They both nodded; the Lord Chancellor had been opening a new file even as they left, gnawing absently on a heel of bread as he did.

The office building that he’d picked was a little out of the way and had been vacant since the Change, a low nondescript brick structure convenient because of its location, its position on the preventative maintenance list, and the fact that the pipes could be turned back on for city water. Huon was glad to be out of the slightly musty scent of a building unoccupied for twenty-five years. Most of the time his generation was thoroughly indifferent to the world before the Change, but settings like that could give you a slight subliminal knowledge that the present was built on the bones of six billion dead.

And . . .

Told everything! That’s a change from being treated like a mushroom, he thought, with a sudden eagerness. It’s going to be fun being the High Queen’s squire, but I’m still sort of burning a bit over the way we were kept in the dark about things. I suppose it was necessary, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. The Spider . . . the Lady Regent . . . is tighter with information than she is with money, and that’s saying something.

He felt a slight guilty spurt of pleasure when he thought of the letter of credit in his belt-pouch, after years on a close allowance while Barony Gervais was under Crown wardship. He could run amok through the quality armorers that catered to the nobility, even with the war. No need to accept good-enough Armory standard gear. It was even justified, since he was going to be a royal squire. He had to show well to do his patron credit!

And horses, he thought. A pair of rouncies and a good courser . . . maybe even a destrier—

Destriers were the ultimate luxury; they cost many times what a suit of plate armor did, and wore out much faster.

If I bought a young one, just out of a training farm, he would still be in his prime when I’m old enough to fight as a man-at-arms; that’s only three years or so from now . . . and he’d be really well-used to me by then.

Yseult gave him a sharp elbow in the ribs and he glared back; they knew each other too well to hide much, even of their thoughts. Then he smoothed his expression. He had a feeling that the elderly cleric didn’t miss much either.

Most of the gathering troops were passing directly east, or were being held in tented camps outside the city walls, but there were armed men in plenty—noblemen and officers clutching papers as often as swords, afoot or on horseback or in pedicabs, with sergeants on bicycles or trotting doggedly with a rasp of hobnails on asphalt and cement. Most of the traffic was freight, though; endless wagons of grain, barreled hardtack, racked armor, crossbows, and the salvage metal and timber and leather that the city’s craft guilds and factories would transform into the sinews of war.