‘I’ll bring you a fish, too, if you want,’ Cynthaen told him flippantly.

‘There’s no market for fish.’ Panhandle shook his head. ‘What am I letting myself in for? Who’s after them?’

‘No one on the earth is hunting them,’ Cynthaen replied, and to the boy the deception seemed glaring. Perhaps it was to Panhandle as well, but if so his face hid it well. He squinted at the two warriors first. ‘You’ll stand guard, I’d guess,’ he decided. ‘Guard a shipment, a warehouse? Warriors, in short.’

Santiren nodded shortly. ‘We can, once our charge here is safe. We shall not need charity.’

Penhold’s eyebrows had risen as he heard her speak, her accent as strange to him as his own was to her. ‘And no questions asked, I’m sure,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Well, then. I am Ordly Penhold, merchant of Collegium. What shall I know you as?’

‘Santiren,’ the Dart-kinden woman replied. ‘And this is Marcantor.’

‘And a boy,’ Ordly Penhold observed. ‘Your servant, is he?’

‘I am no servant,’ the boy snapped. It had been a long march over a foreign land, passed hand to hand, losing his beloved Paladrya. ‘I am Aradocles. I am the…’ He stopped at Santiren’s warning hiss. A whirl of faint colour danced on his skin: shame. I am hunted, that is what I am.

There was nothing on Penhold’s face to suggest he had understood their exchange but, when he spoke, he said, ‘Well now… Arad Oakleaves, is it? Perhaps we’ll call you Master Oakleaves. Almost a Collegium name that, and a lad like you’s better without something too grand.’

Aradocles looked him in the eyes, and saw a man old enough, and wise enough, and outright foreign enough, as not to be easily read.

‘Ordly Penhold…’ He corrected himself, copying the man’s own term of address. ‘Master Penhold. Thank you for taking me into your household. I shall do what I can to requite you.’

Only a few scant years later, General Tynan and the Imperial Second Army defeated the Mantids of the Felyal, burned out their holds, drove them from the forest ahead of his swiftly advancing army, and put to the torch every village and trading post they came across. Nor was Arvandine spared.