My mood worsened as the slow march progressed. We needed food, supplies, and a clear sense of where we were going. I figured that the rest of the party, after examining the farmhouse by the stone circle and giving up on my returning, would make for Verneytha’s capital city, Harvest, and check in with Treylen, the governor. I should try to womens new balance minimus mr00 meet them there, I decided. I mentioned this to Grath and he passed it along as if everyone was invited. They seemed to think this as good an option as any and trailed after me like I knew what I was doing. It was all fairly bizarre, frankly, though not comically so.I had half guessed who he was from the black silk robe with its tiny filigree dragon embroidery, but Mithos introduced him anyway. This is Dathel, chancellor to the county of Shale. He and his men will escort us to the town brown new balance of Adsine, in the north, where the count awaits us.Renthrette was always irritable when she woke up. She particularly didn’t like to see my face as soon as she opened her eyes, since it reminded her that she had been sent off on a wild-goose chase with the apprentice, especially since we had already decided there was nothing in the catacombs but ghost stories. They were just too far west to be a useful base for the raiders. In any case, turning this pointless excursion into a romantic trip was going to be tough. Maybe I could set up a candlelit dinner in the caves and get the fruit bats to serenade us. Or maybe it would be so hot inside that we’d have to strip down to the bare essentials and we’d be rolling on the ground before you could say Wake up, Hawthorne, you pathetic loser.An hour later the puzzle had changed. How had Renthrette convinced me to stand guard while she climbed a rope from the battlements down the side of the keep? We were back on the roof, where the troops were few and not so much new balance golf casual as dormant. One of them asked me where my lady friend had got to and went off chuckling, convinced that she’d dumped me for some burly soldier. Nothing so mundane; she was swinging at the end of a rope, trying to force the second-story shutters with a throwing dagger. Naturally.He smiled again and said, I’d be glad to. Though you aren’t going to be a sword master this time next week, and it will take a lot to impress Renthrette.Ten minutes later I was in a hot tin bath shaped like an overgrown coal scuttle, its water foaming with carbolic soap. So, here I was: a specialist, brought in at considerable expense (I hoped) to save the nation or county or whatever the hell it was. I grinned to myself and wondered whether I could get free beer at the new balance shoes cheap bar. Maybe if I was really good, they’d give me a magic sword.But not everything was falling neatly into place. The attack on Arlest, which we’d witnessed when we first arrived, was a round peg for our square holes. I was tempted to see the count as innocent and the attack as genuine, while Renthrette thought they were all guilty as hell and the attack had been purely for our benefit. That men had died in the course of laying this false trail only convinced her of its spuriousness.A few of the villagers stayed at the inn, but most, including Maia’s family and the teenaged kid with the crossbow, who seemed to have aged about ten years since I first met him, stayed with me. We bought a broken-down cart and a couple of horses to pull it, or, rather, I mens new balance 501 bought it and the others threw in the few coppers they had left. We covered a few more miles, but it was painfully slow, and once it got dark we had to stop and make camp. Again, I kept myself to myself and slept fitfully, getting up several times to make sure there was no sign of the raiders. Everyone was still treating me like some kind of military expert and savior, and though I could play the part well enough, it was exhausting and terrifying. If the raiders caught up with us . . .