The savage training of the House of the Prophet in Corwin bit deep, and it marked a man more than the scars of fire. She let herself look alarmed and curious, with a bit of a gape; it was a mark of the discipline of the riders that not one of them turned his head aside to glance at a good-looking young woman. When the last of them rode by and the short train of two-wheel carts that carried their minimal bagged had passed she blew out her cheeks

“Those guys look serious,” Ian said quietly.

“Tell me. We had a bunch of them chase us from not far east of here all the way to Nantucket. Nothing stopped them except killing.”

“That frightened off the others?”

“No, I mean nothing stopped them except killing them all. All except the last five.”

“Determined.”

“Ai, you have no idea. There were over five hundred to begin with.”

“Very determined. So five gave up?”

“That was after my big brother had the Sword of the Lady. That can . . . do things . . . even to them.”

“Oh.”

“Note that the Sword of the Lady is a long way away from us, right now. But the Sword of the Prophet is right here, and so are some of the Seekers.”

“Yeah, that had occurred to me now and then.”

Traffic took a while to unsnarl, but eventually it started moving again and they crossed, over the tree-lined river and to the high steel portals of the gate-complex, then through its tunnel darkness and into the city. The city wall was high, about the same as Portland’s, but they hadn’t bothered coating it in stucco—old Lawrence Thurston had been an inhumanly businesslike man. She didn’t know if Boise really smelled a little worse than it had last time, or that was her imagination; it certainly wasn’t bad compared to some she’d sniffed, and positively fragrant next to the coal-smoke reek of giant Des Moines. There was no way to cram tens of thousands of human beings and their fires and forges and animals inside a wall and not have it smell bad to country-bred noses.

“Ah, the smell of civilization,” Ritva said.

Ian snorted, then said: “I think we drop off the sheep here inside the gate. Isn’t that the sign Woburn told us about? And I’d better become mute, it’s what it says on my draft exemption papers.”

A broad avenue led eastward from the river gate to a golden-domed building that had been the State capitol; the walled citadel that held the General-President’s residence was south of it.

Last time here I was an honored guest, when we were heading east to the Sunrise Lands. Now I’m a spy and I’ll be tortured and killed if they catch me. It’s an up-and-down life in the Dúnedain Rangers!