“Yes,” muttered Tan, his eyes on the damp road, steaming now in the sun. He swung reluctantly into the saddle. When Gereint took a step toward him, he flinched and backed his horse several steps.
The mage paused and looked at Tan for a moment without speaking. Then he went, still in silence, to mount his own tall horse.
* * *
Tiefenauer was not a great city, with tall mansions of fine dressed stone and wide avenues paved with tight-fitted blocks of stone. Its streets were narrow and cobbled, its buildings tight-packed and mostly of painted cypress and oak. Cheap gray paint was favored in the poorer areas of the town because it was cheap, with dark red or tawny yellow for those who were more daring; white where families could afford to have their houses painted every year. The white buildings had shutters and doors of scarlet or bright green or sunny yellow, and vines with purple or crimson or orange flowers tumbling from their balconies.
In most of the town, homes were small and mostly set above equally small shops: tailors and cobblers and dressmakers all along one long, narrow street; furniture-makers and harness-makers and metalsmiths near the horse-market; butchers and sausage-makers in the south of town and fishmongers along the river; bakers and confectioners and apothecaries and all sorts of small crafts on the north side. In the middle of town was a wonderful fountain, three levels of falling water leaping from top to bottom with hundreds of green copper fish. Beside the fountain stood a huge oak, in the wide square where twice a week the market was raised, and beyond the square the low hill with the sprawling great house atop it.
It was in the square that the bulk of the Linularinan forces were set, and in the gardens around the great house. But there were Linularinan soldiers all through the town, occupying the apartments above the shops and making free of the shops themselves.
“But not too free,” the townsmen had said, with the grudging air of men bound despite their wishes to be fair. The glazier had added, “They’ll let anyone out of Tiefenauer who wishes to go, which is a good many. There hasn’t been much looting and less wanton pillage and no firing the buildings. While I was still there—I have a business to look after, but I sent my wife to her cousin down near Saum—but while I was still in Tiefenauer myself, I saw the Linularinan officers flog one of their men for theft and,” he said with a grim nod of satisfaction, “they hanged a man for raping a girl, as well they might.”
“A gentle occupation. They don’t want your folk to hate them for generations,” the Arobern had said, which was obvious.
“They only want that book—and Tan,” Gereint Enseichen had added. “They must know the book is there. And Lady Mienthe is right: They haven’t found it. But I can’t imagine what’s prevented them. If it’s a twentieth-part as obvious as Tan himself, a blind mage should be able to walk right to it.”
“So perhaps it isn’t a twentieth-part as obvious,” Tan had said, an edge to his tone. “Shall we stand here discussing it from one noon to the next, or shall we get on?”
They had gone on. Mienthe had no idea what the Arobern planned to do about the Linularinan soldiers in the houses or the ones in the square; she hadn’t been able to make herself pay attention. She knew that Tan was near her, but she was barely aware even of Gereint Enseichen, though the mage rode close on her other side. All her attention was focused on the great house, on the book, on the pressing need to get to it and do—something. She could picture the book clearly in her mind’s eye, but she could not picture what either she or Tan or Gereint might do with it. But she could not think about anything else. Images of the book occupied nearly the whole of her mind. She could have drawn every curve and line of its decorated cover; she could have told out how many pages it contained. She felt the textures of leather and fine thick paper against her fingers. She thought if she had been looking for it, she would inevitably have gone straight to it, with the same certainty with which the river knew which way to go to reach the sea. And, of course, she was looking for it, and when she was at last permitted to go freely forward, she headed for it with exactly that certainty.
So Mienthe did not know what disposition the Arobern made with his men, or with the militia companies; she did not know what arrangements he came to with the townsmen and surrounding farmers or even whether there was fighting in the streets of the town once they arrived. She noticed vaguely that she had gone largely blind. Or not really blind. It was not a malady of the eyes, but of the attention. She would blink and find quite a large block of time lost. She knew they were outside the town and then that they were in it, between gray-painted buildings, in a narrow alley that smelled of warm rain and steaming cobbles and horse dung and baking bread, with the angle and quality of the light quite different. Then she blinked again and only the cobbles were the same, for the buildings were painted white and the smells did not include bread but did include the fragrance of tumbling trumpet flowers, and the shadows were long and the air much cooler. Yet she had no sense of passing time: All her sense of time seemed to have narrowed to a single pressing urgent now.