With a friendly smile but not a moment’s hesitation, Farilane declared, “I’m Prudence Hawfinch, of the Merredydd Hawfinches.” She stole the name from a perfectly pleasant seller of flowers, a myr whose father was human and mother was Fhrey. In such an arrangement, the child was forced to retain the human surname. The real Prudence had never allowed the slightest hint of embarrassment to show. Instead, she always announced herself with an overabundance of pride, and Farilane mimicked her now. “Beside me is Kile—”

Here she hesitated, covering the pause with a cough as her mind raced over this potential pothole. A woman who is not the imperial princess would never travel in the company of two men who weren’t relatives. Holding her cloak tight to hide her imperial emblem, she landed on the only sensible solution. “He’s my husband.”

She held her breath, waiting for a reaction from the scribe. He made none, once more displaying his odd acceptance of the bizarre as routine.

“And this?” The abbot looked at Sheldon.

Hoping Faust would be just as accepting of her exaggerations, Farilane introduced him. “Ah, yes, this is Shelly, our . . . servant.”

The abbot nodded slowly as if appraising her words, rerunning them in his head, looking for errors. That’s how Farilane read it, but the guilty, she knew, always feared discovery.

“And you are down from Merredydd?” he asked Kile.

“Yes,” she answered for her husband. “Bound for Vernes when we went astray.”

“You walked?” Again, he spoke to Kile, but her newly appointed husband deferred to his newly declared wife.

“Puddles and pots! Of course not,” Farilane said, and laughed as if it was the funniest jest ever. “We have a small boat. We stopped for a picnic, and there was this utterly charming little bunny—you know, the sort with the white puff-tail? Well, I foolishly tried to feed it a bit of celery, and of course it ran off. They told me not to, but silly me, I chased after it . . . right into the forest. I only stepped a few trees inside, but instantly found myself at a loss on how to get back out. I wandered, and poor Kile and Shelly came looking. I shouted and shouted. Even still, it’s a wonder we found each other. When we did, the three of us realized we were hopelessly confused as to which way the river lay. Can you believe that?”