"Me too," her brother admits. 

"It doesn't change anything, though, does it?" he grumbles. "It doesn't matter what we think of it."

"Only what Father wants," Alanna agrees. "And he wants you to be a knight, and me to learn to be a lady."

The word 'lady' is said as though it was something disgusting. 

"I don't want to be a knight. It sounds horrible." Thom flops over to bury his head in her shoulder. 

"Maybe I can just hide in the royal library all the time and not have to do any fighting." 

She pats him, ruffling his hair. 

"Oh no, you'll have to learn how to make a sword, and ride proper horses instead of our little pony, and shoot things with arrows, and make friends with other boys!" Her tone, which started off somewhere between teasing and genuinely sympathetic, takes on a note of envy. 

"I think I'd quite like the capital, actually." 

"You're welcome to it," Thom says dryly. "Gods know you'd be a better knight than I would." 

He sighs. "I want to be a sorcerer. I want to read every book in the City of the Gods, and cast spells that would make Father's eyes pop, and learn to fly..." 

Alanna flops back against the wall and listens to her brother spin himself fantasies. Thom wants to study magic more than anything in the world, and Alanna would rather stay as far away from it as she can get. Alanna would love to be a knight, and Thom is going to hate it. 

"...Thom? I have an idea." 

"Oh no." Thom has far too much experience with his sister's ideas to be reassured by that statement. 

"This isn't like the time you wanted to go hunting in the woods, is it? Or the time you tried to climb the bell tower, or—"

"No, it's better than all of those!" She leans forward, excited now.

"You want to be a sorcerer, but you're supposed to be a knight. And I want to be a knight, but I'm supposed to learn magic. So..." She pauses for dramatic effect. "We swap!" 

"...what?"

"We'll swap places! When we leave tomorrow, you can go with Maude to the City of the Gods, and I'll disguise myself as a boy and go to the capital with Coram!" 

There's just the small matter of getting the two servants to agree to this plan, of course, but convincing Thom will be the hard part.

Case in point: "Won't they notice? I mean, we do look alike, especially if you had short hair, but in a few years you'll start looking more and more like a girl, won't you?"

"Then I'll deal with that in a few years," Alanna replies, shrugging. "And that'll still get us a few years of doing the things we want to do."

"That's if we even get that far." Thom is on a roll now. "If they're expecting a girl called Alanna and I turn up as a boy called Thomas—actually, do you really want to be called Thomas for the next four years?"

"No, I'll be...Alan. Alan of Trebond." It sounds both outrageously daring and incredibly right on her tongue.  

"And they're not expecting anything yet," she points out. "Father is sending the letters of introduction with us because he didn't get around to sending them ahead. We can rewrite them to say whatever we want."

"What about Coram and Maude? They're supposed to be going with us, and they'll know the letters are wrong." 

She thinks about it. Alanna is pretty sure she can convince both their servants to go along with her plan, but Thom needs to hear a plan, not just vague conviction. 

"I'll talk to Maude. She's been talking for months about how she's run out of magic to teach you, and it's a shame you'll never get the chance to study it as you should. And Coram...I might have to threaten to cast a spell on him if he tells. You know he's scared of magic."

She doesn't like threatening people, or the thought of deliberately prodding Coram's weak spot to force his cooperation, but it's for a good cause. This is their best shot at actually being happy, for both of them. And he'll come around once he remembers that Alanna will make a much better knight than Thom anyway. 

"...okay, we can talk to them," Thom concedes.

"But if you can't convince them to help, we won't do it."

"Deal."

They go to Maude first. Having her backing will make it easier to convince Coram.

After hearing Alanna's plan, with Thom interjecting in a few places to fill in key details, she looks at them both, sighs, and asks them to help her perform a divination, to find out if this is the right path. They haul wood for the fire and build it up high, then Maude throws on a handful of vervain leaves. All three of them hold hands, call on their magic—the twins more powerful but less precise than their teacher—and stare into the flames. 

 Alanna isn't expecting to See anything. It's Maude who cast the spell, even if the twins are helping, so she's the only one who should See what the flames have to show. But...that's definitely a picture forming in the fire. A city of shiny black stone grows before her eyes, gleaming under a hot desert sun. 

Despite the roaring fire, she feels freezing. 

Maude releases their hands, and the picture vanishes as if it was never there.

Alanna blinks. "Did you see the city?" she asks. 

"I saw no city," Maude replies, looking sharply at her. "But I have seen many things I did not understand. Many things..." She looks old and tired in the firelight, Alanna thinks suddenly. 

"You Saw something?" Thom interrupts. "But Maude cast the spell, that's not supposed—" 

He sounds almost jealous that it happened to Alanna and not him. 

"I—I'll tell you later." 

She looks at Maude. "Well?" 

Maude sighs. She doesn't look happy about it, nor does she seem certain of her decision, but she's made her choice.  "Very well. Tomorrow Thom and I go to the City of the Gods." 

In the morning, the twins' father hands them a letter each, both sealed, which they are to take with them. One for Thom, to go to Duke Gareth of Naxen at the royal palace, and one for Alanna to take to the First Daughter of the convent. He gives them his blessing and hopes that they will both do him proud over the next four years. 

Safely back in Alanna's room, with Coram busy preparing their horses, they quickly open the letters and Thom begins writing out new ones. For 'Alan's' replacement letter, he copies his own, changing nothing except the name. For his own new letter he has to be a little more creative, and Alanna helps with the wording in a couple of places. The resulting letters are unusual in only one respect: in most families, it is the younger brother who is sent to study magic with the priests, and the older brother to become a knight. They are changing nothing but Alanna's gender, leaving their relative ages the same so that Thom is still the Trebond heir. 

While Thom writes, Maude sits Alanna down and cuts her hair to the same length as her brother's. Once she's dressed in Thom's borrowed clothes, there'll be hardly anything to tell them apart. 

Alanna—although she'd better get used to thinking of herself as Alan, hadn't she—looks at herself in the mirror and giggles. She looks like a boy!

With Thom dressed in one of Alanna's riding habits and pretending as hard as he can to be disappointed that he's going off to study magic, while Alanna similarly pretends she isn't thrilled to be going to the palace, the twins and their two servants head out. They're travelling together for the first stretch, but soon part ways. They don't have to fake their sadness at the separation. If all goes well, they won't see each other again for another four years. 'Alan' will be a squire, and Thom will be a mage. They'll have built lives without each other, made new friends—well, Alan will make friends. Thom might just bury himself in books like a dragon with its hoard. 

Thom and Maude ride away in one direction, headed for the City of the Gods, as Alanna and Coram turn towards the capital. 

Alanna—no, Alan, she's Alan now—manages to make it until they stop for the night before Coram notices the switch. It isn't hard to act like Thom in a sulk when she's already starting to desperately miss her twin brother. She stays quiet, keeps her hood up and her head down, and tries to convince herself she isn't homesick. The only thing that might give her away is how well the pony is behaving for her: he's never this good for Thom. 

They're walking into the inn side by side when Coram does a double-take at Alanna, hood now lowered, and starts cursing under his breath. He asks; she explains. He takes even more convincing than her brother, but she does not, in the end, have to resort to threats to get him to go along with the plan. After all, he wasn't looking forward to Thom being an embarrassment to his teaching any more than Thom was. There's no denying that, purely on the basis of ability, Alan will make a much better knight. If she doesn't get caught. 

They have four days until they reach Corus. Then the real challenge will begin.