let his hand go, and he gawked at it.  His fingers were smooth, pink skin, and showed no signs that anything had happened to them.
	"How did you do that?" he asked in shock as she took Jenna's hands in her own.  Jenna yelped and tried to pull away, but the woman's hands were like steel, holding them in an iron grip.
	"My name is Dolanna Casbane, a katzh-dashi," she said formally.  "What I just did is called healing, and with practice, it is something that both of you will be able to do someday."
	They both just stared at her.
	"The young one is a bit too young," the knight said.
	"No matter," she replied.  "I am amazed that neither of them have done anything.  She needs instruction before she has an accident."  She put the ivory amulet back around her neck, tucking the device back under her bodice.
	"What are you talking about?" Tarrin asked.
	"Both of you, you have tremendous potential," she said, pursing her lips.  Then she noticed the slightly confused looks she was getting.  "Both of you have the natural talent to be Sorcerers, to be katzh-dashi," she explained.  "Tremendous potential.  The shaeram burned you.  I have never seen that happen before."
	Jenna looked at her a bit fearfully.  "What does that mean?"
	"That means that both of you must come to the Tower of Six Spires, in Suld, and undergo formal training," she replied.  "Soon.  Now."
	"Now?" Jenna said.  "I can't just leave!  My parents wouldn't let me, and I don't want to go!"
	"Jenna," Tarrin soothed, "calm down."  Then he looked at the small woman expectantly.
	"There is no need to look so surprised," she said gently.  "Nor is there reason to be frightened.  I will speak to your parents, and let them know what has happened.  Then we will all sit down somewhere quiet and discuss what must be done."
	Tarrin put his arm around Jenna, who had begun to cry, then he pulled her into his arms and comforted her, his own mind tumbling around a numb sensation.  "It was wrong to just blurt it out like that, Dolanna," the knight berated as the pair left.
	"I was surprised," she said a bit ruefully, and then their voices were lost in the din.  He didn't notice the knight stop and look back at them.
	"But I wanted to be a knight," he said numbly, putting his chin on the top of his sister's head.

	They had been missing quite a while.  Tarrin was still sitting with Jenna at their table, but the sun was creeping very lowly down along the western sky.  His parents and the woman had been missing for hours.  Tarrin still held Jenna very close, for though she had stopped weeping, she wasn't yet ready to give up on the feeling of comfort and security she was receiving from his embrace.  Tarrin wished that someone would do the same for him.
	Sorcery.  Although his father had many times told tales of the Sorcerers of Suld, Tarrin had never really paid much attention to them.  His father had worked with them in the past, and his stories and impression of them was very good.  Tarrin had been raised to believe that Sorcerers and Sorcery were good things, and that the katzh-dashi deserved to be treated with honor.  But never, even in his wildest fantasies, had he ever considered the possibility that he would be capable of using Sorcery.  That was a power for special people, the people in the stories.  Although it existed, he never dreamed that it would affect him so personally.
	Poor Jenna.  All her life, since she'd started to grow into a woman, all she wanted was to find a good man, marry, and settle into a life of blissful domesticity.  She had no desire to leave the village, much less travel all the way across Sulasia and go to the Tower in Suld.  And she was only thirteen.  They had no right to take such a young girl from her parents.  And though Tarrin had always wanted to leave, being a Sorcerer was not the life that he'd imagined for himself.  He wanted to be a knight.  Sorcery was a totally alien concept to him.
	The others seemed to sense that something was wrong with the Kaels, but they did not intrude.  Tarrin thought somewhere in the back of his mind that they knew that this would happen to some family.  Every time a Sorcerer arrived, parents began to worry about ever seeing their children again.  Last year, Timon Darby was taken to learn Sorcery in the Tower, and Leni Darby, his mother, had moped around, not speaking a single word, for over three months.  Timon had visited last month, and he looked well from the glimpse that Tarrin got of him.  What made it seem so bad was that the Sorcerers wanted both of them, that his mother's sense of loss would be that much worse with having to let go of both her grown child and her adolescent child.
	"Tarrin?"
	Tarrin turned.  Elke Kael was standing there with his father and the Sorceress, the knight standing a bit behind them.  It was obvious that his mother had been crying.  Eron looked somber and serious.
	"Mother!" Jenna cried, flying from Tarrin and burying herself into her mother's arms.  She started crying again, her shoulders shaking as she sobbed into Elke's wool shirt.  Elke stroked her hair and held her close, crooning soft words to her daughter.
