The closing in of Winter always brought one definite disadvantage to the weaponry classes; much of the time practices and lessons had to be held in the salle instead of out-of-doors. This limited the kinds of lessons that could be given and the way that practices could be held. Every season brought its difficulties for a Weaponsmaster; in spring and summer there were torrential, cold rains to deal with, it was difficult to muster enthusiasm for heavy exercise in high summer, and in the winter, of course, there was the cold and the snow. Well, if the job had been easy, anyone could have done it.

Alberich still held some archery classes out-of-doors in the winter, but when, as today, snow was falling thickly, with a wicked wind to blow it around, there wasn't much point in keeping the youngsters at the targets. Yes, they would find themselves having to fight for their lives under adverse conditions, but adverse conditions affected the enemy too. And as for needing to hunt, well no Herald was going to starve because he or she could not hunt in a blizzard; Waystations were stocked with sufficient supplies, and every Herald on circuit carried emergency rations. During their last year, each Trainee would get an intense course in survival hunting and disadvantaged-combat, and there was no point in making the youngsters utterly and completely miserable for the sake of showing them what it was like to be utterly and completely miserable. Not even the Karsite officers' academy did that to its students, and having seen what life was like at the Collegia, Alberich knew that the lessoning he'd gotten at the academy was harsh, and not at all conducive to training youngsters like these.

Besides, with the Tedrels gone, and Karse itself essentially neutralized for a while, the only enemies that Heralds were likely to encounter in the field were bandits and brigands.

Now, as Alberich well knew from long experience, bandits and brigands are

humans, they are essentially lazy, or they wouldn't be trying to steal rather than earn an honest living, and they are just as attached to their own creature-comforts as any other humans. Given a choice in the matter, they wouldn't attack under adverse conditions, either. By night—certainly. In ambush, definitely. In a blizzard? A flood? A raging storm? Not likely. In fact, in all of the time that Alberich himself had led his men of the Sunsguard against the bandits on the Karsite border, never once had he encountered a band moving against a target when the weather was foul. That didn't mean it was impossible, just unlikely. That made the circumstance something to guard against, but not something that required extensive training.

So, when the snows began to fall in earnest just after the noon meal, Alberich herded the next class to arrive into the salle itself. Which occassioned the inevitable delay in the cleaning of boots at the door, and the taking off of cloaks and gloves and hanging them up to dry along the oven-wall before anything could get started. And then, because this was a mixed class of Trainees from all three Collegia and some Blues as well, there was more delay as Alberich sorted them out into the limited space inside the salle.

Although there was no fire actually in the room—far, far too dangerous to have a fireplace in an area where someone could fall or be thrown into it—the salle was kept reasonably warm by a huge brick "oven" in one corner. A relatively small fire deep inside it was set alight in the first really cold days of autumn and never allowed to go out, night or day. That fire heated the great mass of bricks that made up the oven and chimney and the wall, and that mass, in turn, radiated heat into the room. It also wasted heat along the outside of the same wall as well, but unfortunately, that couldn't be helped...and anyway, that outside-wall was a nice place for a Companion to come and warm himself. The salle wasn't cozy—but no one was going to freeze without his cloak.

You could—and Alberich occasionally had—actually bake meals in that oven, if said meals were the sorts of things that required slow baking. You could—and Alberich did—leave a pot of soup or stew in there as well, to stay warm during the day. It was off-limits to the Trainees, however, not by virtue of any orders, but by common sense. You couldn't open the cast-iron door without burning your hand unless you used a heavy leather blacksmith's gauntlet, and Alberich prudently never left any of those lying around loose.

Of course, on a day like today, every youngster in the class was doing his or her best to get close to the oven and the warmest part of the room, which meant that unless the Weaponsmaster took a hand in it—-and remembered who had gotten that choice part of the room last—there were going to be difficulties right from the start of the lessons.

Especially on a day like today, when devilment seemed to have infected all of them. There was pushing and shoving, teasing and a few insults and counter-insults, and the general restlessness that showed he was going to have to be an autocratic brute today. He gave a purely internal sigh; what was it about adolescents that made them run wild at utterly unpredictable intervals? Maybe it was that all of the students in this class were boys. Girls were a steadying influence, at least in these classes. The boys didn't seem quite so willing to run about like idiots when there were girls around.

