given the season. It was early in the first month of autumn, and autumn on Eclipsis, even in the low-lying plains between the city and the seminary, features a great deal of wind, freezing rain and sleet. In our fourteen-hour day of travel, broken up, again according to Edwige, into two “easy stages,” we had encountered all of these conditions as we maneuvered our mounts along the narrow, slippery, rocky trails, Eclipsis’s only roads. You wanted this, I told myself. You’re the one who gave up a comfortable life in the Terran Sector to become an Eclipsian. Nobody forced you. But it had happened so quickly there had been no time to think it through or imagine what I had chosen. Two days ago—two days ago!—I had been a Terran, working as an information manager, living in a heated apartment, rarely venturing farther than the Protectorate Headquarters a short walk away on Terran-style paved sidewalks. Now I was riding on an animal, a sturdy little mountain pony suitable for a woman traveling in hilly terrain.
