Lawrence Thurston helped build this house with his own hands—she told me that, and he shrugged and laughed and they looked at each other. Hard enough to lose your man like that, but to have him killed by one of your sons would make it altogether worse. It’s probably a good thing she has daughters to worry about.

And there was little energy in the way she walked. In the kitchen her two daughters were sitting at the table busy at what looked like schoolwork; one of them jumped up to take the basket and transfer its contents to a big icebox, made from a cut-down refrigerator in the usual way. They didn’t look much different from what she remembered, skins of dark-olive shade and tightly curled hair, the elder round-faced and the younger thinner. Their faces were drawn with worry, though, and there was a wariness to their eyes that hadn’t been there before. The kitchen smelled pleasantly of soap and wax and the roses and dahlias which stood in vases on the window-ledges, and faintly of cooking.

And there was a pregnant blond woman sitting at the table too, with a two-year-old boy squatting on the tile floor by her side and a cup of chicory non-coffee before her. She was extremely pretty, but slightly puffy around the eyes, which were a little bloodshot too.

Juliet Thurston! Ritva thought, keeping her face bovine-calm and uninterested. Rhaich, Rhaich! Siniath faeg!

She mentally added a phrase which translated literally into the Common Tongue as: An individual excessively attached to their mother in a carnal manner who is also the offspring of a female Warg.

The tired eyes scanned across her listlessly, then came back. The wife of the ruler of Boise yawned and said: “Lawrence, go play in the living room.”

“No!” the boy said.

Lawrence Jr. was a handsome-looking lad, and he grinned with a gap in his white teeth as he used a two-year-old’s favorite word; both his parents were well made, with the long-limbed build he showed promise of. His eyes were a brightly alert dark blue, and his hair curly and brown with light streaks from the summer sun. He was clad in a miniature version of Boise’s army uniform, complete with small boots.

“Lawrence, do I have to tell you twice? The third time comes with a spank.”

“ ’Kay, Mom,” he said.

His air was cheerful, just a child whose attention had been gotten, and he picked up the painted wooden cavalrymen he had been marshaling and gallumphed out of the kitchen making horse-noises. The living room was visible from here, but far enough away that a soft-voiced conversation couldn’t be heard.

Ritva wasn’t openly armed; the little knife on her belt was the universal tool nearly everyone carried. The blade was only four inches long, but it was honed shaving-sharp, and it was good steel. A step, a blow, a slash . . .