Well, run—that was a good idea. He ought to have them run first. It would warm their muscles up and might exhaust a little of that too-plentiful energy.

"Run!" he ordered, barking out the single word. "Around the salle, ten times."

Grumbling, and in a straggling line, they ran, while he tried to remember who of this lot had gotten the prime spot during the last indoor lesson, and who hadn't gotten it in a while. By the time they finished their warm-up run, he thought he had it sorted, and before they could get up to any immediate

devilment, he separated the most likely troublemakers and paired them up with the more tractable for a practice session.

"Short swords, no shields," he ordered, "Single line for equipment, by pairs. No pushing." So those who had headed for the storage room, eager to be at their practice, got the best choice of equipment, while the stragglers got what they deserved. Not that any of it was bad—Alberich saw to that—but those who got first choice got the padded armor and helms that fit them best, and those who brought up the rear had a lot less choice.

With his pairs of youngsters distributed across the salle, Alberich began his slow walk up and down the lines, giving the call.

Every blow had a corresponding number, starting from "one" for a straight thrust to the center of the enemy's body, and the two students in a pair were designated "odd" and "even." Alberich called out sequences of blows, begining with "odd" or "even" for the students to follow, rather like a dancing-instructor calling out a sequence of dance-steps. Beginning students, of course, were taught one blow at a time, and specific parries for each. At the level these students had reached, the active student was given a pattern to follow, and the defensive student could use any sequence of parries he or she chose. Alberich began slowly, but as muscles warmed up further, and reactions quickened, the pace of the call sped up. And, as the students concentrated on what they were doing, the clatter of wooden sword on sword, which had started out rather ragged, became a single beat, just a fraction off the rhythm of the call.

Meanwhile, Alberich circled the floor like a hunting cat, watching the students, alert for any weaknesses, any bad habits. He wasn't going to interrupt the call just yet to correct them—this was part of the business of making blow-counter sequences automatic and instinctive—but he watched for them and noted them for later.

Now that they were up to speed, he added the next variation to the call. They had been fighting toe-to-toe. Now he ordered them to move.

"Odd! Five-seven-advance-four-two-retreat—five-seven- step right-one-eight. Even! Four-three-step left—" Now it really did look like a dance, and with movement added, some parries were not always working, some blows getting through. Still, he was not going to correct that just yet; this was the point in the practice where experience was the teacher, and there was nothing quite like the experience of a good bruise to drive the lesson home.

Again, he sped up the call. But now they were beginning to tire. The response was getting ragged again, and some of the students began dropping some of the sequence as weary muscles failed to keep up with the cadance. Time to stop, and go on to individual lessons.

"Rest!" he barked, and at that welcome command, the points of a dozen wooden practice-blades dropped to the wooden floor with a loud thwack.

"Kiorten and Ledale, center! The rest, circle!" That order called the first of his pairs into the middle of the floor, with the rest around them to observe. It was not as unfair as it might have seemed, to order a pair straight into the next part of the lesson when the rest were getting a breather. Kiorten and Ledale were the strongest and had the most endurance; a Blue and a Heraldic Trainee, and as alike as brothers. They were still relatively fresh after the call. That endurance needed to be tested; they needed to learn what it was like to fight real combat while they were tired.

Now Alberich took up a wooden longsword, to separate them when he saw something that needed either correction or scoring. The two combatants squared off, standing warily, balancing on the balls of their feet. They'd fought often, of course—though Alberich made a point of rotating partners in practice, he tended to put these two against each other more often than not, just to keep things even.

He held his sword out between the two; they tensed, waiting. "One—" he

counted, "Two—three—-heyla!"

He pulled back the sword and jumped back in the same instant, and they both went on the offensive, which was what he expected from them. They were both aggressive fighters, and neither one had learned yet that immediate offense wasn't neccessarily the wisest course to take.

He didn't separate them, even though they immediately tangled up in the middle of the wooden floor, with Kiorten seizing his opponent's sword in his free hand and Ledale grabbing the front of Kiorten's padded jerkin with his. Neither could do anything against the other when they were bound up like that, and a moment later, they broke apart by themselves, circled for a moment, then began an exchange of blows.

