Arvid could not quite settle to the routine; he was not used to the peace. Day after day, hands of days, passed with no apparent danger. Young Arvid throve, clearly happy here and finding friends in the grange. Arvid, too, began to find friends—friends of a kind he had never known, who were not potential rivals but just … friends.

He knew someone might still hunt him from Vérella or Valdaire. It would not be difficult to trace a man traveling with a boy … but would they bother? He would have bothered, given the assignment, but did they have someone that skilled? He could not count himself or the boy entirely safe, yet … and yet he found himself relaxing, though he continued his habit of listening to gossip in the city, watching for anything unusual, any sign that someone might be on their trail. The undercurrent of concern about magery he shrugged off as Girdish strictness. He was no mage, nor the boy, so it had nothing to do with him. Only the occasional mention of blood magery caught his attention, but he saw no indication that it existed here.

He even left off wearing his sword when he walked up the hill to the scribes’ hall in the mornings. Few people in Fin Panir wore swords in the city. It was not against the Code, but it was just another burden to carry and awkward at his desk. He felt naked the first time he went out without it, but nothing happened. He still took it to drill nights, as he was now instructing yeomen who wanted to learn that weapon. His cloak, its many pockets full of blades and tools, he folded into a box and kept under his bed; it was, he told himself, too hot to wear in the late summer heat. Only the knife in its thin sheath under his heart-hand shirtsleeve and the useful dagger everyone wore remained.

Drill with his group in the grange kept him fit; what he was learning as a scribe and as a student of Girdish law satisfied his need to learn and understand. He still found the bluntness, the lack of elegance, a bit boring. But … it was also comforting, as his friendship with Regar had been. To be accepted by ordinary men and women—to be admired for what he knew but not feared—was pleasant indeed.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Ifoss, Aarenis

Arcolin finished the day’s report just as Burek came to his tent.

“Captain, there’s a fellow out at the gate who says he knows you and must speak with you. From Horngard, he says.”

Arcolin’s stomach lurched. “Horngard? Did he give a name?”

“No, Captain. That’s why I made him wait outside the camp. Or I can bring him myself. He’s armed, but not like us. A short thrusting spear and a short curved blade. Do you think he’s one of Alured’s men?”