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  “I suppose,” Beyrn admitted, reluctantly, after a very long pause. “Do you suppose Bret and Bart think the same way she does?”

  “I think Bret and Bart are as dumb as a pair of posts and don’t think much past tomorrow’s breakfast,” Abi replied, in a lowered voice so the two “lads” would have no chance of hearing her. Beyrn smothered a laugh behind his fist, which he hastily shoved in his mouth. “But they’re strong, good fighters, and loyal, and have very good tempers, and on this trip that’s all that matters. So, tell me about dams.”

  Beyrn was only too eager to oblige, and it was very clear once he started that dams really were his passion. Well, actually, any construction meant to hold back water. He was extremely knowledgeable about everything from a simple berm meant to divert water to a complex stone dam. She learned quite a lot in that day of riding.

  Meanwhile the road they were taking was quite challenging, and Abi was extremely glad that they had hinnies both to ride and to pull their vehicles, because she was fairly certain horses would have been a problem. And near the end of the second day of travel, Jicks stopped them all and pointed up.

  “That’s where we’re going,” she said, matter-of-factly. And after a bit of squinting, Abi realized that what she had taken for the exposed, bare stone cliff at the top of one of the hills was actually a village. She gaped.

  “Why on earth are they up there?” she asked.

  Jicks shrugged. “You have to admit, it’d be hard for anyone to get at them there,” she pointed out.

  “But . . . where do they get water?”

  “The top’s a big cistern cut right out of the rock. Plenty of rain hereabouts.” Jicks shook her head. “Not how I’d care to live, but nobody’s going to get to them without losing more men than it’d be worth to raid a dirt-poor little village.”

  The journey up that hill, which was a mere trail barely wide enough for their wagons, took the rest of the afternoon. And once they got to their goal, the entire village, all dozen families worth, had come out of their houses to greet them.

  Once they arrived, Abi saw that the “houses” were mere facades; the actual buildings were dug out of the rock of the hill itself. And the rock was granite. It made her mind spin to think how long it must have taken to chip out decent-sized dwellings up here.

  She’d been afraid that there would be no place for their wagons, but it turned out that there was room for them. Barely. Abi prayed she would not need to get up in the night. She’d probably misstep and fall to the road beneath the village if she needed to use the wood-shielded, stone bench over the cliff that was the village “outhouse.”

  The needs of this village proved to be very simple; they wanted some sort of system to bring water down out of the cistern so people didn’t have to carry it down twice a day. Master Padrick worked out a simple system for them using a minimum of metal parts involving a bucket-chain worked from below and clay pipes; two days later—most of which time was spent teaching them how to trouble-shoot any problems—and they were on their way.

  It was at the third town that things turned . . . odd.

  This was a walled town, with guarded entrances and exits that were closed at night. And instead of being greeted with smiles when Master Vance announced who they were and why they had come to the gate guard, they were met with scowls.

  “Wait here,” the grizzled, heavily armored guard told them. “I’ll send a runner to the mayor. We’ll see if he wants to see you.”

  “The mayor sent to the King of Valdemar expressly—” Master Vance began indignantly.

  “That’s as may be,” the guard cut him off. “I don’t take the word of a lot of scruffy strangers.” And the man retreated into the guardhouse, making further speech impossible.

  “What on earth . . .” Master Vance said, with exasperation.

  Jicks shrugged. “Maybe this lot only went along with the delegation because the others urged it on them. Look at these walls! They probably think they don’t need protection from your Guard and army.” She snorted. “They’ve never seen a siege engine either, I’ll be bound, or they wouldn’t be so smug.”

  Abi examined the walls, which were stone, and pretty impressive to her mind. At least two stories tall, they had enough room at the top for guards to walk up there, protected by a parapet. There were four guard towers too, two of them visible from where Abi stood.

  They stood there, cooling their heels, for the better part of three candlemarks, before someone finally turned up from inside the town. This person, a middle-aged, scrawny man with black hair and beard, wearing what looked like livery, ignored them to go straight to the guard and talk to him in a low voice for quite some time. Finally the guard gestured to them abruptly. “You can go in,” he said, with a brusque tone that bordered on rude. “But you follow this fellow, and you do what you’re told, and you don’t wander off pretending to be lost. Understand?”

  “Quite,” Master Vance replied, making it clear with his tone that he was offended. He didn’t even speak to their guide, he just gestured to the fellow to lead.

  They went in through a tunnel under the wall; as Abi expected, there were iron portcullises at either end, and stout wooden gates as well. The tunnel gave out into a street nearly identical to similar walled towns in the South of Valdemar: narrow, with houses and shops whose doors were right down on the street itself, wide enough for a single wagon with space for a pedestrian to squeeze by on either side.

  I don’t know why that guard warned us not to wander off, she mused. We’d be pretty obvious if we tried.

  The fact was, that rude greeting made absolutely no sense. And when confronted with something that made absolutely no sense, Abi’s first instinct was to become very cautious and keep her eyes and ears open.