Kiorten got a hit, and Alberich stopped the combat for a moment. "Na. Let me look—" He made a quick judgement of position and strength. "Ledale, you are losing the free hand; struck it truly, Kiorten has. Tuck it behind you. Heyla." Let Ledale judge for himself that he had left that hand out there as an easy target. With the wooden blade, the blow probably only stung a bit, but had it been a real short-sword, even with an armored gauntlet, the hand would have been seriously injured.

But Ledale wasn't taking this lying down; he launched himself at his opponent with a flurry of blows that drove Kiorten back, and scored a hit himself, that made Alberich stop the combat again. "Na—a flesh wound, but you bleed. If this goes on, you weaken. Heyla."

It didn't go on for very much longer. Ledale was at a disadvantage with that hand tucked behind him; it made him turn a little too far to the right, leaving his body more open to attack. Kiorten saw that, and saw too that Ledale was going to go aggressive again. So this time, he wisely let it happen, and by the way he avoided the blows, led Ledale in the direction he wanted, until he got a good opening for a body-shot. He had to commit everything to that, but he made the full commitment, and the sword thwacked home against Ledale's torso with an impact that made him grunt in pain.

"Enough!" Alberich called, although he hadn't really needed to. Ledale backed up immediately, saluted his opponent, and pulled off his helm in surrender.

"Curse you!" he said amiably, though his face was a little white. "I'm going to have a bruise the size of my head for a week, even assuming you haven't cracked my ribs!"

"See the Healers," Alberich directed brusquely, as Kiorten pulled off his helm and extended his hand for his defeated opponent to shake. "After lessons. Ledale, observe. Kiorten, you drop your point too often; go to practice lunges at the mirror. Aldo and Triana, center."

Two more students came out of the circle to face off against each other in the center, while Ledale took a vacant spot in the circle and his erstwhile partner obediently moved to the side of the room to face one of the full-length mirrors set into the back wall of the salle, and began lunging with his sword fully extended, watching his reflection the way he would watch an opponent.

Those mirrors had utterly shocked Alberich the first time he had seen them—mirrors were expensive, appallingly expensive, and that much mirrored glass at that size represented a sum of money that had made his head swim. But when he'd gotten over the shock, he had to admit that putting those mirrors there was a brilliant idea, for nothing enabled a student learning anything involving body-movement to correct himself like being able to see and as well as feel exactly what he was doing right or wrong.

Right now, however, he kept his attention on the two students before him; a pair of the children of the nobly born. Things had certainly changed there—perhaps not in the attitude of those highborn towards him, but at least in the fact that they no longer expressed their contempt for him aloud. And no longer permitted their children to act on that contempt. The Blues now worked just as

hard in his classes as any Heraldic Trainee, and there were no more sneers or other expressions of disrespect in his presence.

As for what happened outside his presence, he cared not at all. If they respected him, well and good. If they feared him, perhaps that was just as good. If neither, so long as they behaved themselves in his class, it mattered not what they thought.

These two, Grays both, were going at it with the same concentration and will—if not skill—as the previous pair. And with a touch less aggression; not so bad a thing, since he preferred to see caution over bravado. When one finally defeated the other, he sent them to observe, rather than to the mirrors.

The third pair, Healer and Herald Trainees, also bouted and retired; one went to the mirrors, the other to point-practice on a ball suspended from the ceiling. The fourth pair, however—

Well, both of them were high-spirited and today, truly full of bedevilment. One was a a Heraldic Trainee, the other a Bardic Trainee, and between them, the two were responsible for half the pranks that were pulled at either Collegia. Both were slender and agile, both possessed of so much energy that their teachers sometimes despaired and envied at one and the same time.

So Alberich knew he was going to have to be sharp to keep these two within bounds.

If he could. Adain (the young Bard) and Mical (the Heraldic Trainee) were harder to keep control of than a bushel of ferrets.

The two went at each other with the same concentration and will as the first two, and a great deal more energy and verve. As a consequence, they didn't stay inside the circle of observers, and those who had been quietly practicing found themselves scrambling out of the way.

