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The weather never changed—cold, cloudy, with gusty winds sweeping in and out of the canyons and carrying fine dry snowflakes. What’s more, at the top of the southern pass, there wasn’t even any view, just a crest in the road that ran between two nearly sheer rock walls. At one instant, I was riding uphill; and the next, downhill.

Not until I reached the top of the foothills overlooking Gallos, another day, and another night spent under an outcrop shivering even within my bedroll, did I find a view.

For nearly three kays the trail down was nothing but an open ledge slanted against a blackish granite.

Halfway down I stopped, able to see anyone approaching in either direction, and guided Gairloch into an alcove back from the road. I climbed up to a flat overlook to look out over Gallos under the first full day of winter sun since leaving Jellico.

Gallos didn’t look much different from above than I imagined Certis might have, just mixed and muddy browns, divided by thin gray lines that had to be stone walls or fences, and infrequent gray-brown and wider curving lines that were doubtless roads.

Down toward my right, to the north, where the road broke away from the rocks and entered a line of forested hills that separated the meadows and hedgerows and stubbled fields from the Easthorns, I spotted an interweaving of smoke plumes in a cultivated valley. What I could see of the valley looked small, in any case. Passera, I guessed.

Leaning back against the rock alcove with Gairloch right below and with the afternoon sun warming the black slab behind me, I finally re-read Justen’s note.

I still hadn’t had time to read the whole book, and on the mountainside wasn’t exactly the place to do that in any case. But Justen had been right more than once…and that was more than enough reason to think about what I was to do before I descended the rest of the way into Gallos and Passera.

Besides the simple matter of survival, I had two problems—neither insurmountable, but both requiring solutions. First, my supply of coins, not exactly large to begin with, was running short, even despite Justen’s provisions. The loss of nearly four golds for a short night’s lodging in Carsonn and the grain cakes for Gairloch had not helped in that matter; although, balanced against the payment for the sheep-healing, I was somewhat better off than I would have been, and a good hundred fifty kays further toward the Westhorns.

Second, I still didn’t have the faintest idea of the problem or cause or whatever-it-was that I was supposed to resolve. This business of blind traveling and quests was getting tiresome, if not plain boring.

Whatever I didn’t know, I did know two things. If I kept blundering into towns and problems, sooner or later an unseen crossbow quarrel or rifle shot would leave me in less than ideal shape, if not dead. That assumed that Gallos would allow rifles; some of the Candarian duchies classed firearms as chaos-weapons, rather than undependable heat-energy weapons. But dead would be dead, one way or another.

I’d also realized from the unusual nature of the storm on the hills of Certis, and from the unguarded look of the nasty innkeeper’s wife when I had mentioned the unseasonable storm, that the ice and snow had not been entirely natural…not at all. It also meant that someone hadn’t exactly been able to locate me, with magic or otherwise.

Gairloch—the pony was another question I had ignored, and kept ignoring. Why did he trust me, and a few ostlers only? Had his presence in Freetown been coincidental? Or a matter of odds?

I looked away from the view of Gallos and down at the not-quite-shaggy golden-brown of his heavy coat. No animal less sturdy would have managed what we had gone through nearly so well.

With another sigh, I reached out with my feelings…looking…

…and came away shaking my head. Gairloch was a mountain pony, but not just a mountain pony. Just as I had strengthened the innate sense of order within the sheep of Montgren, so had someone strengthened that order within Gairloch, to the point that the pony would lash out