  What she saw did not make her feel any better. The few townsfolk they encountered glared at them, frowned, or actually turned their backs on them. It was almost as if they had somehow done these people some great wrong—at least, that was the impression she got.

  It can’t have been the lake we drained. That was too far away to have affected them. Are they angry because we installed bridges they might have to pay tolls to use? That makes no sense; they can’t have found out about that yet. And that water system Vance worked out—that can’t be it, either. Something is very wrong here.

  Unlike the last two places, this town featured buildings made of brick as well as stone, although stone predominated. Like Ellistown, the buildings were tall and narrow and literally built so closely together that you couldn’t have gotten a sheet of paper between them.

  There were also a lot of lingering odors; pleasant ones, but mostly slightly unpleasant ones, including a lingering odor of urine and dung. It wasn’t hard to see where that came from, either. The houses might be stone, but the streets were unpaved; urine from animals just soaked into the hard-packed earth, and dung that wasn’t immediately swept up by an enterprising urchin got trampled into it. Plus it was obvious that they weren’t as careful about cleaning their latrines as people in Valdemar were.

  It made Abi wish for that village perched atop its hill again, where a constant wind ensured that you smelled nothing worse than gorse.

  Finally they came out into a square, with a pump and stone trough in the middle. They stood directly across from a very imposing, three-story tall building of gray stone with actual glass windows that took up all of the back side of the square.

  Their guide led them to that building and finally spoke. “You’re to come in with me,” he said, abruptly. “I’m to take you to the mayor.”

  Master Vance turned his back to the man to speak to the rest of them, but Jicks spoke up first. “Me and the lads will stay here. Stev—”

  “I don’t like the feeling about any of this,” Stev replied. “I don’t think you should all go in there. If nothing else, people might do our wagons and beasts a mischief. My adv
ice is for Masters Vance, Padrick, and Abi to go in, and the rest of us to stay out here.”

  Jicks nodded, and looked meaningfully at Abi. Abi didn’t need to have Mindspeech to know what she was thinking. Are you armed?

  Abi almost smiled, given that she was never unarmed. She nodded slightly.

  “I agree,” Jicks said. “Be careful.”

  Their guide had been waiting impatiently, actually tapping his toe to demonstrate how impatient he was, as they spoke. When they turned toward him, he heaved an exaggerated sigh, and strode briskly toward the building, leaving it to them to keep up. Another demonstration of rudeness—if Masters Vance and Padrick had not been very fit and vigorous, they’d have been left behind completely.

  Inside, the building was not at all unlike the Asterleigh manor, just much larger; outer walls were stone, inner walls were wood, and the floor of the first floor was stone. A foyer with banners hanging from the ceiling led to a large reception chamber that went all the way to the roof, with stairs going up to the right and left, a door in the rear of the room, and doors beneath each staircase. The minion led them up the right hand stair to the top floor, and from there through a series of three rooms, each fitted out with desks and clerks who looked up at their entrance and stared at them silently. Their destination was the fourth room.

  And there they found the mayor, sitting behind his imposing desk, wearing a scowl.

  The minion bowed his way out, closing the door behind himself. The mayor looked them over, top to bottom. He was an old man, bald, with a fringe of gray hair, dressed in a brown and red striped velvet tunic, the collar of a white linen shirt showing at his neck.

  “Well,” he said, in a very unfriendly voice. “You certainly have nerve, showing up here again, after what your other lot did.”

  Master Vance opened his mouth, but Abi put one hand on his arm. “I beg your pardon,” she said politely. “But we have no idea what you’re talking about. We set out from Haven two moons ago. It took us one moon to get to the Border, we spent the better part of a fortnight and a half to deal with problems at Ellistown, then two days travel, then three days at Cliffedge, then two more days here. We were the only party that set out from Haven, and we left less than three days after your delegation left.”

  The mayor looked as if he had plenty to say—right until Abi hit him with the barrage of dates, and the fact that they were the only party to have left Haven coming here. He stared at her as if he were not quite sure what to believe.

  “If you don’t believe me,” she said, still in the same reasonable tone of voice, “You can talk to the Herald who is with us. He’ll tell you the same thing. Heralds cannot lie, as I am sure you know.”

  Not quite true, because her father, for one, had done his fair share of lying over the years, but these people had only heard rumors of Heralds, and she could probably convince them of almost anything.

  A play of emotions ran over the mayor’s face. Doubt, skepticism, chagrin, anger, bewilderment. It was when bewilderment finally settled in that he spoke again. “Then who were the other people here who ruined our wall?”

  “I’m sure I have no idea,” Master Vance replied. “But whatever they ruined we can help you fix.”

  “And why should I—” the mayor began, then shook his head. “Never mind. You can’t possibly make it worse. Benjon!” he bellowed, making them all jump.

  The flunky, the one wearing the brown tunic that definitely was livery, entered the room. “Mayor?” he said, looking as if he expected the mayor to order the three of them thrown into gaol.

