She walked to the Brick House; it was an ordinary two-story dwelling of red brick with a shingle roof, substantial but not really large, disassembled in some wrecked suburb and rebuilt here. The current General-President had a much more extensive suite in the Citadel, and another in a fortress south of town. A pair of soldiers stood at the steps that led up to the verandah, big concave oval shield on shoulder and six-foot javelins braced to the side, armor and the brass eagles and thunderbolts on the shields polished blazingbright. Their eyes followed her, but neither moved until she reached the steps.

Then they both turned in, and the spears moved out to make an X in front of her.

“Name and business,” one of them said crisply.

“Wanda Meeker,” Ritva said. I’ve got more names than the Lady these days! “Delivery from Ayers Produce.”

They looked her over, checked the basket with its two dozen eggs in straw and bricks of butter wrapped in coarse paper on a lump of ice in a clay cup, and one of them said: “Pass.”

Then they turned back, with a crisp stamp of hobnails and a toss that sent their spears turning and then slapping back into the callused hands. It was discipline for discipline’s sake, but oddly impressive. Ritva remembered how she’d walked up these steps the last time—in Dúnedain formal blacks with the crowned silver Tree and Seven Stars on her jerkin, Mary and the other questers at her side. Then she’d been Lawrence Thurston’s honored guest after Rudi and Edain saved his life, about to set out on a path that led to the battle at Wendell and the ruler’s own death.

Now . . . she pulled the bell-handle. The string attached to it yielded with a feeling of weight on the end that ran through a copper tube into the house. Bells tinkled, and she heard slow footsteps and a shadow behind the beveled glass panels of the door before it opened.

“Did I order this?” Cecile Thurston said. “I suppose I did. Come in, come in.”

Ritva blinked, shocked. She remembered Lawrence Thurston’s wife as a quiet woman who’d radiated both strength and warmth and showed a flash of cutting wit now and then; she’d been educated in some profession that the Ranger didn’t remember, before the Change. Now there was little of the light brown left in her hair as she stood in the door of the Brick House, and the gray that had spread to most of it seemed dull. So did her own blue eyes.