Olver gave him an accusatory look, but a moment later he whipped around to give Frielle an insolent grin he had picked up somewhere. It looked odd with his big ears and wide mouth; he was never going to be a handsome lad. “I will sit quietly if I can look at your eyes. You have beautiful eyes.”

Frielle had a lot of her mother in her, and not just her looks. She laughed sweetly and chucked him under the chin, making him blush. Her mother and the big-eyed young woman smiled at the tabletop.

Shaking his head, Mat started up the stairs. He had to speak to the boy. He could not just grin like that at every woman he saw. And telling a woman she had beautiful eyes! At his age! Mat did not know where Olver got it.

As he came abreast of Nalesean, the man said, “They have sneaked away again, haven’t they.” It was not a question, and when Mat nodded, he gave his pointed beard a yank and cursed. “I’ll assemble the men, Mat.”

Nerim was fussing about Mat’s room, wiping the table with a cloth as if the maids had not dusted this morning already. He shared a smaller room next door with Olver, and rarely left The Wandering Woman. Ebou Dar was dissolute and uncivilized, he claimed.

“My Lord is going out?” Nerim said lugubriously as Mat picked up his hat. “In that coat? I fear there is a wine stain from last night on the shoulder. I would have removed it if my Lord had not donned the garment in haste this morning, and a gash in the sleeve—from a knife, I believe—that I would have mended.”

Mat let him bring out a gray coat with silver scrolls embroidered on the cuffs and high collar and gave him the gold-embroidered green.

“I trust my Lord will at least try not to get blood on it today. Bloodstains are very difficult to remove.”

It was a compromise they had worked out. Mat put up with Nerim’s dismal face and gloomy observations, and let the man fetch, clean and hand him things he could just as easily pick up himself; in return Nerim agreed, reluctantly, not to try actually dressing him.

Checking the knives snugged up his sleeves, under his coat and in the turned-down tops of his boots, Mat left his spear leaning in the corner with his unstrung bow and went down to the front of the inn. That spear seemed to draw idiots who wanted to fight the way honey drew flies.