Ritva shrugged and made a slight moue of distaste. “The little orch was a Cutter. I’ve hardly ever met a Cutter I didn’t want to kick to death, and I’ve met quite a few. And my father had a saying . . . I’m not old enough to remember him saying it but Aunt Astrid is . . . that you should always kick a man when he’s down. It’s much easier then.”

“You don’t think he’ll come after you?”

“Probably not. He might have if I’d left it at the playful little tweak to the crotch. But as Dad said, if you leave the mark of your boot-leather on a man’s face, he’s going to remember who won the fight every single day.”

She added parenthetically: “Men are sort of silly that way. You have to . . . to . . . be firm with them sometimes. Not sensible ones like you, of course.”

Ian nodded, giving her an odd look. Then he said: “Should we be looking around ourselves so much? I mean, it’s a big city but we’re supposed to be natives.”

“No, we’re supposed to be hicks from the backlands,” Ritva said. “Believe me, we’d stand out if we didn’t gawk.”

“It is big, bigger than Lethbridge. I’ve never seen anything this size. Amazing! It reminds me of my parents’ stories about Edmonton. They lived there before the Change, then they got out early and went to join my uncle on the farm up in the Peace River country. Is Portland this big?”

“Boise’s even bigger than Portland. By about a quarter, say seventy thousand people. Only half the size of Des Moines, but that’s just ridiculously big, like everything there. Iowa gave me hives.”

It had been only two years since the Quest passed through Boise, and much remained the same; people still moved with a brisk purposefulness, there was less noise than you’d expect, and squads swept up even the horse dung almost as soon as it fell.

But some things have changed, oh, yes.

The big, vividly tinted posters on four-sided hoardings still marked every crossroad within, color lithographs of the type you might see advertising a merchant venturer’s ship fitting out in Newport or an upcoming tournament or guild festival in Portland. But the emphasis was very different. Before, they’d mostly been of implausibly square-jawed men and women doing various tasks; soldiers, of course, but also nurses, farmers, smiths, weavers, potters, scholars, mothers, all looking forward with set purpose and some patriotic slogan below to complement the industriously patriotic things they were doing above.

Now they came in only two varieties. One showed the faces of President-General Martin Thurston and the starved-wolf, shaven-headed countenance of the Prophet Sethaz, both looking off into a distance of blue sky and white clouds and glowing sunlight. Beneath the picture was printed:

TOGETHER WE ASCEND in great block capitals.