  “Take this party to the ruined wall,” the mayor ordered. “And give them what they want. If they’re not lying, and they fix the wall, we have a problem.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The wall was a wreck. Stones tumbled everywhere from a V-shaped gap that went all the way down to the ground. Abi and the other three Masters stared at it. Jicks tilted her head to the side. “Looks like a siege engine hit it, except there’s no sign of battering on the downed stones,” she observed, and moved closer to the breech to examine the fallen stones more closely.

  Master Vance turned to Benjon. “What happened here?” he asked.

  Benjon sniffed. It was very clear that he didn’t trust them at all, no matter what his master had said. Abi suspected that he expected them to know exactly what had gone wrong.

  But he answered anyway.

  “The wall developed a crack we were unable to stop,” he said. “Your Valdemarans—”

  “They weren’t ours and weren’t from Valdemar,” Padrick interrupted him, eyes flashing.

  Benjon sniffed dismissively. “The strangers then—said they could fix the wall overnight. They painted something on it, and left, telling us that the wall would be healed in the morning. In the middle of the night, there was a clamor, and this is what we found.”

  Padrick, Beyrn, and Vance stared at each other. “I don’t—” Master Vance began.

  “I do,” said Jicks. She came back to the group. “You’re an idiot,” she said to Benjob bluntly. “I’ll bet your own stoneworkers told you there was no way to repair a crack like that by painting something on the stone. I know exactly what happened. What got painted all over the mortar was plain old water. And what brought the wall down was simple magic. Someone snuck back here in the middle of the night and rapidly froze and thawed the water in the mortar with magic until the mortar crumbled and the wall fell apart. And these Valdemarans don’t have magic.”

  Benjon gaped at her. “But . . . but . . . but . . .”

  “It’s a trick our Mage-engineers in Hanson’s Harriers like to use in a siege if they can, though usually they can’t get close enough to a wall to work the trick. And usually, they don’t get off enough freezing and thawing cycles fast enough to do more than weaken the wall for the engines. But I’ve seen it done and more than once.” She gave Benjon a gimlet eye. “Bet you didn’t ask these tricksters for their credentials from the King, did you? Bet you just took their word for it, didn’t you?”

  Benjon got stony-faced. “I’m not privy to that information.”

  “Of course you aren’t.” Jicks snorted. “So eager to get repairs made for nothing, you couldn’t hand the keys to the castle over fast enough. Well, now Masters, what do you want?”

  “We need all the loose stones piled on either side of the break,” Master Padrick said. “And any stones that are still in the wall, but loose, knocked out and added to them. First we’ll need to address why the wall cracked in the first place before we can allow you to repair it.” He looked down his nose at Benjon. “Give the orders, please, then run on ahead of us. We’re going back to the mayor to properly present our credentials, including the petition he signed that brought us here in the first place.”

  By now, a crowd had gathered, and although it wasn’t particularly friendly, it seemed that Jicks’s commonsense words had fallen on ears willing to hear them. There was a lot of murmuring, and it looked to Abi as if they were going to get the benefit of the doubt, at least for now.

  Benjon got rather red in the face, but he’d had his orders from the mayor, so there wasn’t much he could do. He bustled off, his spine radiating how indignant he was.

  Abi and the other three Masters prowled around the ruined wall, but she saw Padrick was right. There really wasn’t much they could do until they uncovered the site of the original problem.

  “And this is something you will encounter constantly as a Master,” Padrick sighed to Beyrn and Abi. “People who are taken in by charlatans who promise to do something free or very cheaply. Then they come wailing to you when disaster strikes.”

  “I think there’s more to it than that,” Stev said, glancing over his shoulder at the crowd that had gathered and still had not dispersed. “The people who did this didn’t ask for money. So why did they do it?”

  “Th
at’s not our problem,” Vance said dismissively. “We’re not able to read thoughts—well, all right, you can, Herald, but the rest of us can’t. Our problem is to repair the reputation of Valdemar, fix the original problem, and get these people rebuilding their bloody wall.”

  But Abi didn’t agree with him that it wasn’t their problem, and from the look she got from Stev, neither did he.

  * * *

  • • •

  Credentials presented and sheepishly accepted, crew assigned to move the stones, they accepted quarters in the massive building that was both the Town Hall and the Guild Hall for every guild in the town. Abi found herself paired with Jicks, sharing a smallish room that at least had two separate beds. And it was going to be nice to be in a bed that she didn’t have to curl herself up in to fit.

  They both fetched their belongings from the wagon, which had been wheeled into a carriage house attached to the Town Hall, and Abi followed Jicks up the stairs to the upper floor above the Great Hall itself, where the guest chambers were. These were not anything like “plush” accommodations; the rooms were simple and plain, furnished only with two beds and a tiny table between them, and a chamber pot under each bed. The rooms opened up into each other in a long string just under the rooftree, and the ceiling sloped sharply down on either side—but at least there were gable windows to let in light. They’d probably be freezing cold in the winter.

  But it wasn’t winter, the rooms were clean, and they weren’t in the caravan. And this stop would allow them to get the linens from the caravan laundered. And baths! The town had not one, but three bathhouses, and Abi intended to make use of one of them.