What would have been quite sufficient for a casual game of ball and some seemingly accidental contact with the players was no longer enough to pass muster. Tinwright paused and pulled up his stockings, brushed a few crumbs from his chest—he had been eating bread and hard cheese while contemplating the unfairness of life—then made his way down the path looking only at plants, as if too taken by the harsh beauty of the winter garden to notice the arrival of several nubile young women showing more skin around the neck and bosom than they had in months. He wound in and out among the box hedges by a path so circuitous he might have been a foraging ant, crunching along gravel paths unraked since late autumn, until at last he approached the bench where the object of his garden quest sat with her maid.

Elan M’Cory was sewing something stretched on a wooden hoop; her eyes did not lift even when he stopped and stood for long moments, waiting. At last, his courage dying quickly, he coughed a little. “Lady Elan,” he said. “I bid you good afternoon.”

She finally looked up, but with such an unseeing, uncaring gaze that he found himself wondering against all sense whether he had approached the wrong woman, whether Elan M’Cory might have a blind or idiot sister. Then something like ordinary humanity came into her eyes. An expression that was not quite a smile, but almost, tugged at her lips.

“Ah, the poet. Master…Tinwright, was it?”

She remembered him! He could almost hear trumpets, as if the royal heralds had been called out to celebrate his now unmistakable and confirmed existence. “That is right, lady. You honor me.”

Her gaze dropped to her sewing. “And are you enjoying the afternoon, Master Tinwright?”

“Much more for your presence, my lady.”

Now she looked at him again, amused but still distant. “Ah. Because I am a vision of loveliness in my spring finery? Or perhaps because of the cloud of good cheer that surrounds me like a Xandian perfume?”

He laughed, but not confidently. She had wit. He wasn’t certain how he felt about that. He didn’t generally get on very well with women of that sort. On those occasions when he received compliments he wanted to be sure he understood them and that they were sincere. Still, there was something about her that pulled at him, just like the flame-loving moth he had so often cited in his poetry. So this was what it felt like! All poets should be forced to feel all the things they wrote about, Tinwright decided. It was a most novel way to understand the figures of poetry. It might change the craft entirely.

“Have I lost you, good sir? You were going to explain the subtle charm that draws you to me.”

He started, ashamed at his own foolishness, standing slack-jawed when he had been asked a question, however sardonic. “Because you are beautiful and sad, Lady Elan,” he said, uncertain whether he might not be overstepping the boundaries of propriety. He shrugged: too late—it had been said. “I wish there were something I could do to make you less so.”