Alberich had heard some rumors that these two were in the habit of experimenting with new moves—well, here was the proof that the rumors were true. It looked less like a practice bout and more like an acrobatic exhibition. Very few of their blows actually connected with anything; they weren't actually parrying each other, it was that they were tumbling and spinning and jumping about so much that they never even got near each other with their wooden blades.

"Stop!" Alberich roared, just as Adair, by more luck than anything else, bound Mical's blade in a complicated corkscrewing parry—

—and with a wild flip of his arm, disarmed his opponent and sent the wooden sword flying—

—straight at one of the precious panels of mirror.

It was one of those moments when time slows to a crawl, and the coming disaster is observed in painful detail without anyone being able to actually do anything about it. Adain's grin of triumph slowly turned to one of horror, Mical clawed the air in futility after his lost sword. As the heavy, weighted stick flipped over and over in midair, Alberich just braced himself for the inevitable.

And, with a terrible crash, it came.

A profound and dreadful silence fell over the salle, broken only by a belated series of musical chinks, as a few shards left detached themselves, and landed on the wreck of the rest of the mirror.

Chink. Chinker-chink. Chink.

"Uh-oh," said Adain, in a very small voice.

Chink.

#

Alberich stood behind the two miscreants with his arms crossed over his chest, as they faced the desk of the Dean of Herald's Collegium. Elcarth was not alone; the Dean of Bardic Collegium, Bard Arissa, had joined him for this particular conference. While Elcarth, slight and birdlike, with an inquisitive face and mild manner, was not normally the sort of person who might inspire trepidation in a student, the look he wore today would have frozen the marrow of

anyone's bones.

The two boys huddled unhappily in their chairs. It was the first time within his knowledge that Alberich had seen these two subdued. Their shoulders, under gray and rust-colored tunics respectively, were hunched with misery; their dark heads were both bowed, and two sets of hazel eyes were bent upon the floor.

"What, precisely, possessed you two to demonstrate your—new fighting techniques today?" That was Bard Arissa, a slim, autocratic woman, dark as a gypsy and resplendant in her full formal Scarlets, and you could have used the edge in her voice to cleave diamonds.

"It seemed like a good idea?" Adain said, in a whisper.

"And why did you not ask Herald Alberich if you could show him these things in private?" asked Elcarth, his voice like a wintry blast from the snowstorm outside.

"Um. He's very busy?" Adain seemed to be doing all the talking; Mikal was sitting like a stone. Alberich knew why; Mikal was from a family prosperous enough to possess one or two real glass mirrors and he knew just how expensive they were, although he probably had no idea that the price increased exponentially with the size. Adain was highborn; until he came to the Collegium, he had never had to pay for anything himself in his life, and he had no idea what even a handmirror cost, much less one of the huge panels in the salle. Mikal thought he knew, and he was scared, just thinking it would cost about the same as a good horse; Alberich knew better, knew that you could buy a nice house with a garden in a good part of Haven for less than one of those mirrors.

"Never, to my knowledge, did you inquire of me," Alberich said from behind them.

"You wanted an audience," Arissa said, in that same hard, sharp voice—which, given that she was a Master Bard, was certainly deliberate. And, given that she was a Bard, and so was one of the miscreants, her guess was probably correct. "You couldn't bear not to have an audience. You wanted to show off what you thought you could do."

Alberich's surmise was borne out by the way that both the boys winced.

"Well," she continued, "You got an audience. I trust you're pleased. You've made fools out of yourselves in front of that audience, not to mention the damages."

Now it was Elcarth's turn. "Are either of you aware of just how difficult—and expensive—it is to replace a mirror of that size?"

Identical head-shakes.

Elcarth named a figure. Both of them went white as the snow falling outside. Even Alberich was impressed, hearing the exact cost; it made what he had paid for his stained-glass window look like pin money by comparison.

"Now," Elcarth continued, "Naturally, some of this is going to come from your stipends. We shan't take all of your stipends, but you're going to be down to less than half what everyone else gets."

Mikal finally said something. "But—we could never pay all that back, not even if we stayed Trainees for a hundred years!" He gulped, audibly.

