 she'd have said it the same way you just did, I don't think I'd have been afraid.  Well, I'm still going to be afraid, but I'll try to understand the why of what I do as well as the what.  There has to be reasons the Cat does the things it does.  It's not a creature of whim."
	"That's where you're messing up, Tarrin," she told him.  "Don't keep thinking about it as it and you.  There is no it and you.  It's just you.  What you have in here," she said, tapping his forehead, "it's a part of you.  If you treat it like something that's not, then it's going to seem like it's not, and that's not good for you.  You may call it the Cat, or the instincts, or the other mind, but it's not.  It's just a different part of you, of your own mind.  It's not what the Cat does, it's what you do."
	He gave her a steady look, and he could see her blush slightly.  Tiella was usually a quiet girl, headstrong, but talking wasn't her way.  He knew she was smart, but she'd just laid out what he was feeling, and solutions to those problems, like it was something that even a child would have realized.  He looked at her with a budding new respect.  He reached up and put his paw on her cheek, his huge paw swallowing up half her face, and she smiled at him and put her hand against his paw.  "That tickles," she giggled.  "That pad is soft and rough at the same time, and the fur on your fingers is smooth.  Now, it's my turn," she said, holding out a hand imperiously.  Tarrin seemed to understand what she wanted.  Without much thought, he brought his tail around and placed it into her waiting hand.  She grabbed hold of it, feeling the thickness of it, then probed the fur with her fingers meticulously.  He felt her fingertip touch the skin under the fur, then she grabbed it both hands and bent it.  She bent it until it was touching itself, and kept doing it until he sucked in his breath.  "Sorry," she apologized.  "Is the fur hot?"
	"I don't think so," he replied.  "It just seems normal."
	"What's it like, having the tail?"
	"Different.  Interesting," he replied.  "It does its own thing most of the time, but it does help with balance, and it helps me run faster.  It's longer than my legs, so I have to keep it off the ground, but that's not too hard.  The muscles that move it are pretty strong."
	"How does it help you run?"
	"It's like a counterbalance," he told her.  "I can lean farther down, and that lets me run faster.  I don't fall over because of the weight pushing out behind me.  It seems to just know when and where to move to keep me balanced too.  It's almost eerie."
	She yawned.  "I think I'll go back to bed," she told him.  "Think about what I said, Tarrin.  And try to get some sleep.  You're starting to get circles under your eyes."
	She slipped back into the tent she shared with Dolanna, leaving Tarrin to his own thoughts.  She had come very, very close to the mark, he realized.  He did tend to think of the Cat as an invader, an alien, something that was not him taking up residence in his mind.  That wasn't true.  Though it hadn't been there before, it was there now, and it was as much a part of him as his right arm.  Perhaps the Cat considered him to be much the same, an usurper out to overthrow it.  It did things, things that happend without his rational thought, but that was only logical.  They were instinctive reactions, response to stimulus, reflexes.  They happened first because he didn't have to think about them.  Analyzing his actions also was very sensible.  If he could identify what was making him do things, and why they were happening, he would come into a greater understanding about himself, and that would make it easier when it was necessary for him to prevent that particular thing from happening again, or to minimize its effect if it was something either unavoidable or uncontrollable.
	It wouldn't be easy.  He knew that.  It may be instincts and impulses, but it carried with it a greater intelligence that made what he called the Cat a very complex creature.  But it was a start.  And that was something that he hadn't had when they left Torrian yesterday.  It did make him afraid, but at least now he felt that there was something that he could do in order to make peace inside himself.

	After a suitable gawk at Skeleton Rock and a hot breakfast, the group was off again, riding hard in the cloudy morning.  Captain Daran kept two men in the lead at all times, scouting out the conditions ahead as two men drifted behind them to ensure there were no followers.  They passed one caravan train in the morning, and a brief stop to talk to them told them that the way ahead was all but deserted, and that they were making better time than they thought.  At the pace they were going, they would reach Marta's Ford before noon tomorrow.
	Tarrin spent the riding thinking about what Tiella had said to him, and thinking about Dolanna's instruction that morning, in concentration exercises.   They were a bit like the aiming exercise that his father taught him, about emptying the mind of all thought and concentrating all of your attention onto a single thing, ignoring everything else.  In archery, that one thing was the target.  Dolanna was teaching him to center himself on himself.  She told him that that was the first step to using Sorcery, to look within, and then without, then draw what was out within, then use what was within to change what was without.  It sounded a bit confusing, but he was certain that it would make sense eventually.  He couldn't do it riding the horse as hard as he was, but he could think about how what Dolanna had told him would fit in with the insights that Tiella had revealed to him early that morning.