	"Child, there is nothing to be afraid of," Dolanna said calmly.
	Jenna pushed away from her mother, her eyes burning with something that Tarrin guessed was pretty close to hatred.  "Get away from me!" she shouted.  "I don't want to go!  I don't have to!"
	"Child," Dolanna said, but Jenna cut her off.  Jenna raised both her hands, and Tarrin felt the most unusual sensation, a sensation of drawing in.  Except it was Jenna who was drawing whatever it was.  He could feel something, it, flow into his sister like a flood.
	"Leave me alone!" she screamed.  Suddenly, pure fire erupted from Jenna's hands, and it roared at the Sorceress like a wall of blowing dust before a tornado.  The fire simply stopped when it reached the woman, coalescing into a fiery ball in front of her.  Then it vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
	Jenna stared at her hands in shock.
	"That is why you must learn, child," Dolanna said firmly.  "With your power, you could quite possibly destroy the entire village.  But you are right.  We cannot make you go."
	"Dear, you don't have to go," Elke said softly, putting her hand on her shoulder.  "Dolanna agreed to send someone here to teach you.  You're too young yet to leave, but they can't just let you go around like this.  You could hurt yourself."
	"I don't have to leave?" she asked in a small voice.
	"No," Elke said with a gentle smile.  "When you're older, you will have to go to their tower, but not until you're older."
	"Mother!" she said with a sob, crushing into Elke's arms again.
	"She will learn much better in a place more comfortable for her," Dolanna said to Elke calmly.  "We have not had one as young as she with the kind of power that she possesses.  In such a special case, certain exceptions must be made."
	"What about me?" Tarrin asked.
	"You, my young one, you will be going with us," she told him.  "We are leaving tomorrow.  And you will not be alone.  Two other young ones will be going with us.  Tiella Ren, and Walten Longbranch.  I believe you may know them."
	"Tiella?  And Walten?" he said in surprise.  Tiella was the herbalist's apprentice, learning the uses of herbs for healing.  Walten was the son of the village carpenter, a tall, rather shiftless young man more fond of sleeping than working.
	"When we return to Suld, I will send one of my brothers or sisters here, Mistress Kael," the woman continued.  "As per our agreement, the instructor will reside in your home, so that he or she can be close to Jenna."  She turned and looked at Tarrin.  "Do not feel that going to the Tower is the end of all," she told him.  "It is not required for you to become katzh-dashi.  If you decide that the life of the order is not for you, then we will teach you what you need to do to control your power, and then you may be on your way to pursue your own life.  But if you do wish to remain among us, I am certain that someone with your raw power and potential would find a position of respect and importance among us."
	Tarrin nodded quietly, thinking back to what Jenna had done, and what he had felt.  It had frightened him, but at the same time, it felt....wonderful.  Like life flowing into him for the first time.  Was that how Sorcery felt when it was used?  Tarrin was a curious person, and his appetite had been whetted by that strange sensation.  He suddenly found that he wanted to know more about what it was about.
	"There is little time to chat," she prompted.  "Tarrin, you must go home and pack for the journey, but you may only bring what I tell you.  You may bring enough clothing for the journey.  You may bring a knife for utility, you may bring any books that you own, and you may bring some of your personal belongings, such as a razor.  Anything that you use in your day to day life.  You may bring weapons, but not weapons of war.  Your staff and your bow are acceptable, but a sword or axe is not."
	"Why?" he asked.
	"Because novices come to the Tower carrying only what they need, and you will not need weapons," she told him simply.  "You will need these items during the journey, so they will not be taken from you when you arrive.  But you will be expected to put them away, and not touch them while there.  If you were to bring a sword, it would be taken from you and held, and then returned to you when you leave."
	"Alright," he said.  Despite it not being what he wanted, that short touch on something larger was like a seed growing inside him.  Even though he still didn't want to be a katzh-dashi, he found the idea of learning more about the sensation he experienced to look better and better to him.
	"You will return to the village after packing," she told him.  "You will spend the night in the inn, so we may get an early start on the day."
	"Wylan said you can borrow one of the inn's horses," Elke told him.  "Go ahead and go get your things.  Make sure you get enough clothing for a month-long journey.  We'll be staying here tonight too, so bring back a change of clothing for all of us."
	"Alright, mother," he said.
	"Well scoot!" she said, shooing him away.
	"Be back soon," he promised.
