A horse and rider lay at the base of the slope. The man slapped his mount’s neck; the horse rose, and the man was in the saddle as it did, and trotting west a heartbeat after. His own men were out there, and the Sioux contingent under Rick Three Bears, and Ingolf’s wife Mary, and her followers—Dúnedain Rangers. Of which he supposed he was one too.

Sorta. Kinda.

“Go let ’em know, Mark,” Ingolf muttered. “I’ve got to see the local panjandrum.”

He walked down the slope, a big broad-shouldered man with a bear’s strength in his long limbs and thick shoulders. But he moved lightly, with a sort of lazy precision; his shaggy ear-length hair was sun-faded brown, his eyes dark blue in a weathered face that had been better looking before a broken nose and a fair assortment of scars, some showing as white hairs in his close-cropped beard. There was a sword by his side, the heavy horseman’s chopping blade known as a shete, and a bowie on the other hip, with the handle of a tomahawk tucked through a loop at the back.

None of the weapons clattered as he scooped up his helmet—a locally made sallet with a neck-flare—and trotted across the open grassland with the scabbard of the shete in his left hand. The black cottonwoods here were thicker than in the next valley over with the sheep, up to forty or fifty feet tall, with a dense understory along their edge. He slowed down as he approached them and waved his sword-hand to show it was empty.

Because there are a bunch of local yokels with crossbows there; I’m not coming back to the same spot I slipped out of. I don’t think some of them really grasp the distinction between stranger and enemy all that well. Christ . . . Manwë . . . but a lot of the peasants on these Association manors are more like turnips than people. And I thought we Readstowners were hicks!

“Come ahead!” someone said from ahead of him. “Slowly!”

He came ahead . . . slowly. Sure enough, two crossbows were pointed at him, and a bunch of spears with unpleasant foot-long heads sharpened until the naked metal gleamed. The men behind them were bearded if they were old enough for it, with fairly close-cropped hair; short hair was a lower-class marker here, like their shapeless linsey-woolsey shirt-tunics and wool pants and moccasinlike shoes tied at the ankle with thongs. Ingolf spread his arms.

“Ingolf Vogeler. Your ally. Remember?” he said.