circles. The longing on even that man's jaded face was fresh and bright and transparent as at last he turned to catch up. 'Still, we'll see. Would you consider a split? Payment in silver, and one foal?'

    The Lord snatched his cuff from the clutch of a briar the mowers had missed. His mouth turned down. 'Certainly not. Duke Tanemar's enough man to please, for setting such store by a daughter who's nobody's beauty. It's the foals or nothing, for you. Press too hard, and I'll send for a gypsy.'

    'What, and see your treasure stolen the moment it's tamed enough to halter?' The voices of the two men dwindled, amiably contentious as they hammered out terms for their bargain. Trionn sat up in the brush, feeling whitely shaken. He wished all the cats had not left. In balled up, tongue-tied frustration, he watched the stallion storm out one last gust of air, then settle his head down to graze.

    A sadness near to pain ached in his chest at the thought that such a beast should ever be trapped or taken.

    Distressed beyond concern for the slaughtered pig, Trionn saw the sun gone, and the sky turned silver at twilight before he trudged back to resume his neglected chores. The first thing he noticed as he approached the haphazard cluster of frame buildings that made up Silverdown's manor was that lights burned in nearly every window. Reflections of a hundred flames danced in the boggy, sediment-choked ditch that fronted the tumbledown breastworks. Trionn might have a clumsy tongue, but he was exceptionally quick at balancing. He crossed the ditch by footing across a slime-caked log, last remains of the decrepit palisade. He reached what the servants called the yard, a narrow, irregular court whose cobbles were furred in moss; or had been. A fresh, dirt-colored scar sliced one corner, where a drudge labored by torchlight to scrape the paving bare.

    More of the new Lord's fussiness, Trionn concluded. Stones could not grow clothes of moss, and wax lights and tallow dips could be burned without care, as the animals were slaughtered for the table; as a great dun stallion could be torn from his freedom and used as a bribe to court a girl. Wrapped in unhappiness, Trionn failed to notice the cat that had found him already. It trotted up and shouldered between his shins, joined at a run by two more.

II2