Halt snorted derisively. "Battleschool evidently isn't what it used to be," he replied. "It's a fine thing when an old man like me can sleep comfortably in the open while a young boy gets all stiff and rheumatic over it."

Horace shrugged. "Be that as it may," he replied, "I'll still be glad to sleep in a bed tonight."

Actually, Halt felt the same way. But he wasn't going to let Horace know that.

"Perhaps we should hurry," he said, "and get you into a nice comfortable bed before your joints seize up altogether."

And he urged Abelard into a slow canter. Behind him, Tug instantly increased his own pace to match. Horace, caught by surprise, and hampered by the captured horses he was leading, was a little slower to keep up.

The string of battlehorses, laden with armor and weapons, raised quite a bit of interest in the town as they rode through the streets.

Horace noticed again how people scurried to clear the way in front of his battlehorse as he rode. He noticed the furtive glances cast his way and more than once he heard the phrase Chevalier du Chene whispered as he passed people by. He glanced curiously at Halt.

"What's that they're saying about chains?" he asked. Halt gestured toward the oakleaf symbol on the shield hanging at Horace's saddlebow.

"Not chain," he told the young warrior, "They're saying chene.

That's their word for 'oak.' They're talking about you: the knight of the oak. Apparently your fame has spread."

Horace frowned. He wasn't sure if he was pleased about that or not.

"Let's hope it doesn't cause any trouble," he said uncertainly.

Halt merely shrugged.

"In a small town like this? It's hardly likely. More the opposite, I'd expect."

For it was a small town, barely more than a village, in fact. The single main street was narrow, with hardly room for their two horses to move abreast. People on foot had to press back out of the way, stepping into the side streets to let the horsemen pass-then remaining in that position as the small string of battlehorses clopped quietly along behind them.

The street itself was unpaved, a mere dusty track that would quickly turn to thick gluey mud in the event of any rain. The houses were small, mostly single-story affairs, which seemed to have been built on something less than the normal scale.

"Keep your eyes open for an inn," Halt said quietly.

Traveling with a notorious companion was a novel experience for Halt. In Araluen, he was accustomed to the suspicion and sometimes fear that greeted the appearance of a member of the Ranger Corps. The mottled cloaks with their deep cowls were a familiar sight to people in the kingdom. Here in Gallica, he was quite pleased to notice, the Ranger uniform, along with the distinctive weaponry of longbow and double knives, seemed to evoke little or no interest.

Horace was a different matter entirely. His reputation had obviously gone before them and people eyed him with the same edge of suspicion and uncertainty that Halt had become used to over the years.

The situation pleased Halt quite well. In the event of any trouble, it would give him and Horace a decided edge if people had already decided that the main danger came from the strapping young man in armor.

The fact of the matter was that the grizzled older man in the nondescript cloak was a far more dangerous potential enemy.

"Up ahead there," Horace said, rousing Halt from his musing. He followed the direction of the boy's pointing finger and there was a building, larger than the others, with a second story leaning precariously out over the street, rather uncertainly supported by uneven oak beams that jutted out at first-floor level. A weathered signboard swung gently in the breeze, with a crude depiction of a wineglass and a platter of food marked on it in peeling paint.

"Don't get your hopes too high about a nice soft bed for the night," Halt warned the apprentice. "We may well have slept softer in the forest." He didn't add that they would almost certainly have slept cleaner.

As it turned out, he had done the inn an injustice. It was small and the walls weren't quite true to the perpendicular. The ceiling was low and uneven and the stairs seemed to lean to one side as they made their way up to inspect the room they had been offered.

But at least the place was clean and the bedroom had a large, glazed window, which had been flung wide open to let in the fresh afternoon breeze. The smell of freshly plowed fields carried to them as they looked out over the higgledy-piggledy mass of steeply pitched roofs in the town.

The innkeeper and his wife were both elderly people, but at least they seemed welcoming and friendly to their two guests-particularly after they had seen the store of arms and armor piled on the riderless horses lined up outside the inn. The young knight was obviously a man of property, they decided. And a person of considerable importance as well, judging by the way he left all dealings to his manservant, the rather surly fellow in a gray-and-green cloak. It suited the innkeeper's sense of snobbery to assume that people of noble birth didn't deign to interest themselves in such commercial matters as the price of a room for the night.

Having ascertained that there was no market within the town where they might be able to convert their captured booty into money, Halt allowed the inn's stable boy to bed their horses down for the night.

All except Abelard and Tug, of course. He saw to them personally, and he was pleased to note that Horace did the same for Kicker.

Once the horses were settled, the two companions returned to their room. Supper wouldn't be ready for an hour or two, the innkeeper's wife had told them.

"We'll use the time to take a look at that arm of yours," Halt told Horace. The younger man sank gratefully onto the bed and sighed contentedly. Contrary to Halt's expectations, the beds were soft and comfortable, with thick, clean blankets and crisp white sheets. At a gesture from Halt, the apprentice stood up and pulled his mail shirt and tunic over his head, grunting slightly with pain as he had to raise his arm above shoulder height to do it. The bruising had spread across the entire upper arm, creating a patchwork of discolored flesh that ran from dark blue-black to an ugly yellow around the edges. Halt probed the bruised area critically, feeling to make sure there were no broken bones.

"Ow!" said Horace as the Ranger's fingers probed and poked around the bruise.

"Did that hurt?" Halt asked, and Horace looked at him with exasperation.

"Of course it did," he said sharply. "That's why I said 'ow!'"

"Hmm," Halt muttered thoughtfully, and seizing the arm, he turned it this way and that while Horace gritted his teeth against the pain.

Finally able to contain his annoyance no longer, he stepped back away from Halt's grasp.

"Are you actually hoping to accomplish anything there?" he asked in a peevish tone of voice. "Or are you just having fun causing me pain?"

"I'm trying to help," Halt said mildly. He reached for the arm once more, but Horace backed away.

"Keep your hands off," he said. "You're just poking and prodding.

I can't see how that's supposed to help."

"I'm just trying to make sure there's nothing broken," Halt explained. But Horace shook his head at the Ranger.

"Nothing's broken. I've got some bruising, that's all."

Halt made a helpless gesture of resignation. He opened his mouth to speak, planning to reassure Horace that he was really trying to help, when matters were taken out of his hands-literally.

There was a brief knock at the door; then, before the sound had died, the door was flung open and the innkeeper's wife bustled in with an armful of fresh pillows for the beds. She smiled at the two of them, then her gaze lit upon Horace's arm and the smile died, replaced instantly by a look of motherly concern.