	They stopped for lunch near a small river which they had just forded.  Lunch was going to be a simple affair of bread and cheese and some dried fruit, but Tarrin was more thankful for the time out of the saddle.  His back didn't agree with all the bouncing around.  He put his paws on his back and stretched it, bending backwards so deeply that his head nearly brushed the ground.  His backbone was different now, he knew, with more bones in it that were a bit smaller, which let him bend like that.  Playing around, he put one paw on the ground and walked over himself, bringing his legs up and over until he was balanced on that one paw perfectly.  He'd never considered that he would inherit the cat's agility as well as the fur.  Such a move was no strain on him at all to maintain.  He bent his elbow and brought his nose down to tickle the grass, then pushed himself back out, then swung down into a hunched, all-fours position much akin to a cat sitting.  "Having fun?" Walten asked him as he walked by.
	"Just testing something," he replied.  He sprang straight up, high into the air, then tucked in and began to roll backwards.  The sky and ground traded places wildly, but Tarrin just knew exactly where the ground was, and he also just knew precisely how he was oriented to the ground at all times.  He snapped out his arms, and his paws made perfect contact with the grass.  He arched back and pushed off with his arms, coming to a perfect stop, bent like a bow, at a very shallow angle to the ground, using raw strength to keep from toppling over.  It was incredible, and he wondered at it for long moments as he generally just jumped around, performing acrobatic feats that would had made the most grizzled veteran performer gawk.
	"Impressive," Dolanna remarked.  "Now, if you are done playing, we need to eat and move on."
	"Sorry," he said, sitting down beside the Sorceress as Faalken grinned at him.  "What?"
	"You should tour," he said with a laugh.  "Tarrin Kael, acrobat extraordinaire.  I can see you pack them in."
	"Oh, please," Tarrin scoffed.
	"We can get you one of those tight-fitting costumes," he went on.
	Jarax laughed, and Tarrin scowled at the knight.
	"Dolanna can open for you, doing a magic act with things stuffed up her sleeves and ribbons hidden in her hair."
	"That will do," Dolanna said frostily.
	Faalken gave Dolanna an imupdent grin, then took a drink of water innocently.
	"You can be the strongman," Tarrin told him with a calm voice.  "Faalken, the half-brained strongman, so muscular because his body didn't want to waste the effort on his mind, so dumb we don't even pay him.  I figure that should attract the baser audience."
	Faalken gave him a look, then laughed jovially.  "I guess I deserved that," he chuckled.
	"You deserved worse," Dolanna said in an icy voice.
	"Your dinner is getting warm," Faalken told her with a wink.
	They camped that night in a clearing well off the road, and it was another sleepless night for Tarrin as the dreams invaded his mind.  He awoke the next morning sandy-eyed and feeling like his head was stuffed in wool.  Dolanna put them out on a pace even harder than the day before, and it wasn't long until the first farms surrounding Marta's Ford were laid out to the sides of the Skeleton Road.  Dolanna slowed them to a walk, and as Walten and Tiella listened to the wiry Jarax tell some old tale, Tarrin rode up to Dolanna and listened as she talked with the captain of Arren's men and Faalken.
	"We intend to take ship here, Daran, and there are too many of your men to make it feasible," she told the captain.
	"I intend to see you to Suld, Mistress Dolanna," he said adamantly.  "Arren ordered me to escort you through the front door of the Tower, and I mean to do just that.  I'll bring five men with you."
	"That is still too many.  We have to board the horses."
	"Four."
	"Three," Faalken said.  "That's about all the room that we'll have."
	"Three then," he said.  "Jarax and Orgal."
	"Good choices," Faalken agreed.
	"Jarax?" Tarrin asked.  "Why?"
	"There's more to worth than a man's arm, Tarrin," Daran told him.  "Jarax is a good fighter, but he's also a talkative man that keeps the villagers entertained, and keeps their mind off what's going on.  That makes him more than worth it."
	Tarrin hadn't considered that.  And it made sense.
	"Orgal is the monster of a man that usually rides rear guard," Daran told Dolanna.  "He's quiet and seems slower than he is, and he's got a good eye.  Not much gets past him."