	He went to the inn first, and after talking to the wiry, nervous-looking Wylen Ren, Tiella's father, he was on a horse trotting back down the large trail that led to the secluded Kael farm.  It didn't take very long to get there, and he tied the horse to the porch rail and ran inside.  He had a leather pack for when he went hunting, made by his mother, and he used that to pack up enough clothing for one month on the road.  He also added in his shaving razor and soap, then got his small cooking pot he used when hunting and filled it with various odds and ends that he felt he may need.  He got his pouch that had his sling and a variety of sling stones and metal sling bullets, metal cast-offs of Master Karn's forge that he formed into little balls for a sling.  That way he profited off the leftover metal.  The knife he'd won in the staff competition went on his belt, and two slender throwing daggers were tucked into his boots, one on each side.  Eron had taught him how to throw daggers, and these were balanced for throwing.  A third also went on his belt, on the other side.  He rolled up his outdoor bedroll, a thick mat filled with down and scraps of wool to form a pallet-like mat, with two heavy wool blankets and a small pillow rolled up inside it.  When travelling on the road, it was almost guaranteed that they'd spend some nights outside.
	He came down out of the loft and went to the storage room, and got his tent.  It was a small tent, made only for one or two people, but it was perfect for camping outside.  He then picked up three extra quivers of arrows for his bow, and took it all outside and started lashing what he couldn't wear or carry on the saddle.
	He stopped, and looked at the house, and he realized that it would be the last time in a while that he would see it.  He went back in and went back up to his room, looking around just once more.  He'd lived in this room for the last ten years.  His eyes came to rest on a section of wall that was slightly different than the others, where he'd accidentally ran his staff into the wood and made a big hole.  It had happened in the winter, and his father had made him sleep in the room with the hole to the cold outside for two days until he could get it patched.  He stood on the bed, and reached up into the rafters running along the top of the attic, feeling around.  He found the small wooden box, then grabbed it and pulled it down.  When he was younger, he always used a chair on the bed to get up there, and hide this box.  His secret box, full of all the things that a young boy thought were important.  Many things had been into and out of this box, some of them even alive.  He opened it after sitting on the bed.
	Inside were four things.  A large tooth of some animal, the sharp fang nearly as long as Tarrin's hand, a brilliantly glittering piece of quartz crystal he'd once found out along the streambed of Two Step Creek, a twisted nugget of pure gold, also found along the creekbed, and the wing.  It was a large gossamer wing, looking like the wing of a dragonfly.  But this dragonfly would have been nearly a span long.  The wing was a bit longer than Tarrin's hand, thin and delicate looking, but Tarrin knew it was very hard and rather tough.  It would also bend before it broke.  It was translucent, and when one looked through it, it scillinted and reflected in all the colors of the rainbow.  Tarrin had often spent hours gazing at the wing, mesmerized by the colors, and dreaming about what animal or creature had once owned it.  Tarrin had found it out in the woods when he was eight years old.  It was the first thing that had went into the box, and it was the only thing that had been in the box the entire time he'd kept the box.  The wing was the reason he had the box; he wanted to hide something that incredible, put it where nobody could find it.  He had owned it longer than anything else, and it was very special to him.
	He didn't want to leave the box here.  It was as much a representation of his life here as it was a possession.  It had been filled with his most secret secrets through the years, and the child in him didn't want anyone else to come along and find it.  He remembered Dolanna saying he could bring personal effects.  Well, this was the most personal effect he had.
	He packed everything back into the box carefully, and then used scraps of wool from his mother's work room to pad the contents.  They'd never been jostled around, and he didn't want to run the risk that age would make the wing brittle.  After making sure that everything was well protected, he closed the box and set the tiny latch on the front.  The box had been a gift to him from his mother, and she'd always wondered what had happened to it.  Tarrin had let her believe that he'd lost it.  He went back out to the horse, noticing that it was starting to get dark, then packed the box deep into his pack, where it wouldn't have to be removed to get at anything else.  Then he locked the front door, got on the horse, and hurried back to the village before it got too dark to ride.

	It had been a quiet, emotional night.  Tarrin had spent most of the night with his family, just sharing their company this one last time before he left to go to Suld.  It wasn't an unhappy time.  As the hours went by, the excitement of doing what he had always wanted to do began to take hold of him, and Tarrin's leaving was something that the family was already prepared to face.  He was up well past a reasonable hour, listening to Jak Longbranch, Walten's brother, playing his lute and talking.  Tarrin's departure had quickly circulated around the village, and everyone in the inn stopped by to wish him good luck at one time or another.
