For my part, I stood like a fool, unable even to close my slack jaws. I know now how different it is elsewhere, but in the country of my birth women do not ride out unescorted, however many they be. And Lal—I learned her full name later, though never how to say it properly—Lal was the first black woman I had ever seen. Black men, yes, often, as traveling merchants and now and than a poet, rhyming for bread in the marketplace, but never a woman. I believed, with most, that there were none.

“Sunlight on your road,” I managed to greet her at last, voice had changed some years before, but you could never have told it then.

“And on yours,” the black woman answered. I say it in shame and honesty that my mouth fell open again to hear her speak my language. I would have been less astonished if she had barked or flapped her arms and screamed like a hawk. She said, “Boy, is there such a thing as an inn or a tavern in these parts?” Her own voice was low and rough, but even so the words rose and fell with the sound of small waves breaking.

“An inn,” I mumbled, “oh, aye, you mean an inn.” Lal said later that she was certain their prankish luck had brought them upon a natural, a wandering carrot. I said, “Aye, there’s a such—I mean, there’s an inn. I mean, I work there. Stable hand, Rosseth. My name.” My tongue felt like a horse-blanket in my mouth, and I bit it twice getting all those words out.

“There would be a place? For us?” She pointed at her companions and then herself, still talking carefully to an idiot.

“Yes,” I said, “oh, yes, certainly. Plenty of rooms, business is a little slow just now”—Karsh would have killed me—“plenty of empty stalls, hot mash.” Then I saw the brown woman’s saddlebag ripple and lurch and twitch open at one corner, exactly like my poor idiot mouth, and I said hot mash again, several times.

The sharp, grinning muzzle first, black nose reading the wind; then the red-brown mask and the crisp arrowhead ears.