"The farmer's child breathes so loud we could have shot him in the dark," she went on, still speaking softly but not whispering-whispers carried.

Edain bristled: " Child yourselves," he muttered. "You're Changelings too, and not much older than I am!"

He was nineteen and he was a farmer, but also an experienced hunter of deer and elk, boar and cougar, of tigers and sometimes of men, and he'd carried away the Silver Arrow at the Lughnasadh games twice; once he'd been younger than any champion had before. His father had taught the whole Clan the art of the bow.

"You two might as well have been playing the bagpipes," another soprano added.

At least they're speaking English instead of Elvish, Rudi thought with resignation. When they insist on Sindarin… there's no better language for being insufferable in, and the Lord and Lady know Mary and Ritva are experts at insufferability anyway.

The twins came in, shaggy in their war cloaks of mottled dark green canvas covered in loops stuck with bits of grass and sagebrush. Rudi had to admit they were invisible until they wanted to be seen. He was a very good scout himself; the twins were very very good, able to crawl to within touching distance of alert, war-wise men. If they had time enough, and sometimes it could take days.

They were also identicals, tall young women lithe as cats, their yellow hair caught up in tight fighting braids under knitted caps of dark gray wool. The faces below the hoods of the war cloaks were oval and high-cheeked and their slightly tilted eyes cornflower blue, capable of a most convincing imitation of guileless innocence.

In truth his half sisters reminded him of cats in more ways than one, including an occasional disconcerting capacity for cool wickedness. They'd also, in his opinion, spent far too much time in Aunt Astrid's little kingdom in the woods, listening to her bards recite from those books she insisted on calling the histories, and talking in a language invented by a long-dead Englishman. Not that they weren't great stories, but the way the Dunedain carried on, you'd think they were as true as Tain Bo Cuailnge.