	He'd spent some of that time talking to Dolanna, and to Faalken, the knight.  He'd asked them about Suld, and they'd spent quite a while describing the city, one of largest and grandest cities in the Twelve Kingdoms.  Dolanna described the Tower, with its six smaller towers surrounding the huge central tower, which rose over the city like a tree in a meadow, how the grounds were surrounded by a magical fence, and enclosed enough land to put ten Aldreths inside comfortably.  The Tower was home to more than the Sorcerers.  The knights had their academy on the grounds as well, and the Tower ran a school for educating those willing to pay for it.  Everyone in the school was considered a Novice, although only a handful out of each major class had the spark to be Sorcerers.  Tower educated people had quite an edge on others, so many rich nobles and merchants sent their children there to be educated and gain that edge.
	Faalken described the city in a bit more detail, like the massive, grand, breathtaking Cathedral to Karas that was in the center of the city, and the Eight Fountains, one at each compass point, beautiful sculptures set in fountains, many of them rigged to spray water.  The most famous was the Fountain of Swans.  There were many other landmarks in the city, like the Black Tower, a tower that was once home to a wizard, and now was a cursed place.  Many came to look at it, enjoying the perverse thrill of catching glimpses of the hideous things that roamed the tower's halls, and occasionally appeared on the balconies.  Faalken had told him that they couldn't leave the tower, but that anyone that went into the tower was putting his life in his own hands.  Dolanna had called the things trapped in the tower Demons, and she said that it was the hands of the Gods themselves that trapped them inside.
	Dawn came early, but Tarrin was already awake to greet it.  He was dressed and packed when Dolanna knocked on his door.  She gave him a cursory glance when she saw him fully dressed.  "Do you often sleep so little?" she asked.
	"I don't sleep too much, no," he replied.
	"That will work to your advantage at the Tower," she told him with a smile.  "Get your pack and come downstairs.  We will eat, and then be off."
	Tarrin picked up his two packs, a personal one and one for a pack horse, and then went downstairs.  His father was already up, sitting at a table with the knight as Wylan Ren set down plates of fried eggs and bread and bacon.  "Morning, Tarrin," Wylan said with a smile as he passed.  "I'll bring you some breakfast."
	"Thanks, Master Wylan," he said, then he set down his packs and sat beside his father.
	"Morning, son," he said.  "Sleep well?"
	"Well enough," he replied.  "You?"
	"Your mother kept me awake pretty much all night," he said ruefully.  "You warmed up to the idea of going much faster than she did."  He took a bite of bread.  "Now that you've had a night to think about it, what do you think?"
	"I, I think I'd like to know more," he said.  "I don't know if it's what I want to do with my life, but looking into the possibilities won't hurt me."
	"That's a good attitude," the knight, Faalken, told him.  "A man set in stone will break before he can bend."  He leaned back in his chair some.  "You know, maybe I can convince the Tower to let us borrow you for a while," he thought aloud.
	"Borrow?"
	"You're Ungardt trained," he said.  "There's alot we could learn from our northern neighbors.  They fight better than most I've seen.  They're not the wild savages people make them out to be."
	"Definitely," Tarrin said.  "They work very hard to be that good."
	Faalken nodded.  "I think all the screaming and craziness is more show than anything else.  They have a reputation for it, so they have to maintain it."  He grinned suddenly.
	"A predictable opponent is a defeatable one," Tarrin quoted from his mother's many sayings.
	"I see you learned your lessons well," Faalken said shrewdly.
	Wylan Ren brought him a platter, and also weak ale for everyone to drink.  "Uh, Faalken, I need to ask you about the horse," he said.
	"Don't worry about it," he said.  "Dolanna bought one of the inn's horses for you."
	"Well, that's nice and all, but I don't ride very often," he said.  "I'm bound to get saddle sore."
	"I'm sure Dolanna will take care of it if you start getting raw," he assured him.
	"That's a relief," he said, cutting into the eggs.
