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clearly.”
    “ ‘And one can endure anything as long as one knows how long that enduring will last’—as
my
one-mother used to say,” Strynn added, with a yawn. And with that she started toward what had clearly been the previous tenants’ fire pit.
    Per their usual arrangement, Div, who had Beast-Hold connections, attended the unpacking and care of the horses, while Strynn made fire and saw to the rest of camp. It was good they’d arrived when they had, too, because the rain was falling harder than ever. There was also enough wind to whip those drops about, though the steep sides of the ravine kept all but the worst gusts at bay, even if enough still managed to find their way in to irritate the quasi-feline birkit. Div thought that odd, given that the beast had seemed untroubled when actuallyout in the weather. Suddenly it seemed very human: willing to suffer stoically when there was no choice, but anxious to choose comfort when that was an alternative.
    “Big fire or small?” Strynn asked, seeking solace in routine as she wandered over to help Div unharness their mounts. “It’s not all that cold, but a big one would help us dry out. On the other hand, there’s not enough firewood to see us through the night.”
    Div nodded toward the saddlebags she had just hoisted down. “We’ve dry clothes if we’re lucky, and tomorrow might be sunny enough to dry these, if we make ourselves take the time. So I’d say we should change, then make a cook fire, eat, dry what we can, and get a good night’s sleep. The … previous tenants have left sleeping hollows, so we should avail ourselves of them.”
    Strynn stifled a yawn, then snared a saddlebag and padded off—barefoot—to lay out their bed pads and find dry clothes. When Div saw her again, she was naked and drying off with her towel. Her hair hung in damp black tendrils around her face, and even thus disarrayed she was beautiful. Taller and more full-figured than Div, whose body displayed a hard wiriness born of years in the Wild, Strynn’s true distinction in a nation of beautiful people was the absolute symmetry of her face and—now Div saw it revealed—figure. The rest wasn’t that different from other High Clan Eronese women—not even that different from Div, who had the same black hair (though shorter, for convenience), the same dark blue eyes, the same sharp cast of cheekbones and jaw.
    Avall is luckier than he knows
, Div thought, with a mental sigh. Twice lucky, actually, to have both Strynn
and
Rann as lovers—lovers who were not only beautiful, but brilliant and loyal as well. Either would die for him. She wondered if Rann would do as much for her.
    No! she told herself. Better not to think of that now. Rann was far away with the army. Perhaps he was even now recoveringfrom a day of battle, for the army had certainly had time to reach Gem-Hold-Winter. Perhaps—
    No!
she told herself again, and forced her mind into more practical—and imminent—channels, all of which, not unexpectedly, wound up back at Merryn.
    Strynn had found a dry undershift by then, and pulled it on. Div located another amidst her jumble of garments and accepted Strynn’s towel when her own proved damp from a bath in a river that morning—a bath she had naïvely assumed would be her sole wetting of the day.
    Soon enough they were dry, the horses fed and tended, and the birkit become less restless. Strynn got a small fire going, then yawned again. “I’m sorry,” she murmured, shaking out her blankets in another homage to mindless routine, “but I have
got
to get a nap. If you’ll stand watch for a hand, I’ll cook when I wake up. Don’t let me oversleep.”
    Silence. Then, from Div: “You don’t think I’m crass for not suggesting we go after Merry now?”
    “No more than I am,” Strynn replied seriously.
    “Merry can take care of herself,” Div continued through a yawn of her own. “We need to remember that.”
    You need to sleep, the birkit told them