Like most walled cities there had been a lot of infilling since the Change, second stories added to houses and new workshops built. Like the more closely regulated cities, Boise also had a stretch of cleared land just inside the fortifications, letting troops move quickly in an emergency. It also served as holding pens for livestock; each dealer had a sign with his name and license number. It was all very orderly, as far as anything concerned with sheep and other beasts with wills of their own could be. They turned the flock in between the wattle hurdles and into the corral. They quieted quickly; sheep weren’t intelligent enough to figure out what humans had in mind for them. Unlike pigs. Pigs were dangerous in large numbers, for exactly that reason.

The contractor who’d bought Woburn’s sheep was a weathered middle-aged man; he took a look at the flock with an experienced flick of the eyes, scanning for sickness or scrawny individuals. Then he went through and checked a few at random to make sure they were what they appeared. The sheep were mostly overage ewes, sold off when their best wool and lambing days were done. The hides would bring nearly as much as their tough stringy meat, with leather in such demand for the war, but soldiers weren’t picky eaters either.

He had an assistant, a youngster in his late teens with stained working clothes and a shepherd’s crook. He was staring at Ritva, which wasn’t unusual, but there was as much hostility as jittery adolescent lust in it. He was silent until she handed over the invoice with Woburn’s signature.

“What are you doing with that?” he said. “Why isn’t the man handling it?”

“I’m giving it to your boss, stranger,” she said mildly. “And you should mind your own business.”

“You’ve no business handling that, girl,” he said. “You should be home, and dressed decent. Let men do men’s business. The day is coming—”

Ritva stuck a finger in the young man’s face, the point almost touching his nose, and he jarred to a halt in astonishment.

“Who is this asshole?” she asked the dealer.

“He badgers the flocks for me around the town pens,” the man said. “And he’s my cousin’s kid, for my sins. That side of the family has been listening to the new preachers.”

“He pisses off the people you do business with,” she said; Ian was keeping quiet, in case anyone was struck by his accent. “And my brother here is mute, or he’d be pissed off.”

Which accounts for why he isn’t in the army, she thought.

“The little dick ain’t me,” the dealer pointed out. “And the sheep don’t mind his disposition.”