‘Oh, Killane,’ I said, ‘be serious. I won’t be in any danger.’

‘Yer not goin’ off alone!’

‘How are you going to stop me?’ I asked mildly.

‘I’ll burn yer house down if y’ even so much as try!’

‘You wouldn’t!’

‘Try me!’

Now that was something I hadn’t anticipated. Killane had found my soft spot. I loved my house, and he knew it. His threat made me go cold all over. Still, I had to get to Vo Astur as quickly as possible, and that meant that I almost had to use the form of a falcon. No falcon alive could carry a Wacite Arend weighing just over twelve stone, however.

The answer, of course, was fairly simple, and it would almost certainly teach my belligerent friend not to deliver ultimatums to me any more. I’d never done it before, but there’s a first time for everything, I guess. I knew what was involved, and I was confident that I could improvise should the occasion demand it.

‘All right, Killane,’ I said in feigned surrender, ‘if you’re going to insist –’

‘I am,’ he said flatly. ‘I’ll be after saddlin’ our horses, then.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We won’t be traveling on horseback. Let’s go out into the garden.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘You’ll see.’

I’ll admit that it was just a bit tricky. I knew what Killane looked like, but I didn’t have a complete grasp of exactly how he felt– his own sense of his being, I suppose you could call it. Our gender differences complicated things just a bit, but I set that part aside. Killane’s gender wasn’t going to be particularly important for a while. He stood near a bed of winter-dormant rose-bushes with a slightly apprehensive look on his face, realizing, I suspect, that he might have pushed me just a trifle too far.

Then he started slightly, seeing something that wasn’t really there near his left foot. He raised the foot, obviously intending to tramp on what he thought he was seeing.

‘Leave it alone, Killane,’ I said sharply to him. ‘I need it just now. Look at it very closely, however.’

He stared intently at the illusion.

I had to filter the release of my will through his consciousness, and that was no mean trick. So far as I can recall, it was the first time I’d ever actually funneled my will through the mind of someone else. When I had everything firmly in place, I almost absently picked up a rock that weighed perhaps two pounds, and then I let my built-up Will go in the direction I had it pointed, and even as the transfer was taking place I prudently set the rock down on the tail of the small field-mouse into which the entirety of Killane’s awareness and body were being transferred. There was a fair chance that the transformation might make him a bit hysterical, and I didn’t really have the time to hunt him down.

The squeaking he made was pathetic, and the poor little creature’s beady eyes were almost starting out of its head. I pushed back my instinctive sympathy, however. Killane had insisted, after all.

Then I went falcon, and that definitely increased the level of squeaking. I more or less ignored those shrill cries of absolute terror and strutted – that’s the only word for it – over to one of the fruit-trees, selected a winter-shriveled apple on a lower limb, and pecked at the stem until it came free and fell onto the half frozen grass. I practiced with the apple for a few moments until I could hold it firmly without sinking my talons into its flesh. Then I went back to the squealing field-mouse. I took him firmly in my talons, shouldered the rock off his tail, and left for Vo Astur.

The trip wasn’t bad – for me – and after we were several hundred feet up in the air, Killane stopped squealing. He did tremble a lot, though.

It was mid-afternoon when we reached Vo Astur, and I noted as we settled onto the battlements of the palace that the parapet was largely deserted, a clear indication that discipline was lax. I disapproved of that, even though it was definitely to our advantage. Asturia was on a war footing, after all, and the lack of sentries on the parapet was an indication of unforgivable slovenliness. Still holding the trembling mouse in one claw, I hopped into a deserted sentry-box at the southwest corner of the battlements and changed Killane and myself back into our natural forms. He was staring at me in absolute horror when his real form blurred into place, and he continued that squeaking.

‘Stop that!’ I told him sharply. ‘You’re a man again. Talk. Don’t squeak.’

‘Don’t you ever do that t’ me again!’ he gasped.

‘It was your idea, Killane.’

‘I never said no such thing.’

‘You told me that you were going to come along. All right, you did come along. Now quit complaining.’

‘What a dreadful thing that wast’ do!’

‘So was threatening to burn my house down. Snap out of it, Killane. We’ve got work to do.’

We kept watch from the tiny sentry-box until the soldiers who were scattered along the parapet gathered over on the far side in response to the inviting sound of a pair of rattling dice. Then, with no ostentatious display of furtiveness, Killane and I went down a flight of stairs into the upper floors of Nerasin’s palace. I still knew my way around the ducal residence, and Killane and I slipped unobtrusively into a dusty, neglected library. In all probability, it was the safest place to hide, since study was not held in very high regard in Vo Astur just then.

The sun went down and darkness settled over Vo Astur. The noise from the throne-room seemed to suggest that the Asturians were celebrating something. Nerasin had evidently done some boasting, and his cohorts – his immediate family, for the most part – appeared to be convinced that his clever ploy would improve things in Vo Astur. I assumed that they were eating as well as drinking. That’s the basic flaw in any attempt to starve a people into submission. The ones you’re really after are the last ones to go hungry.

Killane kept watch at the door while I carefully reviewed the details of a dissection my teacher Balten and I had performed back on the Isle of the Winds. I wanted to make absolutely certain that a fairly common ailment would convince Nerasin to be cooperative.

I think it was almost midnight when a group of rowdy Asturian nobles came staggering up the stairs from the throne-room, turned the semi-comatose Nerasin over to the guards at the door to the royal apartment, and reeled off down the corridor singing a bawdy drinking song.

Killane and I waited. ‘I’ll be after doin’ th’ killin’, Lady-O,’ my friend whispered to me. ‘I’d not be wantin’ y’ t’ soil yer pretty hands on th’ likes o’ no Asturian.’