Seven days he had been riding, up from the valley and the smoke of burned fields, and down again with the mountain wall at his back, a winding trail of barren crags and eagles' perches, gray sere brush and struggling juniper.  The horse he rode plodded in sullen misery, gaunt and galled.  His armor was scarred with use and wanted repair he neglected to give it; that was the way he traveled, outward from the war, from his youth which he had lost there and his service which he had left.

Dubhan was his name, and far across the land in front of him was his home, but the way looked different than it had looked ten years ago.  He remembered fields and villages and the sun on the mountains when he rode up to them, when the horse was young, his colors bright and his armor gleaming as he rode up to the duke's service - but now when the winding trail afforded sometime glimpses of the plains, they seemed colorless.  It was the season, perhaps; he had come in a springtime.  He rode out in a summer's ending, and that might be the reason, or the color might have been in his eyes once, when he had been easily deceived, before the old duke had taught him the world, and the lord he served changed lords, and knights who had defended the land drifted into plunder of it, and the towns fell, and the smokes went up and the fields were sown with bones and iron, and the birds hunted carrion in roofless cottages.  Maybe the war had spilled beyond the mountains; maybe it had covered all the world and stripped it bare.  It had taken him this long to remember what sunlit green he had seen here once, but no longer seeing it did not surprise him, as worse sights had ceased to surprise him.  There were scars on him which had not been there that springtime ten years gone.  He ached where the mail bore down on old wounds; pains settled knife-pointed into joints in nighttime cold and made him know what pains years ahead held, lordless and landless and looking - late - for another lord, another place, and some more hopeful war while something left of vigor in his arm, some strength to trade on to put a roof over his head before he was too old broken, and too broken, and finally without hope.  Bread to eat, a place to sleep, a little wine for the pains when it rained: that was what he rode out to find.

At one cut and another the nearer land lay spread below the rocks, dull tapestry of the tops of trees where the trail turned and some slide had taken away the curtaining scrub.  The trees came nearer, and stretched farther as the trail wound down the mountainside, more of forest than he recalled.  At such vantages he looked out and down, marking what he could of the road to come, all curtained below in trees and gray bush.

So he saw the birds start up, and drew in the horse so sharply that the old head came up and muscles tensed.  A black beating of wings rose above the woods below, and hovered a time before settling back into that rough patterning of treetops elsewhere.  He marked where, and moved the horse on, and got his battered shield out of its leather casing.  He thought about his armor, regretting mending not done, and took his helmet from where it hung on his saddle, and kept toward the inside of the road whenever he came near some other open place, fearing some movement, some show of metal might betray him - prudence not of cowardice, but of cold purpose.

That was also the way of the war he had waged, that no one met friends on the road.  He rode carefully, and thought about the sound of the horse's hooves and kept off bare stone where he could.  He stalked that rememberd location in the woods below with wolfish hope - of provisions, of which he was scant, and whatever else he could lay hand to.  If the were many he would try to ride by; if one man - that was another matter.