“So you say your name is Timoid, young man?” Finn Teodoros nodded at her sagely. “It smacks somewhat of a straw-covered bumpkin just off the channel boat from Connord. Perhaps we should call you Tim.”

Briony, who had picked the name of the Eddon family priest, could only nod.

“Strange, though, since the channel boat does not, as far as I know, make landfall in the midst of the Whitewood. Nor do you sound Connord-fresh. You say you have been wandering here how long?”

“Days, maybe weeks, my lord.” She tried to keep her voice boyishly gruff and her words what she imagined would be peasant-simple. “I do not know for certain.” This at least was true, but she was glad her dirty face would hide the flush of her fear. “And I am not from Connord but Southmarch.” She had hoped to pass herself off as a wandering prentice, but she had expected to encounter some tradesman or merchant, not this shrewd-faced familiar of her own court.

“Do not task him so,” said the tall one named Dowan—a giant of a fellow, so big that Briony did not reach near to his shoulder, and Olin Eddon’s daughter was not a small girl. “The lad is weary and hungry, and cold.”

“And looking to ease those deficits at our expense,” said a woman the others had called Estir. Her dark hair was shot with gray and although her face might be called pretty, she had the soured look of someone who remembered every slight ever done to her.

“We could use another hand on the ropes,” offered a handsome, brown-skinned youth, one of the few who seemed near Briony’s own age. He spoke lazily, as one accustomed to getting his way, and she wondered if he was related to the owner of the troop. Finn Teodoros had introduced the company as Makewell’s Men, which was the usual sort of name for a troop of traveling players—perhaps the young man was Makewell’s son, or even Makewell himself.

“Well, that is at first easy enough to accomplish without loss, Estir,” said Teodoros. “He shall have my share tonight, since my stomach pains me a bit. And he shall sleep with me in the wagon—unless that is not mine to grant?”

The woman named Estir scowled, but waved her hand as though it was of little import to her.

“Come, then, wandering Tim,” said Teodoros, rising heavily from his seat on the wagon’s narrow steps. He was no older than her father and what hair he had showed little gray, but he moved like an aged man. “You can have my meal and we can speak more, and perhaps I shall sniff out what use you might be, since no one travels with us who cannot earn his way.”

“That’s not all you’ll sniff out, I’ll wager,” said one of the drinkers. His words were mumbled in a way that suggested he had started his drinking long before sunset. He was handsome in a thick-jawed way, with a shock of dark hair.