Fargin Graw's voice boomed above those homier echoes like flatulant thunder on a summer afternoon.

"If we're supporting them, they'd damn well better earn their keep!" He was a big man-Rudy could identify his silhouette against the chilly light that streamed through the passageway between the two sets of open Doors while he was still crossing the last of the low stone bridges over the indoor streams.

"And if they're not earning their keep, which I for one can't see 'em doing, then they better find themselves a useful trade or get out! Like some others I could name sitting around getting fat... There's not a man in the River Settlements who doesn't get out in the fields and pull his stint at guarding-"

"And boy, after all day in the fields, they must be just sharp as razors on night-watch." Rudy hooked his free hand through the buckle of his belt as he came out to join the little group on the Keep's broad, shallow steps, blinking a little in the pallid brightness of the spring sun.

Graw swung around angrily, a brick-faced man with the fair hair not often seen in the lands once called the Realm of Darwath, perhaps five years older than Rudy's thirty years. Janus of Weg, commander of the elite corps of the Keep Guards, hid a smile-he'd lost warriors twice due to the inefficiency of Graw's farmer militia-and the Lady Minalde, last High Queen of Darwath and Lady of the Keep, raised a hand for silence. "Rudy." Her low, sweet voice was pleasantly neutral in greeting, as if he had not spoken. "Master Graw rode up from the Settlements with the tribute sheep today, to hear from your own lips why there hasn't been further progress in eliminating slunch from the fields."

Rudy said, "What?" In three years, slunch in the fields and in huge areas of meadow and woods, both here in Renweth Vale and down by the River Settlements-had become an endemic nuisance, indestructible by any means he or Ingold or anyone else had yet been able to contrive.