Well, Rudi thought. Odard's a friend… more or less. Ingolf's a comrade, and Matti is… well, I'm not sure, except that I care for her as much as for anyone living who's not my mother. It's not just that we're anamchara, either.

He and she had sworn the oath of soul-bonding when they were ten, during the War of the Eye… He smiled a little at the memory of their seriousness, and their determination not to let their friendship be broken by the quarrels of their elders. Not that being young made the ritual any less binding…

And all of us on this trip are young, he thought, not for the first time. Changelings, or nearly so. For good or ill, the world is passing into our hands.

The two young Mackenzies fell silent, waiting patiently behind their low ridge of sage-grown rock. Rudi raised his head slightly and looked again through the roots of the bush ahead of him-always much safer than looking over it. At this angle there was no risk of a flash from the lenses of his field glasses.

He'd tied back his red-gold hair and wrapped a dark bandana about it, and dabbed his face with dust and soot; his gray-green eyes shone the brighter in the dusk. A few hours of sleep snatched during the sunlight hours had repaired most of the damage of days of fighting and hard riding; he'd recovered with the resilience of youth. He'd turned twenty-two just this last Yule, in fact; a broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, long-limbed man two inches over six feet, and even stronger than he looked.

Few works of humankind showed, besides the fireless war-camp of the Prophet's men two miles away. This stretch of the Snake River plain had depended on power-driven pumps before the Change. People had fled or died when the machines failed, and the fields had gone back to sagebrush with thicker lines of scrub and the bleached skeletons of dead trees to mark the sites of homesteads. Crumbled snags of wall still here and there, and the rusted, canted remains of a great circular pivot-irrigation machine, but like most of his generation Rudi usually ignored the ruins of the pre-Change world so thoroughly that he didn't really see them, unless there was some immediate practical reason to give them thought.