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her as the miners had seen her, not as a gawky youngster with freckles like butter forming in the milk.
    His eyes took in Epona’s braided hair and long gown, but his mind did not register the fact because it was not pertinent to the forging of the iron. His arm rose and fell, rose and fell, and the sparks showered from the anvil like runaway stars.
    Epona tried to think of something womanly and charming to say but the spirit within betrayed her; there was only silence in her head. “Epona, what do you want?” he asked again.
    Defeated, she passed her knife hand in front of her eyes in negation. “Nothing. I only … I came to wish you sunshine on your head,” she offered lamely.
    “And a day without shadows to you,” he responded kindly, the flicker of a smile crossing his mouth above his golden beard. These children! Then he caught sight of a heavy smear of carbon in the iron, indicative of an unevenness in strength, and he forgot all about Epona.
    The girl shoved through the circle of spectators and walked slowly away from the forge, face turned downward, studying her feet.
    Something alerted Goibban and he glanced up once more, watching her slender back as she walked away. A long gown? She had been to her woman-making, then? But only yestersun … Perhaps she had come for something important after all. But no, if she had anything to say she would have said it; women of the people always spoke their minds. He shrugged and attacked the iron.
    As Epona slouched across the commonground the fragrance of baking bread floated to meet her. Her mouth filled with saliva and she was thankful to remember her day’s task. At least she had a woman’s job, now; not just the incessant woodgathering that any child could handle.
    A woman’s job, but not the recognition she sought to go with it.
    The radiant morning had lured another from the chief’s lodge. Rigantona had grown impatient with the walls crowding in on her, and as soon as the men and the children had gone their separate ways she was anxious to seek the sun. But first she must dress.
    Rigantona never left the lodge without preparing herself to appear as the wife of a great chieftain. The village of the Kelti had become a major stopover on the trading routes since the discovery, many generations ago, of the Salt Mountain,
and important visitors could be expected at almost any time; sometimes even before the passes were clear enough to allow traders’ wagons. Representatives from other tribes of the people came in search of prosperous Kelti wives and joined with Illyrian and Hellene merchants and temperamental Etruscan businessmen in bartering for furs and craftwork and salt.
    Always, the salt.
    The sunseason was at hand; soon strangers would come and be impressed by the sight of the chief’s wife. But like all the Kelti, Rigantona also dressed to please herself, relishing fine fabrics and jewelry, adoring brilliant colors and soft furs. As every grown woman did, she wore a dagger, almost a shortsword, thrust through her belt, convenient to her knife hand, and she was skilled in its use. As Toutorix’s wife she was entitled to more jewelry than any other woman of the tribe and she liked to array herself in every piece of it: dangling gold earrings, bracelets of bronze and amber, a neckpiece inlaid with coral from Massalia, rings of ivory and copper and star metal, bronze anklets and massive brooches. She braided her hair into a coil atop her head and fastened it in place with a handful of little silver pins. The Kelti believed art central to life, rather than peripheral, and Rigantona took great pride in the fact that every article in her household, no matter how utilitarian, was meticulously crafted and beautifully ornamented, even the smallest hairpin.
    She had just finished her toilet when she caught Brydda watching her with undisguised envy.
    I earned it all, Brydda, she thought complacently. I earned it all.
    “Mind the fire,” she instructed the other woman.