hire you until the Fall Evener,” one councilman said.

“No,” Arcolin said. “I must attend Autumn Court in Tsaia; my king commands it. And I have scarce time to travel there as it is.”

“How long will you be here, then?”

“Only long enough to let the men spend a little money and complete the business I have with those who helped my sergeant.”

With coinage the banker considered legitimate, Arcolin paid the troops enough to let them go—one tensquad at a time—into the city for a few hours, while he visited Marshal Harak and the others.

“I’d like to see him again,” Harak said. “I’m sure Tir’s Captain would, too.”

“I’ll tell him,” Arcolin said.

“What’s this about the Blind Archer?”

“You’ve heard of that?”

“It was all over the market last week: the Blind Archer has returned. I thought at once of Stammel, but surely—”

“He can shoot a crossbow,” Arcolin said. “And when we were attacked, he stood there in the open and called out that he was the Blind Archer—I’d never heard that story—and shot the first man that yelled at him. And then others. Eventually about half of the attackers fled. Don’t ask me how—it must have been the gods.”

“Hmm.” Harak turned and pulled a ragged scroll from the stuffed pigeonholes in his office. “It’s in here: Cornlyn’s Instructive Stories. Sometimes it’s told of Falk, but in this …” He unrolled the scroll, frowning. “Here. Balester of Gaona—not on any map we have—being blinded and exiled by the malice of Tagrin for having failed to kill the princeling and heir of the former and rightful king as ordered but instead placing him in safe fosterage, learned archery by the grace of the Master Archer and returned to kill the said Tagrin of hated memory, to the glory of the Lord of Justice and as proof that no infirmity need make a man—or woman—incapable of serving the right.” He rolled the scroll again. “A southern tale; I doubt Gird ever heard it, but I’ve used it in homilies. So did my predecessor. And so now Stammel thinks he’s the Blind Archer?”