"Which is why you are both going to be spending all of your free time working for the Master of the Glassmaker's Guild until he finishes the new mirror," Arissa said, flatly. "When the mirror is finished, I trust you will have an entirely new understanding of your folly."

"And a new set of muscles," Elcarth added, enigmatically. "Now you may go, and reflect on the fact that you will not have any time to get up to any more clever ideas for the duration. This will be your last evening with any leisure in it, because you'll be spending your mornings, your afternoons, and half of your evenings down at the Glassworks for a while. Enjoy it."

As if they could, with a sentence like that one hanging over their heads. The two rose, heads hanging, and shuffled out of the room, the very image of

dejection.

Elcarth sighed once they were gone, and ruffled a hand through his hair. "I wouldn't mind so much if they'd gone about their little project sensibly," he said. He motioned to Alberich to sit; Alberich did so. "Consulting with their instructors, for instance. Not that all of that gymkana nonsense would have worked, mind you. I wonder where they got such a notion?"

"Out of their imaginations, I suppose," growled Arissa, sitting on the other chair. "Which are entirely too active if you ask me. Or perhaps out of some idiot play or other; the two of them are always running down into Haven to see some fool drama whenever there's one to be seen. I presume they're going to be put to working the bellows at the glassworks for the next moon or so? It could be worse; this could be summer."

"It will be summer before they see the end of their labor," Elcarth said. "I intend to leave them down there for more than a moon. Master Cuelin tells me his apprentice is ready to go on to more complicated work, and he doesn't have a junior apprentice to start on the bellows. So our lads can serve until he gets one. At least it was only one mirror-panel."

"How often does this occur?" Alberich asked, curiously. "Assume, I must, that accidents do happen. Stupidity probably rather more often than accident."

Elcarth shrugged. "About once every hundred years or so. I mean, we designed the salle to minimize the possibility of an accident, and you Weaponsmasters rarely permit flying objects in the salle itself. It does happen, and it isn't always a Trainee's fault, though I must say that this time is probably going into Myste's Chronicles for sheer wrong-headedness. The panels are all a standard size, and the glassworks has the dimensions in their records from the last time, so Master Cuelin won't even have to come up here to take measurments. I can't tell you how long it's going to take to replace the mirror, though. The Master will have a lot of failures before he gets a success."

"I would interested be, to watch," Alberich admitted.

"Then deliver the criminals yourself in the morning, after breakfast," Elcarth told him. "Someone will have to escort them the first time."

Alberich took quick account of his schedule, and smiled thinly. "So I shall," he decided.

Arissa laughed, her voice full of ironic humor. "Oh, they'll enjoy seeing your face tomorrow morning!"

#

The snow was still falling all that afternoon, into the night, and the next day, and Alberich had sent word up to the Collegia that the Trainees were to have a day-and-half holliday from their weaponry classes while the salle was cleaned. A small army of Collegium servants were scouring the salle floor for the tiniest slivers of glass, and would not leave until the floor had been swept several times over, then washed down, then buffed and lightly sanded, so that it wasn't slippery. The one proviso to this "holliday" was that the Trainees were to spend the class-time out-of-doors, but with this much snow, he doubted that would be much of a trial for them. The first lot was already building a snow-fort when he and Kantor left to escort the two troublemakers to their appointed labors, while snow continued to fall from a sky that was the same color as a pigeon's breast, and looked just as soft.

When Alberich got to the grounds of Herald's Collegium, the two boys were waiting for him on the road that ran among the buildings, mounted, Adain on his Companion and Mikal on a sorrel gelding from the Palace stables. There was a conspicuous absence of Trainees anywhere near them; they waited alone in their disgrace.

As Alberich and Kantor approached, he observed that Adain and Mikal looked just as subdued as they had last night, and even Adain's Companion drooped a little. They kept the hoods of their cloaks well up, and aside from a soft,

"Good morrow, Weaponsmaster Alberich," he got nothing more out of them. Not that he tried. It would do them good to contemplate their sins in silence.

