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John approaches Wellbury in the evening and finds the great fortress everyone has been hinting at to be a wooden-palisade town with two stone gate-towers, a moat that would at least be a nuisance to wade, and not much else of stone. It is bigger than Stenford, certainly, but it is not the castle he was half-expecting. He is starting to suspect there are no castles in this dimension at all.

What still bothers him is how close to the coast it sits. Ealstan has been telling him about Hordaman raids of dozens, even hundreds of ships. He tries to picture that landing on the road they are walking up — a hundred ships' worth of bearded raiders, the Preserve's people, who don't have a fighter among them, running for their lives. From here the palisade looks like toothpicks and the moat barely a puddle.

He is bent under the strap of a basket of apples, walking inside a little column of Yazad's faithful. Yazad has done this route many times. At the gate he sets down the pole his baskets hang from, chats up the hearthmen, lightly tries to convert them to Ahura Mazda, and hands out apples. The guards laugh and take the apples and wave the column through. John watches their faces for anyone Ulric might have left to catch Ryan — but if someone is watching, they are watching from somewhere quieter.

Inside the walls, the town is busy in the fading light. Men pen animals in the great round pens by the gate; others queue at the blacksmith, cart firewood, or head home. A lifetime of video games has trained John to scan for a tavern or an inn — he finds neither, and decides the place runs on personal connections and useful trades: if you are here, you either know someone, or you are a skop or hearth-tender, and people are pleased to feed you in exchange for what you do. The houses crowd against the streets like baby birds in too small a nest; the only break in the press is right next to the wall, where ladders run up to the walkway for the guards.

The smell is a surprise. The people themselves are no worse than his hippie friends back home — Sefawynn usually smells nice. But the town is rich with farm smells overlaid on worse human ones; he switches to mouth-breathing. So much for the symphonies-and-bakers picture of a medieval town. He notes the rifeness of disease and the buzz of flies and finds himself missing the Preserve.

He is also surprised by the variety of faces. The bulk of the crowd wears the two-layer dresses or tunic-and-trouser sets he has come to associate with the locals, but he counts visitors with tan and dark skin, Yazad-style hats, colourful patterned clothing — and at one point an Asian family. He had imagined medieval people pinned to their hometowns without steam engines or aeroplanes; clearly that is one more thing his world got wrong about this one.

Yazad ushers them out of the busiest streets into a quieter quarter with little fields between the houses, and finally into a storehouse full of grain sacks and prowling cats. One rubs against John's leg and bites him when he tries to pet it. *Cats. The same in every dimension.*

Inside, Yazad lays the plan to bed. By Ahura Mazda's grace, they are inside. The reeve Wealdsig will be at his manor preparing his nightly feast and boasts. Please, Yazad asks, do not get my people into trouble with whatever you do here. Sefawynn promises they will leave the borrowed robes with him and not name him. Ealstan thanks him and asks him to send a prayer up on their behalf, *if it is true that your god cares for men as you say.* *He cares for them more than you fear,* Yazad says, *and accepts only good words, good deeds, and good thoughts; I will pray.* Ealstan, with a small smile, tells him his god is far and his lands distant. Yazad answers: *he is only as far as your heart.*

He slips the pole free of his baskets and hands it to John as a staff. It is apple wood, smooth, reminiscent — Yazad notes — of the staff of the magi. John accepts it gratefully; he had asked for one. Yazad waves off worry about counting heads at the gate on the way home — Delm only counts how many apples have not yet been given to him — and gives each of them a hug.

Ealstan nods to Sefawynn and John, who raise their hoods, and the three of them slip out the storehouse's side door into the alley — and then Thokk slips out behind them. They turn. *What?* she says. Ealstan suggests, gently, that she should perhaps stay back at the storehouse. *I'm my own woman.* Sefawynn warns that the mission is dangerous. *I know,* says the old lady. *And you'll end up dead without my help. Besides, the apple farm is boring and you're interesting. The decision is made.* Sefawynn and Ealstan share a look and do not press. John doesn't either; Thokk knows this country far better than he does, and tonight he has to prove that the book's pitch about being a wizard is, in fact, the kind of thing that gets results.