Gritted teeth snarl. I have an ordained right

Egar slapped the rest of the sentence out of the man s mouth.

We re not discussing rights, my friend. Do I look like a lawyer to you? We re talking here about a polite and reasonable personal request I m making, to you and all your bearded chums. Stay the fuck away from this house. Take that back to Menkarak, make sure he spreads it around. Because anyone who doesn t get the message, I will be forced to hurt, probably very badly. And if you ever come back here again. The Dragonbane dug his index fingernail in under the invigilator s chin and lifted his face closer. Looked into his eyes to make it stick. Well, then I ll kill you. Okay?

From the man s face, he judged the message conveyed.

He got up, looked around at the tumbled, twitching bodies, and the goggling crowd that had gathered.

Show s over, he said brusquely. Nothing to see here.

And there it was, something in the words as he spoke them, some echo of the elusive feeling he d been carrying around all day which now slid out from the shadows and took on recognizable form.

Bored, he realized with a slight shock. Dragonbane you are bored.

CHAPTER 3

Later, with the band muffled up in thickening cloud and the last of the daylight gone to a fading orange glow over the trees to the west, the march-masters set about building campfires. Tinder sparked and flared at intervals across the low open ground where the thirty-five coffles of slaves were huddled against the growing chill of night. Gerin watched the flames spring up, and counted four, no, five of them among the slaves and another smaller one farther out where the overseer s tents were pitched. None was close enough to cast more than the faintest radiance on the men in his coffle a gleam here and there on a few pale, city-bred faces like Tigeth s, the odd glint of an eye catching the light as someone turned their head. But mostly, the slaves made a rumpled and undistinguished mass of shadow in the gloom.