Snow drifted down now as fat, slow flakes; there wasn't even a breath of wind, and the air smelled damp. Most of the trees bore burdens of snow along their black, bare branches, and bushes were mounded, hidden under heaps of the stuff. Nothing had spoiled the pure whiteness yet, except for where the road had been cleared by the Palace gardeners. Alberich led them away from the Palace and towards the wall that surrounded the entire complex. They left from the Heralds' Gate, the guarded postern at the Collegium side of the Palace grounds. Outside the walls, the road hadn't been cleared as yet. Heavy as the snow on the road was, the Companions made easy going through it, and the horse was able to follow in Kantor's wake. By the time they got down through the manors of the highborn and the very wealthy, there were crews out starting to clear the road. Traffic was limited to a few riders and people on foot; except for a few main thoroughfares, the streets hadn't been shoveled out yet either. Fresh snow was nearly up to the knee, and drifts blocked many smaller side-streets and alleys. But people were already out with shovels and teams of horses pulling scrapers, and work was going apace.

After all, it was in the interest of a shopkeeper to get the street in front of his place of business cleared quickly. So as they passed farther down into the commercial parts of Haven, there was more clean pavement, and more activity. And by the smokes coming from the chimney of the glassworks as they arrived, things were busy in there as well.

Alberich dismounted and gave a hard rap on the door to the glassworks with his fist. Two of the apprentices met them at the door; one took charge of their mounts, and with an evil grin, the other took charge of the miscreants. Alberich understood the reason for the grin perfectly; the apprentice would be put to doing something far more interesting and less labor-intensive while Adair and Mikal took his place at the bellows. The furnaces were always going in a glassworks; the fire needed to be quite hot indeed and at an even temperature. The least-skilled job was that of keeping the bellows pumping air into that furnace, so that the molten glass was always ready to use, cane for decoration could be melted, and glass being blown into vessels could be reheated.

Alberich knew from his previous visits where to find Master Cuelin; in the Master Workshop. That was where he headed. The glassworks itself was a dangerous place, and he was very careful as he made his way through it.

Even now, in the dead of winter, it was very warm in here. Surrounding the furnaces were stations for molding glass, for those who decorated finished vessels, for beadmakers, for glassblowers. The floor was of pounded dirt, the benches and tables made of metal and stone. There was very little that could catch fire, logically enough. It was surprisingly dark here too; Alberich supposed there was a reason for that. Perhaps it made the hot glass easier to see while it was being shaped.

Glass was both blown and molded here, and all manner of things were made. The most common pieces were molded disks and the thick "bullseye" glass for inferior windows, made by dropping hot glass into molds and pressing it. That was a job for an apprentice; it was relatively easy, relative being the proper word when you were talking about glass. Beadmakers formed their amazing little works of art on mandrels at their own little benches—or spun out long, thin tubes of colored glass to be chopped into bits and sand-polished in big drums when cool. Glassblowers formed the molten stuff into every shape imaginable, and decorators took the finished vessels and shapes and embellished them with ribbons of colored glass.

Better window-glass was made in the same way as mirror-glass, and required a glassblower as well. Alberich had been rather surprised by that when Master Cuelin told him; it had not occurred to him that one would use the same technique that created a goblet or a vase to make a flat pane of glass.

But, in fact, that was precisely how it was made. Glass was blown into a bubble of the right thickness, the bubble was then rolled against a flat metal plate to form a cylinder, the ends were swiftly cut off the cylinder and the cylinder slit up the middle while the glass was still soft enough to "relax," and the resulting pane unrolled itself onto the plate and cooled flat. A master of the craft created a flat, rectangular pane of even thickness with irregularities so few as to be trivial.

But of course, the larger the pane—or mirror—the more difficult the task of blowing and cutting. Something the size of the mirror in the salle was going to be extremely difficult to do.

And in fact, it was Master Cuelin himself who was taking the first tries at it. A pile of rejected shards to one side testified that he had already tried and failed a time or two this morning.

"Ah, I give over," he said, as Alberich arrived. "I thought I'd give it a try, but I've not the lungs anymore. I'll stick to my colored glasses and let young Elkin here do what he does best."

But "young" Elkin—who was older than Alberich—shook his head. "It won't come quick, Master Cuelin," he said honestly. "I've never done aught that big. I'll need to work up to it."

