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to meet the bow-happy relatives of the poacher boy, which got me to wondering what would happen to him, since I wasn't going straight to the castle. But if I was supposed to play a part in that, his capture by the guards must be triggered by my arrival at the castle.
    It wasn't a long ride before we reached what looked like an about-to-fall-down lean-to of twigs and hide that sagged against a hill.
    "There she is," Deming said, stopping the horse half a city-block length away. "Feordina the Knitter. I'm not going any closer."
    Feordina the Knitter? I squinted my eyes in the direction he was looking, at what I had supposed was a heap of forest debris piled by the wind into a corner formed by the lean-to and the hill. I became aware that the pile of debris had looked up and was watching vis.
    "Wait for me," I told Deming, dismounting.
    "Yeah, yeah," he said. He, too, got off the horse and led it to the stream to drink.
    I approached the lean-to. "Good day to you," I said.
    The reason the person—Feordina—looked like a compost heap was that her clothes seemed to be made entirely of vegetation. She had a basket by her feet that was filled with dandelions, and that was what she was knitting with. I mean, she had knitting needles made of smooth sticks, but she was using dandelion stems as yarn. Dandelion stems not being very long, every few stitches she'd reach down into the basket for a new dandelion, lop off the top with her thumb, then add this new stem to the garment she was knitting. And I knew it was a garment she was making because she seemed to be wearing last season's model, over a fashionable chemise of what I was guessing to be moss and lichen, with accent points of leaves and a hint of heather. She had a two-foot-wide mushroom cap on her head.
    "Hold on," she told me, "I'm counting knits and purls."
    I waited while she got to the end of the row.
    "So"—she didn't set her project down, but she looked up at me through her bushy eyebrows, which themselves almost looked knitted—"who are you and why are you here?"
    "I'm Janine," I told her.
    She looked at me blankly.
    "Janine de St. Jehan." Still no reaction. "You were midwife at my birth. In the king's castle. "Where my mother died. You brought me to my foster parents, Solita and Dexter the peat cutter." She
was
the right woman, wasn't she?
    "You don't look like the Janine I remember," she said.
    "Well"—I was beginning to get worried—"it
has
been fourteen years."
    "Hmmm," she said noncommittally.
    "My parents—my foster parents—said that they left a ring with you that my mother wanted me to have."
    "We'll see," Feordina said. She carefully set her knitting down in the basket and stood, creaking and snapping. I couldn't tell if that was her bones, or something she was wearing. She was even shorter than me, probably only four feet tall. "Well, come in, then."
    She motioned me to follow her into the lean-to, which hardly looked big enough for two. But it turned out to be only an entryway, protecting a huge crack in the side of the hill. There were burning torches set into nooks and crannies in the cave surface, so I had no trouble seeing.
    The cave must have been formed by an offshoot of the stream we'd been following, for it was quite damp, which made me sneeze. The cave was roundish and about as big as, say, your average one-stall-and-a-sink public bathroom, which it also kind of smelled like. At the far wall was a life-size statue of a man who most likely was Saint Bruce the Warrior Poet. What was kind of neat was that, even though his face was carved wood, his armor was real: a plate-metal helmet (the visor was up, which was how I saw his face), gauntlets, shin protectors, and a surcoat of mail—thousands and thousands of interlocking circles of metal.
    "Wow," I said. "Impressive."
    When Feordina didn't say anything, I asked, "Uhm, what does this have to do with me and the ring?"
    She waggled her finger at the statue, and my heart sank. "I hid the ring in the