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thought was that he could afford to feed her and perhaps clothe her. Now she understood that he must be another kind of player altogether, the kind that performed before lords and perhaps murmured sweet love songs into the ears of great ladies and kissed their soft white hands.
    Something inside Carys shriveled and sank until she bent in on herself, and the alewife patted her shoulder. “There, there, child,” the woman said, “I have not made you bald. See, the hair is almost to your shoulder. If you wear a loose cloth over it, no one will know.” Then she pulled Carys’s head toward her, lifted her chin, laughed, and added, “And you are such a pretty thing, no one will care even if they do know.”
    With the words—and the touch of envy in the woman’s voice—reaction swept through Carys. She knew she was pretty. Many men had told her that, even some who were not seeking to lie with her. More important, she was a fine rope dancer, one of the best. I have nothing to be ashamed of, Carys thought, straightening her body. She was as good as any soft-voiced singer with dainty ways. Sooner lie with a pig in a wallow, would he? Then why was he so eager to have her accompany him that he would pay to have her bathed?
    Suddenly, a far different reason for Telor’s wishing her to dress as a boy came into Carys’s mind. If she was taken for a boy, other men would not desire her. Could not that be Telor’s reason? Carys smiled at the woman and shook her head, loosening her damp locks from the straight pattern in which the comb had set them. Freed, the hair began to spring into curls. Carys put up a hand to touch it and sighed, then smiled again.
    “Yes, it will grow,” she said to the alewife, unconsciously matching her speech to that of the woman as she had earlier matched the way Telor spoke.
    It was easy for Carys to mimic accent and rhythm; she had a keen ear and was accustomed to playing roles that required different speech. Actually, because Morgan had taught her always to speak as nearly as she could as those around her did, Carys hardly had a natural mode of speech. A strange accent, he had told her, marked a stranger, and strangers were always untrustworthy in the minds of those who lived always in one place. Out of costume, it was safer not to be taken for a player too.
    “And meanwhile,” Carys added for Telor’s ears, although she still seemed to speak to the alewife, “since I have lost my clothes, the short hair will better befit these that have been lent me.”
    “Good.” The woman returned Carys’s smile, then turned away and pulled the dress and shift from the tub and wrung them out. “I will rinse these at the well, since you cannot walk, but I think the gown may be too far gone to be mended. That must have been a bad fall.”
    “It was.”
    Carys shuddered as the memory of her escape flashed though her mind, and the anger coiling inside her at Telor’s seeming duplicity lost its hold. He could have left her by the road, she reminded herself. He could not have known who or what she was from a glimpse in the dark, and that he had stopped to help showed a good heart. If he desired her and wished to keep her from others—was that bad?

Chapter 4
    What Carys had said for Telor’s benefit was wasted. She had been so deep in her own thoughts and misery that she had not heard Telor shaking Deri and at last lifting him, with considerable effort, to carry him out and dump him near the well where he could soak Deri’s head and flush away the results of his being sick from drinking too much. Carys had noticed that the dwarf was gone from the table when she watched the alewife leave the room. Her eyes also took in the food on the other table, and a pang of hunger assailed her, reminding her that she had eaten nothing since the previous day’s single meal.
    There were more important things than hunger, however, and Carys made haste to belt on her knives and pull the shirt over her head so she could