:Oh, don’t be so oversensitive! I won’t eavesdrop! You’ll just have to learn not to “shout” all your thoughts.:

Great, now he would have to watch, not only what he did and said, but what he thought. . . . This Herald business was getting more unpleasant all the time.

:It’s not like that, Skif,: she said coaxingly. :Really it isn’t. I was just teasing you.:

He found a smile starting, no matter how he tried to fight it down. How could he possibly stay angry with her? How could he even get angry with her? And maybe that was the point.

He wasn’t sure how long it had taken them to get from the park where he’d found her to the Way Station where they stopped, but it took them most of the morning to get back to Haven. The Guards on the walls paid absolutely no attention to him, although they had to have seen him careening down the road yesterday. Cymry didn’t volunteer any information as he craned his neck up to look at them, then bestowed a measuring glance at the two on either side of the passage beneath the wall. He wondered what they were thinking, and what they might have said or done yesterday.

They sure didn’t try to stop us, anyway. Not that it was likely that they’d have had much luck—not with only two Guards on the ground and Cymry able to leap a farm wagon without thinking about it. Maybe it was just as well they hadn’t tried. He might have ended up with both eyes blackened.

Once they got inside the city walls, though, people stopped paying as much attention to them. Well, that wasn’t such a surprise, people saw Heralds coming and going all the time in Haven. On the whole, he felt a bit more comfortable without so many eyes on him.

Their progress took him through some areas he wasn’t at all familiar with as they wound their way toward the Palace and the Collegia. He didn’t exactly have a lot to do with craftsmen and shopkeepers—his forte was roof walking and the liftin’ lay, not taking things from shops. That had always seemed vaguely wrong to him anyway; those people worked hard to make or get their goods, and taking anything from them was taking bread off their tables. Helping himself to the property of those who already had so much they couldn’t keep track of it, now, that was one thing—but taking a pair of shoes from a cobbler who’d worked hard to make them just because he took a fancy to them was something else again.