	"Then arrange your packs so that your gear is with us," she said.  "But I do not want any more than one extra pack animal in our train.  Space is becoming a problem."
	"I'll see to it, Mistress Dolanna," Daran said.
	"Tarrin, go back to Tiella and Walten for a time," Dolanna told him.  "And pull up your hood."
	"Yes ma'am," he said, pulling back and letting the knight and Sorceress speak privately.  He didn't even try to eavesdrop on them, which would have been easy because of his keen hearing.  He settled the hood over his ears carefully, patting on it to feel if they were bulging, then joined the trio in the middle of the column.
	Jarax was spinning a tale about history, about the civil war that had raged between Draconia and Tykarthia for the last seven hundred years.  They were the two kingdoms north of Sulasia, which had once been one kingdom, and had fought a war so bloody for so long that victory wasn't even a goal any more.  They lived only to completely eradicate the other off the face of Sennadar.  "So," Jarax was saying, "the western nobles of Draconia were getting more and more displeased with King Dawon.  They considered the weighted tithe system the king used to be unfair, seeing as how the western nobles were paying nearly four times as much as the eastern ones.  The nobles of the east, led by the crafty Earl Winold, kept flattering the king with gifts and very carefully arranged plots to continue to discredit the western nobles and keep them out of the king's favor.  Winold, you see, hated Duke Tykan with a passion, and he considered the more moderate practices going on in the western parts of the kingdom to be almost sacreligious.  Winold was a man that would have banned the use of fire if the thought he could get away with it.  Some men are like that.
	"Winold was a crafty one, but he made one fatal error.  He arranged a border atrocity, sending a large complement of soldiers to attack an isolated, small village in southern Ungardt, then arranged it to look like the leader of the western nobles, Duke Tykan, was the one that ordered the attack.  The attackers carried out their mission, and did manage to convince the Ungardt that it was Tykan who was responsible, but they didn't count on the Ungardt response.  Instead of punishing just Tykan, the Ungardt invaded the entire kingdom of Draconia.  That was the War of Seven Roses, and it lasted only six months.  It ended with the Ungardt invaders taking King Dawon back to Dusgaard in chains, dragged by a horse the entire way.  The stories say that he even managed to live long enough to get to Dusgaard, where he was stoned to death in a public square by children.  Dawon's heir was Elon."
	"Elon the Sunderer?" Tarrin asked.
	"That's how he's known, yes," Jarax said with a smile.  "Elon wasn't a very smart man.  He relied on Winold's counsel, not realizing that Winold only cared about putting Tykan in his place.  Tykan and the western nobles had fought well in the war, but the western lands had been relatively untouched.  The Ungardt had invaded from the north and east, ravaging the eastern duchies on their way to Draconis.  Winold convinced Elon to raise the taxes and thithes even more on the western nobles, to equalize the suffering, so Elon had been told.
	"Needless to say, Tykan and the western nobles went up in flames.  Tykan demanded an audience with the king, which was denied.  Tykan knew that it was Winold behind all the scheming, so he decided that he had to talk to the King without Winold's oily voice there to cloud the issues.  When he tried to get into the king's bedroom to talk to him personally, Winold had him thrown in the dungeon.  The western nobles, loyal to Tykan, attacked Dracon Keep in a surprise attack and freed Duke Tykan.  They were careful not to hurt anyone, but their goal of just freeing the Duke wasn't really noticed.  Tykan fled back to his duchy with Winold's private army on his tail, then they barred themselves in Tykar's Hold and endured a month-long siege.  The armies of the west rose up and chased out the invaders.
	"That was when Elon made a fateful mistake.  He declared Tykan an outlaw, and levied fines on all the nobles of the west that had participated in the routing of Winold's army, so steep that they would never be able to pay them.  The western nobles, in an absolute rage over the continual injustice, simply seceeded from Draconia as a block.  They decided that wise Tykan would be their king, and named their new kingdom after him.  The nobles of the central duchies were suddenly caught between two nations, and they declared their allegiances in a random order that left pockets of one kingdom inside another.
