The Icebound Land- Character Reaction

28

"Here, Horace." The tall knight took the book and frowned down at the first page.

"Well, this should be fun," he said before began reading.

HALT LOOKED AROUND THE LARGE CHAMBERS THEY HAD BEEN shown to.

"Well," he said, "it's not much, but it's home."

Halt smiled grimly. "Almost worse than Clonmel. Not quite." Only Crowley, Pauline, Alyss, Will, Duncan, and Horace understood.

In fact, he wasn't being quite fair with his statement. They were high in the central tower of Château Montsombre, the tower Deparnieux told them he kept exclusively for his own use—and that of his guests, he added sardonically. Duncan raised an eyebrow. The room they were in was a large one and quite comfortably furnished. There was a table and chairs that would do quite well for eating meals, as well as two comfortable-looking wooden armchairs arranged on either side of the large fireplace. Doors led off either side to two smaller sleeping chambers and there was even a small bathing room with a tin tub and a washstand. There were a couple of halfway decent hangings on the stone walls and a serviceable rug covering a large part of the floor. There was a small terrace and a window, which afforded a view of the winding path they had followed to reach the castle and the forest lands below. The window was unglazed, with wooden shutters on the inside to provide relief from the wind and weather.

"I don't care how nice it was," Horace muttered. "The head of the castle hardly made it welcoming."

The door was the only jarring note in the scheme of things. There was no door handle on the inside. Their quarters might be comfortable enough. But they were prisoners for all that, Halt knew.

Horace dumped his pack on the floor and dropped gratefully into one of the wooden armchairs by the fire. There was a draft coming through the window, even though it was still only midafternoon. It would be cold and drafty at night, he thought. But then, most castle chambers were. This one was no better or worse than the average.

"Oh, it was a lot worse," both Halt and Horace said, and looked at each other in surprise.

"Halt," he said, "I've been wondering why Abelard and Tug didn't warn us about the ambush. Aren't they trained to sense things like that?"

Halt nodded slowly. "The same thought occurred to me," he said. "And I assume it had something to do with your string of conquests." Will snorted.

The boy looked at him, not understanding, and he elaborated. "We had half a dozen battlehorses tramping along behind us, laden down with bits of armor that clanked and rattled like a tinker's cart. My guess is that all the noise they were making masked any sound Deparnieux's men might have made."

"So they were noisier than Horace," Gilan quipped. Halt smirked, while said knight rolled his eyes.

Horace frowned. He hadn't thought of that. "But couldn't they scent them?" he asked.

"If the wind were in the right direction, yes. But it was blowing from us to them, if you remember." He regarded Horace, who was looking vaguely disappointed at the horses' inability to overcome such minor difficulties. The four Rangers raised an eyebrow at the knight. "Sometimes," Halt continued, "we tend to expect a little too much of Ranger horses. After all, they are only human." "Wow, Halt said a joke," Gilan said. The faintest trace of a smile touched his mouth as he said that, but Horace didn't notice. He merely nodded and moved on to his next question.

"So," he said, "what do we do now?"

The Ranger shrugged. He had his own pack open and was taking out a few items—a clean shirt and his razor and washing things.