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and was by no means a cold-blooded beast, the palfrey had not moved, standing still as a stone.
    Then Wald the head groom felt fear prickling at the back of his astonishment. The boy had carried each plait down to the last three hairs. Yet he had fastened nothing with thread or ribbon, but merely pressed the ends between two fingers, and the braids stayed as he had placed them. Nor did the braids ever seem to fall loose as he was working, or hairs fly out at random, but all lay smooth as white silk, shimmering. The boy, or whatever he was, stood still with his hands at his sides, admiring his work.
    Uncanny. Still the lord and lady would be well pleased… Wald jerked himself out of amazement and moved quickly. “Get back to your work, you fellows!” he roared at the grooms, and then he strode into the stall.
    “Who are you?” he demanded. “What do you mean coming in here like this?” It was best, in a lord’s household, never to let anyone know you were obliged to them.
    The boy looked at him silently, turning his head in the alert yet indifferent way of a cat.
    “I have asked you a question! What is your name?”
    The boy did not speak, or even move his lips. Then or thereafter, as long as he worked in that stable, he never made any sound.
    His stolid manner annoyed Wald. But though the master groom could not yet know that the boy was a mute, he saw something odd in his face. A halfwit perhaps. He wanted to strike the boy, but even worse he wanted the praise of the lord and lady, so he turned and snatched the wrapping off the palfrey’s tail, letting the cloud of white hair float down to the clean straw of the stall. “Do something with that,” he snapped.
    A sweet, intense glow came into the boy’s eyes as he regarded his task. With his fingers he combed the hair smooth, and then he started a row of small braids above the bone.
    Most of the tail he left loose and flowing, with just a cluster of braids at the top, a few of them swinging halfway to the ground. And young Lady Aelynn gasped with pleasure when she saw them, and with wonder at the mane, even though she was a lord’s daughter born and not unaccustomed to finery.
    It did not matter, that day, that Lord Robley’s saddle had not been polished to a sufficient shine. He was well pleased with his grooms. Nor did it matter that his hawks flew poorly, his hounds were unruly and his clumsy hunter stumbled and cut its knees. Lords and ladies looked again and again at his young wife on her white palfrey, its tail trailing and shimmering like her blue silk gown, the delicate openwork of its mane as dainty as the lace kerchief tucked between her breasts or her slender gloved hand holding the caparisoned reins. Every hair of her mount was as artfully placed as her own honey-gold hair looped in gold-beaded curls atop her fair young head. Lord Robley knew himself to be the envy of everyone who saw his lovely wife and the showing she made on her white mount with the plaited mane.
    And when the boy who plaited manes took his place among the lord’s other servants in the kitchen line for the evening meal, no one gainsaid him.
    * * *
    Lord Robley was a hard old man; his old body hard and hale, his spirit hard. It took him less than a day to pass from being well pleased to being greedy for more. No longer was it enough that the lady’s palfrey should go forth in unadorned braids. He sent a servant to Wald with silk ribbons in the Auberon colors, dark blue and crimson, and commanded that they should be plaited into the palfrey’s mane and tail. This the strange boy did with ease when Wald gave the order, and he used the ribbon ends to tie tiny bows and love knots and leave a few bright tendrils bobbing in the forelock. Lady Aelynn was enchanted.
    Within a few days Lord Robley had sent to the stable thread of silver and of gold, strings of small pearls, tassels, pendant jewels, and fresh-cut flowers of every sort. All of these things the boy who plaited manes used with