	Dolanna came down with his mother, and they ate breakfast quietly and quickly.  Just about the time that Tarrin finished his breakfast, Tiella Ren staggered down the stairs.  Tiella was a pretty girl, fifteen years old and with blond hair and blue eyes.  She was very petite, even shorter than Dolanna, but had a very generous figure.  She was one of the most sought after girls in the village.  Every boy in Aldreth sighed and staggered a bit when Tiella Ren walked past.  Tarrin had probably talked to Tiella more than any girl in the village, because she was very smart, and she knew that Tarrin didn't have a real interest in her in the way the other boys did.  Although she was very pretty, Tarrin thought of her as a friend, not like that.  She was wearing a plain wool travelling dress, one of her older ones so that the brown dye had faded, divided at the skirt for riding.  She too had a pack with her.
	"Tiella," Tarrin greeted.  Tiella was not a morning person.  Tarrin had seen her in the morning before.
	"Umm," she said blearily, sitting down.  Tiella had taken the apprenticeship with the herbalist as much for the fact that he didn't get up until noon as anything else.  "There should be a law against getting up this early," she groaned, putting her elbows on the table and putting her head in her hands.
	Faalken grinned at Tarrin, then he smacked his palms on the table.  Hard.  Tiella squeaked and sat bolt upright, then glared at the cheeky knight with murder in her eyes.  "I love dawn," he said with an innocent grin.  "I love them so much, I'm going to go outside right now and check on the horses."
	"You do that," Tiella said in an ominously low voice.
	The burly man got up and left without a word.
	Dolanna came down with Walten moments later, as Wylan came out, saw the two newcomers, and then went back into the kitchen.  He returned with three platters of breakfast,  "Wylan, get two more," his father said.  "I'm going to go wake up my wife and daughter."
	"Certainly, Eron," he said.
	Walten was a tall, lanky lad, sixteen years old, with sandy brown hair and a narrow face.  His eyes were small and set close together, and his hands were scarred from working as the carpenter's apprentice.  He was wearing a simple brown tunic and leather breeches, the knees of the breeches a bit thin from his need to constantly kneel.  "Tarrin," he said simply as he sat down.  Tarrin and Walten didn't talk very often when Tarrin was in the village, but they got along well enough.  They weren't exactly friends, but they didn't actively dislike each other, either.
	"Walten," he returned.  Walten was notorious for being a bit lazy, but Tarrin thought he understood why.  On one rare occasion when they talked, Walten admitted he hated carpentry with a passion that bordered on holy.  Tarrin could understand how difficult it would be to motivate yourself into doing something you couldn't stand.  He hated carpentry, but he loved to whittle and carve wood.  It was that hobby that convinced his parents to apprentice him to the carpenter, but Walten had told Tarrin that there was a big difference between shaving a piece of wood into a shape, and nailing two boards together.  Walten would have been a good woodcarver, but not a carpenter.  It was the shapes and designs that Walten could design in wood that the kept the carpenter, a wiry, crotchety old man named Dumas Tren, from throwing Walten out on his ear.
	Tarrin didn't quite understand the difference, but he kept his opinions to himself.  Tarrin crafted arrows in his spare time, trying to master the touch that his father had when making arrows, but what he did wasn't quite the same as what Walten did.  Tarrin shaped the ends of arrow shafts to accept the head and the fletching, but Walten could carve remarkably human-like faces and figures into wood.  Tarrin could see a difference between the woodworking he did and the work that a carpenter did, but not the difference between what Walten did and the nailing part.
	His mother and sister came down moments later, with his father.  Elke immediately sat beside him and brushed his hair away from his ear impulsively.  Jenna sat across from him, staring at the plate that Wylan set in front of her woodenly.
	"We must be off with the dawn," Dolanna said as she sat down.  "Eat quickly, young ones.  We do not have much time.  Tarrin, take the packs and go help Faalken pack the pack horses."
	"Yes ma'am," Tarrin said as Elke glared darkly at the Sorceress.
	Tarrin shouldered six packs, grunting under the weight, and carried them out to the large stables to the side of the inn.  Faalken was there, saddling a small white palfrey, and a large roan stallion pawed the ground behind him.  It was a huge horse, and Tarrin didn't doubt that it was war-trained.  "Dolanna send you out?" Faalken asked.
	He nodded.  "Which is the pack horse?" he asked.  "I'll start loading it."
	"Those two down there," he pointed to the far stalls.  "Those packs in the corner go on them too.  Put all the food and the tents on the gelding, and use the mare for the personal gear.  I have to reshoe Dolanna's horse, and that takes a bit of time."