	"By then, Elon had died under mysterious circumstances, and with no heir, Winold assumed the throne.  His hatred of Tykan had totally consumed him, so he raised an army to march into the rebelling western lands and kill anything that moved.  The western lords, already mobilized, marched east and met the hastily assembled army at Long Staff River, and totally crushed them.  Winold pulled back and regrouped as Tykan rallied for support from Ungardt and Sulasia, his bordering neighbors.  The Ungardt were still in a tiff over the war, and the Sulasians recognized their independence but wouldn't form any sort of military alliance.  	"And that was how the war started.  Tykan controlled the commerce coming in from the western harbors and ports, but Winold controlled the iron mines in the mountains around the Petal Lakes. The two kingdoms started a war that still hasn't ended, to this day.  The lands between Draconia and Tykarthia, once fertile farmland, are nothing but a barren wasteland now, the grass trampled into mud by hundreds of battles and all the towns and keeps crushed by one side or the other.  The border changed by the day at the beginning of the war, but as time went by and more and more was destroyed by the boots of soldiers, the wheels of siege engines, and by fire.  They're more or less separated now, and there are few if any major battles, but not a day goes by when one baron or earl rides across that wasteland to raid on the border of the other.  They say that there are enough bones littering Elon's Waste to make a mountain."
	"Wouldn't it have grown back by now?" Tiella asked.
	"Yes, it has, but it's still called a wasteland because nobody can live there," Jarax replied.  "Even the rudest hut is burned and all its inhabitants killed, because there are raiders from both sides prowling the no-man's land constantly.  That brutal practice has actually helped to keep the two kingdoms separate."
	"I'm glad I don't live there," Walten said, shuddering.
	"It's an unhappy place, all right," he said.  "I've been there a few times.  Children are taught that the people on the other side of the border are murderous animals and have to be completely exterminated.  They live in cities behind walls, and the people out on the farms jump at every shadow.  The funny thing is, they both worship the same God.  They're the same people, but they're too busy hating each other to notice it."
	"Eww," Tiella sounded.  "I'm glad I don't live there too."
	"Why does it go on?" Tarrin asked.
	"Who knows?" Jarax shrugged.  "I guess because by now, there's nothing left but hate.  The minds of fanatics are hard to fathom.  You'd be better off trying to walk to the sun."  He scratched at his beard absently.  "Now that we got the unpleasant story out of the way, how would you like to hear about the Islands of Amazar?"
	"Where?" Tiella asked.
	There was a gleam in Jarax's eye.  "A wondrous place that I myself have visited.  A place of women, where women rule, women fight, and women do all the things that men do here, and men are the property of the women."
	"There's no such place," Walten scoffed.  "My father told me that the tales about Amazar are a bunch of baloo.  There's no Amazar, no Sha'Kari, and there's no such things as dragons."
	"Sha'Kari, I don't know about," Jarax admitted, "but Amazar is a real enough place, thousands of leagues to the south of Shac.  Amazar is actually a series of islands off the coast of the continent of Sharadar, home of that wondrous and ancient land of magic.  The Wikuni visit it often, because the furs and silk the Amazons make are in high demand, and they are the only ones that go to the islands.  I was there myself, so I know."
	"If they don't let humans go there, how did you get there?" Tiella asked, a bit accusingly.
	"Ah, that's a long tale," he said.  "Let's just say that I was a young man with a wanderlust.  It's not that humans aren't allowed.  Women are free to come and go as they will, but any man that sets foot on the lands of Amazar becomes a woman's property, and he's not allowed to leave.  I happened to Amazar quite by accident, and spent nearly a year there, owned by a tall, regal lady named Sulina Dar.  She was quite a woman," he said, his eyes distant.  Then he cleared his throat and continued.  "I decided that  being a slave wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and snuck onto a Wikuni galleon and returned to Sennadar.  I even have something to remember it by," he said.  He rolled up the sleeve of his tunic, displaying a strange tatoo.  "This was the mark of my mistress," he told them.  "That's how they know who owns which man."
	"What happens when he's sold?" Tarrin asked.
	"He's tatooed again underneath the first one.  Some men have tatoos all the way down one arm and halfway down the other, but they're usually older men.  Being sold too often hurts a man's reputation."
	"Reputation?"  Walten asked.  "How can a slave have a reputation?"
	"It's slavery, yes, but it's almost an institution now," he said.  "Full-blooded Amazon men may be owned, but they're not exactly slaves either.  They have to do what the woman tells them to do, but there's a certain amount of leeway in the matter.  It's very difficult to explain."
	"Kind of like marriage," Tiella injected.
	"Something like that, yes, but not quite," Jarax agreed.
