“You’re not stupid, Arvid,” Marshal Porfur said. “That’s one of the things that’s worried me, how smart you are. Intelligent men think up ways to get themselves in tangles a stupid man would never imagine. But if you’re hearing voices—and more, if you’re really hearing Gird…” He shook his head. “You said you called on Gird today: tell me about that.”

“He told me to,” Arvid said. He told the rest, including his impatient reaction. “But I knew I wouldn’t get to the children in time. So I asked—”

Told.

“I guess it was more like … told him … to do something.”

“You would,” Marshal Porfur said. He was not laughing. “Arvid … if indeed Gird speaks so to you, then you are beyond my guidance. No—” He held up his hand as if Arvid had spoken. “You are not yet ready to make all your own interpretations, but you are beyond my guidance. You need to be instructed by a High Marshal, at least. Perhaps the Marshal-General. I think you should go to Fin Panir.”

“Go—but—” You just told me to stay, he almost said, but managed to shut it off.

“The difficulty will be getting you past Valdaire, I’m sure—”

“But—go now—?”

“You wanted to leave now anyway, didn’t you?”

“There’s … there’s my … he may be my … son.”

Marshal Porfur nodded. “You’ll want him safe with you. Where is he now?”

“Marshal Steralt in Valdaire found him a place.”

“I’ll send word to him for you. I’ll need to talk to your—to Count Arcolin. I should think the trouble’s done for today, don’t you?”

“Yes, Marshal.”

“Then come along to the grange; we’ll have our service of thanks. I’ll go with you to see the Count afterward.”

It seemed everyone involved and their families were packed into the grange that hot midafternoon: Regar and his whole family, the other men, even the mule team’s owner, who had stopped grumbling about the damage to his wagon when the Marshal pulled him aside on the way to the grange. Someone must have run to the camp, because a squad of Fox Company soldiers and Count Arcolin were there, too, at the last moment.

He would have scoffed at Marshal Porfur’s words a season ago. Porfur pounded his points home with repetition: this was the Fellowship’s duty, to respond to threats to the community, and they should remember this day whenever trouble came. By standing together … and so on. Now it seemed much less fussy and overblown. Now he had seen for himself what it meant, and he stood silent and sweating with the others, listening to Porfur, feeling a kinship with those he’d despised.