‘I’m more or less used to mine,’ Ulath told her.

‘You may be, Ulath, but it might startle the Zemochs.’

The five knights and Berit removed their formal armour – the knights with a certain relief and Berit with obvious reluctance. Then they pulled on their only slightly less uncomfortable chain-mail and lastly the Styric smocks.

Sephrenia looked at them critically. ‘Leave your swordbelts on over the smocks for now,’ she said. ‘I doubt that the Zemochs have any really set customs about how they wear their weapons. If we find out differently later, we can make adjustments. Now, stand still, all of you.’ She went from man to man, touching their faces and repeating the same Styric incantation for each of them.

‘It doesn’t seem to have worked, Lady Sephrenia,’ Bevier said, looking around at his companions. ‘They all still look the same to me.’

‘I’m not trying to disguise them from you, Bevier,’ she smiled. She went to her saddlebag and took out a small hand-mirror. ‘This is how the Zemochs will see you.’ She handed him the mirror.

Bevier took one look and then made the sign to ward off evil. ‘Dear God!’ he gasped, ‘I look hideous!’ He handed the mirror quickly to Sparhawk, and Sparhawk examined his strangely altered face carefully. His hair was still horse-tail black, but his weathered skin had become pale, a racial characteristic of all Styrics. His brows and cheekbones had become prominent, almost rough-hewn. Sephrenia, he noted with a certain disappointment, had left his nose as it was. As much as he told himself that he really didn’t mind the broken nose all that much, he nonetheless found that he had been curious to find out just how he might appear with a straight one for a change.

‘I’ve made you resemble a pure Styric strain,’ she told them. ‘It’s common enough in Zemoch, and I’m more comfortable with it. The sight of a mixed Elene and Styric nauseates me, for some reason.’

Then she extended her right arm, spoke at some length in Styric and then gestured. A dark spiral band that looked much like a tattoo encircled her forearm and wrist and culminated in an amazingly life-like representation of a snake’s head on her palm.

‘There’s a reason for that, I suppose,’ Tynian said, looking curiously at the marking.

‘Of course. Shall we go then?’

The border between Pelosia and Zemoch was ill-defined, seeming to lie along a meandering line marked by the end of the tall grass. The soil to the east of that line was thin and rocky, and the vegetation stunted. The dark edge of a coniferous forest lay a mile or so up the steep slope. When they had covered perhaps half that distance, a dozen riders in dirty white smocks emerged from the trees and approached them.