Only the Fateguard themselves could understand what it meant to be made into an ironskin, a man who served the Eyes of Time. Much was lost, many things that other men took for granted and would never willingly have forgone, and almost all those the Eyes of Time chose were given no say in becoming a Fateguard. Yet it was not all loss. With the iron and the sleepless eyes and the ever-present chill and the little need for food and rest there came an instinct for what was proper and what was wrong, what was fated and what was chance, what was a man’s destiny and what was not. This was the instinct that had made Beyard let Gallow go in Middislet, the same instinct again in Hrodicslet. Something lay between them. Their fates had been entwined for a full score years and would not unravel so easily. So he told himself, and he told himself too that it couldn’t simply be that Gallow had once been his friend or that he was a better man than Sixfingers and always had been.
