Graw's mouth clamped into a settled line, and his pale tan eyes, like cheap beads, sliced resentfully between the slim black-haired woman beside him, the young wizard in his painted vest, and the heavy-shouldered, black-clothed shape of the Commander of the Guards, as if he suspected them of somehow colluding to withhold from him the secret of comfort and survival.

"It's sickening the crops, and if the River Settlements are sending wheat and milk and beasts for slaughter up here to the Keep every year, we're entitled to something for our sweat."

"Something more than us risking our necks to patrol your perimeter, you mean?" Janus asked thinly, and Graw scoffed.

"My men can do their own patrolling! What the hell good is it to know about saber-teeth or some bunch of scroungy dooic ten miles from the nearest fields?" He conveniently neglected to mention the warning the Guards had brought him of the White Raiders last winter, or the battle they and the small force of nobles and men-at-arms had fought with a bandit company the autumn before. "But if our labor and our strength are going out to support a bunch of people up here at the Keep who do nothing or next to nothing..." His glance slid back to Rudy, and from him to Alde's belly, rounded under the green wool of her faded gown.

The Lady of the Keep met his eye. "Are you saying then that the Settlements Council has voted to dispense with sending foodstuffs to the Keep in return for patrols by the Guards and advice from the mages who live here?"

"Dammit, we haven't voted on anything!" snapped Graw, who, as far as Rudy knew, wasn't even on the Settlements Council. "But as a man of the land whose labor is supporting you, I have the right to know what's being done! Not one of your wizards has come down to have a look at my fields." "The slunch is different down there?"