Alain shook his glass slightly—just enough to make the ice tinkle—and Roland responded with the barest sliver of a nod. He had expected cool tea from a jug kept in a nearby springhouse, but there were actual chunks of ice in the glasses. Ice in high summer. It was interesting.

And the tea was, as promised, delicious.

Avery finished the letter and handed it back to Roland with the air of one passing on a holy relic. “Ye want to keep that safe about yer person, Will Dearborn—aye, very safe indeed!”

“Yes, sir.” He tucked the letter and his identification back into his purse. His friends “Richard” and “Arthur” were doing the same.

“This is excellent white tea, sir,” Alain said. “I’ve never had better.”

“Aye,” Avery said, sipping from his own glass. “’Tis the honey that makes it so fearsome. Eh, Dave?”

The deputy with the monocle smiled from his place by the notice-board. “I believe so, but Judy don’t like to say. She had the recipe from her mother.”

“Aye, we must remember the faces of our mothers, too, so we must.” Sheriff Avery looked sentimental for a moment, but Roland had an idea that the face of his mother was the furthest thing from the big man’s mind just then. He turned to Alain, and sentiment was replaced by a surprising shrewdness.

“Ye’re wondering about the ice, Master Stockworth.”

Alain started. “Well, I...”

“Ye expected no such amenity in a backwater like Hambry, I’ll warrant,” Avery said, and although there was a joshing quality on top of his voice, Roland thought there was something else entirely underneath.

He doesn’t like us. He doesn’t like what he thinks of as our “city ways.” He hasn’t known us long enough to know what kind of ways we have, if any at all, but already he doesn’t like them. He thinks we’re a trio of snotnoses; that we see him and everyone else here as country bumpkins.

“Not just Hambry,” Alain said quietly. “Ice is as rare in the Inner Arc these days as anywhere else, Sheriff Avery. When I grew up, I saw it mostly as a special treat at birthday parties and such.”

“There was always ice on Glowing Day,” Cuthbert put in. He spoke with very un-Cuthbertian quiet. “Except for the fireworks, that’s what we liked about it most.”

“Is that so, is that so,” Sheriff Avery said in an amazed, wonders-will-never-cease tone. Avery perhaps didn’t like them riding in like this, didn’t like having to take up what he would probably call “half the damn morning” with them; he didn’t like their clothes, their fancy identification papers, their accents, or their youth. Least of all their youth. Roland could understand all that, but wondered if it was the whole story. If there was something else going on here, what was it?