	They could see the edge of the town of Marta's Ford, and Tarrin pulled up the hood a bit more to make sure of it, especially since there were children playing in the field off to one side of the road.  Dolanna called the column to a stop, then turned her horse to face them.  "Faalken and I are going ahead to secure passage on a ship.  Daran, keep everyone together and off the road, and perhaps this would be a good time to check the horses.  We should be back soon."
	The two of them trotted into the town as Daran and his men walked the horses to a small field by the road across from the playing children, then they all dismounted.  Daran's men started checking over their horses, and Tarrin did the same, urging his horse to give him a hoof at a time, as he checked them to make sure the shoes were in good shape and there were no stones or bruises.  All of the horses had more or less grown used to Tarrin's unusual smell, and he could pass among them like anyone else.  They actually paid him no mind; although his smell was obviously one of a predator, they either understood or came to realize that he didn't eat horses, and that they were safe with him among them.
	A wooden ball came to a stop near Tarrin, and he froze at the sight of the two small children running across the road to fetch the toy.  It was two little boys, both of them about eight years old, gangly but well fed, with the taller of the two having reddish hair and the shorter brown hair.  Their features were similar; they were either brothers or cousins.  Tarrin let the rear hoof of the horse down slowly as the two boys looked at him curiously.  "Why do you have such big hands?" one of them asked boldly.
	"And why are they all black?" the other one continued.
	Tarrin put his hands inside his sleeves slowly as if it was something he was used to doing, not drawing any undue attention to them.
	"They're just my hands," he said calmly.  "Just like any other hands."
	"My hands aren't black," one boy said, holding them out to show him.
	"No, but you're not me either," Tarrin replied with a smile.
	"You have funny eyes, mister," the other boy noticed.
	"They're not funny to me," Tarrin told him.  "I could say that your eyes are funny."
	"You're one of those wi-koos, aren't you?" the taller boy asked.  "Those animal-people that sail on the ships."
	"No," Tarrin said, "but you can think of me as one of their cousins."
	One of the boys across the road shouted for them to bring back the ball.  "Well, we have to go.  Goodbye, wi-koo cousin," the taller boy said.
	"Bye," the other said, and they ran back across the road to rejoin their friends.
	They hadn't shown any fear of him, even when it was obvious to them that he wasn't human.  But then again, children were like that sometimes.  He went around the horse and picked up the other rear hoof, checking it carefully for signs of injury or damage, noting that it would have to be trimmed down soon.
	The horses all started fidgeting.  Tarrin looked up and sniffed deeply at the air, then his hackles rose.  He had no idea what that smell was, but it was not human, and it didn't smell very friendly either.  Judging from the way the horses reacted to it, it could be said that it was definitely a bad smell.  The wind was blowing from the north, from the trees and across the field on the other side of the road, and then to them.  Whatever it was was up there in those trees past the field.  Tarrin listened to his instincts for the first time, actively seeking them out and seeing how they reacted to that smell.  The Cat didn't like that smell.  And that was what he wanted to know.
	"Jarax," Tarrin said calmly, peering over the children at the trees on the far side.
	"What is it?" he asked.
	"How quietly do you think you could get the attention of those kids and get them to move?" he asked in a quiet, intent voice.  "There's a smell in the air that's upsetting the horses, and it doesn't smell friendly.  Whatever it is, its in those trees on the far side of that field."
	Jarax gave him a sober look.  "I think I can get their attention," he said.  "I'll get Orgal and Nyllin and we'll let them look at our swords.  That always fascinates young boys."
	"I'll drift up to the road over there," he said, pointing towards the town with a clawed finger.  "If whatever it is sees that the kids are being watched, maybe it will give up and go away."
	"What is it?"
	"I don't know, but it has the smell of blood on it," Tarrin replied.  "That means its a predator."
	Jarax nodded, and he walked over to where Daran was talking to Orgal and a few other of his men.  Daran looked at Tarrin curiously, who nodded and started to move, so he quietly issued a few orders to his men, and they all started to drift apart in seemingly random directions.  Jarax, Orgal, and Nyllin, the second in command of the men, approached the boys with light voices and offers to let them hold their swords.  That made the young boys instantly forget their game and rush over to where the men were standing, which was on Tarrin's side of the road.  That drew the boys out from between Arren's men and whatever it was on the other side of the field.
