What gave her pause, ironically, was a consideration of pure practicality.

With the braid off, there'll be no breakfast in the kitchen.

She had to use both hands, rocking the shears to win them free of the pitted wood. Maia turned the twin blades in a shaft of dawn light streaming through the shutters. She laughed aloud and decided.

Even winter kids were seldom perfectly identical. Rare summer doubles like Maia and Leie could be told apart by a discerning eye. For one thing, they were mirror twins. Where Maia had a tiny mole on her right cheek, Leie's was on the left. Their hair parted on opposite sides, and while Maia was right-handed, her sibling claimed left-handed-ness was a sure sign of destined greatness. Still, the town priestess had scanned them. They had the same genes.

Early on, an idea had occurred to them — to try using this fact to their advantage.

There were limits to their scheme. They could hardly put it over on a savant, or among the lordly merchant houses of Landing Continent, where rich clans still used the data-wizardry of the Old Network. So Maia and Leie had decided to stay at sea awhile, with the sailors and drifter-folk, until they found some rustic town where local mothers were gullible, and male visitors more taciturn than the gossipy, bearded cretins who sailed the Parthenia Sea.

Lysos make it so. Maia tugged an earlobe for luck and resumed hauling her gear down the twisty back stairs of Lamatia's Summer Creche, worn smooth by the passage of generations. At each slit window, a chill breeze stroked the newly bare nape of her neck, eliciting a creepy feeling that she was being followed. The duffel was heavy, and Maia nursed a dark suspicion that her sister might have slipped in something extra while her back was turned. If they had kept their braids for another hour, the mothers might have assigned a lugar to carry their effects to the docks. But Leie said it made you soft, counting on lugars, and on that she was probably right. There would be no docile giants to ease their work at sea.