'I figure they camped at the ruined watchtowers where the road comes into the Vale, the ones Janus called the Tall Gates. There were several thousand when they came up the road yesterday. By the fires, I don't think there's near that many today. The Dark must have come in the night.' She turned, prickled by the older Guard's silence. 'You know, we didn't have to drive them on like beggars.'

Seya looked uncomfortable. She hadn't cared for it, either. The newcomers had been nearly frozen, in rags and starving, when they'd trudged up the valley road. It hadn't taken much of a show of force to send them on their way. But she only said, 'When you put on the emblem of the Guards, Gil-Shalos, you gave up the right to have an opinion. We serve the King of Gae - in this case, Prince Altir. Or the Queen.'

Gil folded her arms, trying vainly to warm her hands under her dark, shabby cloak. In the distance she could still see the thin plumes of bluish woodsmoke rising in the clear, freezing air. It wasn't the Queen who gave the orders, she thought. // was Alwir. But it might as well have been her Majesty, for all the difference it made.

She thought of the Queen, a shy, dark-haired girl standing in her brother's elegant shadow. She saw the two now as they had been yesterday, standing in the dark gateway of the keep with their guards ranged around them, the bullion on their embroidered robes flashing palely in the wan sunlight. We have neither food nor space to take you in, Alwir had said to the tall, ragged monk who had led the refugees up the Pass and who had stood at their head with his stained red robes as brown as old blood against the snow. What food we have will barely take us 'til spring.

There had been a stirring among Alwir's guards and a leathery rattle, like a dragon's scales, of fingered scabbards. The refugees had turned away, retracing their ploughed tracks through the crusted snow.