The woman turned and shouted back: "Would you leave a stranger out in the cold, and on the holy eve of-"
He didn't catch the next part; the word wasn't one he'd ever heard before.
"-at that?"
She turned back to him. "I'm Saba Brannigan Mac kenzie, Mr. Vogeler; my sept's totem is Elk. And my father keeps an inn here, and you'll be very welcome. I'll show you the way; we're being relieved by the night guard now."
She shook his hand as he dismounted; her brow went up as she felt the heavy swordsman's callus around the inner edge of his thumb and forefinger, and his at the strength of her grip.
They walked through the gatehouse and into streets laid out in a grid, mark of a pre Change settlement. This one was better kept up and better lit than most and free of sewage stink, the houses neatly repaired and big lan terns on posts where the streets met, the folk looking well fed and prosperous if oddly dressed. But though it was fairly dark-nothing was so dark as a town at night, unless it was a windowless basement-he caught glimpses of things that did look strange.
A terra-cotta of a bearded face over a door with horns growing from its brow; the wood of a shutter carved into leafy tendrils that seemed to be looking at him somehow; a stone post with a head on top and a phallus jutting from its middle, wrought in knotwork; a set of running and laughing children wearing costumes fantastically shaped and painted…
He snapped his fingers. "It's Halloween, or nearly!" he said. "Kids wear masks and things back home too, on Halloween."
"Samhain, we call it," she said, and spelled it out for him: she pronounced it soween.
He nodded and made a mental note of it; that was the word he'd heard her shout up to the tower. Then she smiled and winked at him and added, "You'll find we take it, oh, a wee bit more seriously than your basic trick or-treat."
Just then a snatch of song came from another group making its way down the middle of the street, youngsters nearly full-grown dancing amid a cold trilling of panpipes. And singing: