While she and the others were stripping to their undertunics and wrapping their hands and wrists, the Icefalcon again put on the soft jerkin of black-dyed wolf-hide he wore on patrol, marked with the white quatrefoil emblem of the Guards of Gae, and pulled on over it a heavier vest, and his gloves.

Though it was April, in these high valleys the wind blew cold, colder now every year. There was still chance of snow.

Janus, the stocky, red-haired Commander, called out, "You're not on now, you know," and the Icefalcon shrugged.

"I'm just going up the Vale to see about those bandits."

"There can't be a lot of them." He straightened up from lacing his boots. "The watchers at the Tall Gates never saw them. Neither have any of the patrols."

"Even so." He gathered up his bow, a blanket, a quiver of arrows, and then, because he had been raised among the Talking Stars People, added to the sword and water bottle at his belt a leather wallet of dried meat and flatbread, enough for a hard day's walking, and some dried fruit. Like most of the Guards he carried a firepouch at his belt, the whole cured hide of a woodchuck lined with horn and clay, in which was packed a smolder of rotted yellow birch that would burn for a day.

There were few enough guards, and Renweth Vale stretched eighteen miles from the sapphire wall of the St. Prathhes' Glacier down to the spruce forest at its lower end. A fairly large force might hide in the pinewoods or the rock caves above, and it was not impossible they could have come in over the ice-crowned spine of the peaks, rather than the eastward pass.

It would be as well to know where they were and what they were up to. The regular patrol had departed only an hour before the Icefalcon briefly considered rounding up a band to go with him, then dismissed the thought. On simple reconnaissance, he would do better alone.