"I wouldn't expect anything else, my lad," Cuelin told him. "Give it time; you'll manage. Kernos knows so long as you don't make the mess of it that I just did, we can find buyers for the smaller panes and mirrors while you work your way up to the right size."

"Are you sure of that, Master?" the other craftsman asked, surprised.

Cuelin laughed, and pulled off his leather gauntlets. "Certain sure. You just wait; as soon as word gets out that we're replacing a salle mirror up there on the hill, there'll be a stream of highborn servants at the door. `If you'd happen to have a spare window-glass, so-by-so, Master Cuelin...if you're like to have a mirror for milady's dressing-table....' They know we have to work our way up to a pane that big, and they know they'll get a bargain they wouldn't get if they'd commissioned those glass-panes and mirrors special. Then it'll be the silvering, and that'll be a bit tricky as well. Master Alberich, I want to show you something that'll catch your interest, aye, and you, too, Elkin—I had the Collegium servants bring me down the old glass, and when I got it, this is what I found."

He held up a shard of silvered glass. "This'll be from the top of your mirror—" and a second "—and this'll be from the bottom. Now, what d'ye think of that?"

The top shard was clearly thinner than the bottom. Alberich scratched his head. "Glass not so good as you can make it?" he hazarded.

Cuelin laughed. "Oh, flattery! No, no, it was fine glass, and we'll be hard put to match it. But I'll reckon that mirror was over two hundred years old if it was a day, Master Alberich. Maybe more. And when it was made, top to bottom was the same thickness."

He wanted Alberich to look puzzled; with some amusement, Alberich obliged him. "Then, how?" he asked.

"Glass never quite sets, Master Alberich," Cuelin told him. "It's like slow water, my old Master told me. Believe it or not, it keeps flowing—oh, slow, too slow to notice, but over a century or two, or three, you look, you'll see that any glass has got thicker at the bottom than it is at the top. Mind, most of it doesn't stay unbroken long enough to find that out, `specially with lads like your two troublemakers about, but there you have it."

Alberich examined the two shards, then passed them on to Elkin, and blinked at that, and tried to get his mind wrapped around the idea of something that flowed that slowly. "I am—astonished," he admitted after a moment. "Astonished."

"Wonderful stuff, is glass," Master Cuelin said with pride and pleasure.

"And I'll see to it your lads get their heads stuffed full of more than they ever cared to learn about it. No point in exercising their arms and leaving their heads to come up with more mischief. I'll send them back up the hill on time for their classes. And—" he took a slip of paper out of a pocket in his tunic and consulted it "—I see I'm to expect them back down here at fourth bell, and keep them until our supper-time. We eat late, mind."

"Correct," Alberich said. "Be here, they will be. Fed, they will be when they arrive, then they must study for the morrow, then bed."

Cuelin laughed. "If they've strength enough to hold up their heads without falling into their books, I'll be main surprised."

Alberich took his leave of the Master with better humor than he had arrived in; clearly Cuelin understood boys, and was quite prepared to handle them as they needed to be handled. Mikal's horse and Adain's Companion were comfortably housed, as the Weaponsmaster saw when he went to fetch Kantor, so Alberich left them in peace. The horse was happy enough; the Companion still looked subdued.

:An interesting place. Have you ever thought of glasswork as a hobby?: Kantor asked, as Alberich mounted.

:I think I would not be good enough to satisfy myself,: Alberich replied truthfully. They rode out into the street; already, the industrious craftsmen here had gotten it cleared, and the snow had been piled up along the walls. :Why was the boy's Companion so quiet?:

:Because he is as much to blame as the children,: Kantor told him. :Apparantly, he was in league with them. He is very young.:

Alberich snorted. :He must be. I thought your kind had better sense.:

Kantor sighed gustily. :Those of us who are older, are. Some of us, like Eloran—are young.:

:Have you got any plans for delivering some sort of chastizement to Eloran?: Alberich asked after a moment, while he tried to sort out the meaning behind his words and couldn't come up with anything.

:Oh, yes,: came the reply. :Rolan and I have devised something quite—appropriate.:

And since nothing else was forthcoming, Alberich's curiousity had to remain unassuaged.

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4