	Tarrin reached the road a few paces from the leading horse, ignoring the curious looks from Tiella and Walten.  He looked back at Walten quickly, and made a drawing motion with his hands, then nudged at the far woods with a jerk of his head.  Walten understood his action, then quickly pulled Tarrin's longbow out of his saddleskirt and started stringing it.  Tiella pulled her leather sling out of her belt pouch and kept it wadded up in her hand, a bullet stone fitted into the sleeve, as she pulled out Walten's quiver of arrows for him.  Tarrin untied the robe belt in front of him; the robe was too full, and he couldn't run very fast or very well while wearing it.  He stood on the side of the road, seemingly with his head bowed, watching the edge of the woods from the edge of the hood.
	There was a movement at the edge of the woods.  It was just too high up.  Tarrin looked up and saw a face, nearly fifteen spans off the ground, impossibly wide.  Tarrin gave a gape at the face that materialized in the greenish cast of the woods, probably invisible to any eyes but his, then he saw the yellowed tusks at the edges of its mouth.  It was a Troll!  He'd never seen one, but he'd heard enough about them from his father.  Trolls were the largest of the Goblin races, twice as big as a man and ten times meaner.  They ate humans whenever they got the chance.  The Cat in him welled up loudly when he recognized that face; obviously the Cat had no love for Trolls either.  It wanted to kill it, and Tarrin found himself in agreement.  Trolls this close to human lands were only there for one reason, and that was to catch someone to eat.  But he wouldn't go running after it.  The smell of it was too strange to him to discern if there was more than one, and he wasn't about to run into a snake pit.  Too strange, and too horrid.  Now that the smell was clearer, he decided that he'd never smelled anything so vile in his life.  Not even the city-smell that hung about Torrian was that bad.  It smelled like rotting flesh floating in a month-old cesspool.  Tarrin made a motion to Daran, who approached him casually.  "It's a Troll," Tarrin told him.
	"You're sure?"
	Tarrin nodded.  "I saw it.  The face was about fifteen spans off the ground, and it had tusks."
	"That was a Troll, alright," he said grimly.  "How many?"
	"I'm not sure," Tarrin said quietly.  "I don't know their scent well enough to figure out if there's more than one.  Besides, the smell is so awful I doubt I could if I tried," he said, wrinkling his nose.
	"We can't let a Troll run around loose," Daran said.  "It will kill someone."
	"Walten may be able to put an arrow into it," Tarrin said.  "It's right at the edge of bow range."
	"No, then it'll just get mad," Daran said, thinking.  "We have to lure it out, so we can kill it."
	"Trolls may not be smart, but they aren't stupid," Tarrin said, falling back on what his father had taught him about them.  "It's not going to come out here when it can see twenty armed men."
	"We can have some of the men trot off," Daran said to himself."
	Tarrin looked up, seeing more disturbances in the foliage.  "I don't think that it's going to matter," Tarrin said quickly.  Tarrin could see another Troll, and then another, and one more, gathering at the edge of the trees.  "I see four of them now."
	"They'll attack with that many," Daran told him, turning around and putting a hand on his sword.  "I can see them," he said.
	The Trolls hovered at the edge of the clearing, then they simply turned and walked away.  Tarrin could smell their scents getting fainter; a smell that pungent was easy to keep track of.  "They're leaving," Tarrin said.  The taste of disappointment was hot in his mouth, and he had to quell the Cat's desire to go chase them down.  Now he was glad that he hadn't chased off after that thing in the first place.  He'd have had a nasty shock by the time he got there.
	"That's not like them," Daran said curiously.  "Twenty to four are odds that Trolls would have accepted, and it's not like a Troll to give up on a fight.  They like killing as much as they like eating."
	"All in all, with those children here, I'm glad we didn't have to fight," Tarrin said, tying his robe belt again and trying to calm down from the adrenaline-rushed high he'd worked himself up to in preparation for the fight.
	"It may not be over yet," Daran said.  "They may have decided to turn around, or maybe even try to come at us from another direction.  We're moving into town, and we're bringing the children in with us," he announced.  "I don't want to be left out in the open like this with four Trolls prowling the woods."
	"Good idea," he agreed.
	They all got into a loose formation around the children, who were lured into coming with them by Jarax's easy manner and promise that they could sit on the horses, then walked into town.  Marta's Ford was a large village, with no outer wall, and it was surprisingly clean by the standards of Tarrin's nose.  The buildings were vaguely similar to the ones of Aldreth, except for the thatched roofs where Aldreth used slate tiles, but they were laid out in rectangular patterns follow