	"Alright," Tarrin said, and he went to work.  He pulled out one horse at at time, then saddled it with the pack saddle.  After that, he put on the bridle, then began tying packs and tents to the fittings and loops on the pack saddle.  After he'd loaded the gelding, he tied it to a post at the feeding trough and went for the mare and repeated the procedure.  Tarrin worked with a quiet efficiency that got the job done quickly, and he finished in time to help Faalken saddle the last two riding horses and picket them at the feeding trough.
	"Where did you learn how to handle horses?" Faalken asked as they left the stable.  "That was professional work."
	"My father was in the army," he replied.  "He taught me how to take care of horses a long time ago."
	"I've heard of your father," he said.
	"Really?"
	"Yes, his arrows fetch a high price in Suld."
	"His arrows go to Suld?" Tarrin asked in a bit of surprise.  "A merchant from Torrian comes here and buys them from time to time, but we always thought he sold them in Torrian."
	"I guess he sends them on to Suld.  Some of them, anyway," he said as they returned to the inn.  "Can you make arrows like that?"
	Tarrin laughed.  "I can make decent arrows, but nothing like my father's," he admitted.  "Father has a magic touch when it comes to making them.  It's something I could never quite manage to duplicate."
	"Don't sell yourself short, son," Eron said.  "More than half of the arrows I sell are yours."
	Tarrin stared at his father.
	"Seriously," he grinned.  "You just think my arrows are better.  The truth is, you can't tell one of yours from one of mine."
	Elke laughed at Tarrin's baffled expression.  "I feel, cheated," Tarrin said.
	They both burst out laughing at that.
	"Tarrin, what do you think happens to all those arrows you make?" Eron asked.
	"I thought we used them around the house," he said.
	"Son, if I did that, we'd have arrows coming out the chimney.  You make more than double what I do.  But now that you're going to school, I'm going to have to cut down the orders I accept," he noted to himself.  "My hands aren't as fast as they used to be."
	"Speaking of school, it is time for us to go," Dolanna said, standing up.  "Young ones, pick up your packs and go outside.  We will choose mounts for you."
	Elke stood and embraced her son fiercely.  "You mind your elders now, and do well in your training," she said in a controlled voice.  "And remember, your room is always there for you when you come home."
	"I'll be back as soon as I can," Tarrin promised.
	Tarrin embraced his father warmly.  "Do us proud, boy," he said.
	"I will," he replied.
	Jenna crushed him with a fierce hug.  "You write me and tell me what it's like there," she said in a breaking voice.  "Maybe we'll be there together when I get there."
	"I hope so, shortness," he said.  "I wouldn't mind having my little sister around.  It wouldn't feel like I was alone then."
	His family stood by the table.  It was obvious that they weren't going to see him off outside, and that was well enough for him.  He wouldn't be tempted to turn the horse around and ride back if he knew they were there watching him leave.  Tiella was saying her farewells to her mother and father and three siblings off to one side, and Walten was being admonished by his mother on the far side of the room about his manners and being a good boy.  Tarrin hadn't seen his mother come in, but he'd been out in the stables.
	Tarrin shouldered his pack and, waving to his parents and sister, he walked out the front door.
	Outside, Faalken had the horses lined up and ready.  Tarrin selected the largest of them, a gray mare that looked to have a steady disposition, and tied his pack to the saddle quietly.  "They're staying inside?" Faalken asked.  Tarrin nodded, and Faalken nodded himself.  "I can understand that," he said.  "I chickened out my first attempt to leave home.  I turned around and rode back."
	"I was thinking about it," Tarrin admitted.
	"Setting out on your own for the first time is both exciting and scary," Faalken said, mirroring what Tarrin was feeling inside.  "You're excited about the idea, but part of you doesn't want to abandon what it's come to know and accept as life."
	"You're a very wise man," Tarrin said with a smile.
	"I've seen Dolanna play this out many times," Faalken admitted.  "Be glad you got her.  Many Katzh-dashi aren't quite so gentle or considerate as she is."
	"Is this all she does?" Tarrin asked.
	"No, they take turns," he replied as the others filed out of the inn.  Tarrin noted that Tiella was looking back alot, but Walten marched right up to a horse and started tying his pack on, humming a tune and with a big smile on his face.  Walten was certainly looking forward to getting away from the carpenter.  Tiella tied on her own pack, adjusting the cloak her mother had given her a bit, and climbed up into the saddle.  Tarrin had his own cloak rolled up behind the saddle, a very tightly woven one that was virtually waterproof.  The ai