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entirely pleased with what you seem to think of my intelligence.
    “But, all right, what’s the plan, my friends? Are you going to stone me to death? Beat me to death? Call your Baron to send in his soldiers?” He shook his head slowly.
    “What a peck of fools.”
    “Now, look,” said Tem, whose face had become rather red. “No one said you did it; we’re just wondering if you know—”
    “I don’t know,” the Easterner said. Then added, “Yet.”
    “But you’re going to?” said Tem.
    “Very likely,” he said. “I will, in any case, look into the matter.”
    Tim looked puzzled, as the conversation had gone in a direction for which he couldn’t account. “I don’t understand,” he said at last. “Why?”
    The Easterner studied the backs of his hands. Savn looked at them, too, and decided that the missing finger was not natural, and he wondered how Vlad had lost it. “As I said,” continued Vlad, “I think I knew him. I want to at least find out why he looks so familiar. May I please have some more water?” He dug a copper piece out of a pouch at his belt, put it on the counter, then nodded to the room at large and made his way through the curtain in the back of the room, presumably to return to the chamber where he was staying.
    Everyone watched him; no one spoke. The sound of his footsteps echoed unnaturally loud, and Savn fancied that he could even hear the rustle of fabric as Vlad pushed aside the door-curtain, and a scraping sound from above as a bird perched on the roof of the house.
    The conversation in the room was stilted. Savn’s friends didn’t say anything at all for a while. Savn looked around the room in time to see Firi leaving with a couple of her friends, which disappointed him. He thought about getting up to talk to her, but realized that it would look like he was chasing her. An older woman who was sitting behind Savn muttered something about how the Speaker should do something. A voice that Savn recognized as belonging to old Dymon echoed Savn’s own thought that perhaps informing His Lordship that an Easterner had drunk a glass of water at Tern’s house might be considered an overreaction. This started a heated argument about who Tem should and shouldn’t let stay under his roof. The argument ended when Dymon hooted with laughter and walked out.
    Savn noticed that the room was gradually emptying, and he heard several people say they were going to talk to either Speaker or Bless, neither of whom was present, and “see that something was done about this.”
    He was trying to figure out what “this” was when Mae and Pae tost, coWttVed ? otyv and approached him. Mae said, “Come along, Savn, it’s time for us to be going home.”
    “Is it all right if I stay here for a while? I want to keep talking to my friends.”
    His parents looked at each other, and perhaps couldn’t think of how to phrase a refusal, so they grunted permission. Polyi must have received some sort of rejection from one of the boys, perhaps On, because she made no objection to being made to leave, but in fact hurried out to the wagon while Savn was still saying goodbye to his parents and being told to be certain he was home by midnight. In less than five minutes, the room was empty except for Tern, Savn, Coral, a couple of their friends, and a few old women who practically lived at Tern’s house.
    “Well,” said Coral. “Isn’t he the cheeky one?”
    “Who?”
    “Who do you think? The Easterner.”
    “Oh. Cheeky?” said Savn.
    “Did you see how he looked at us?” said Coral.
    “Yeah,” said Lan, a large fellow who was soon to be officially apprenticed to Piper. “Like we were all grass and he was deciding if he ought to mow us.”
    “More like we were weeds, and not worth the trouble,” said Tuk, who was Lan’s older brother and was in his tenth year as Hider’s apprentice. They were proud of the fact that both of them had “filled the bucket” and been apprenticed to