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Benton was doing.
    Benton was at university and had started his master’s work. I forgot that I was trying to avoid notice and asked what his subject was. The baron looked surprised at such a knowledgeable question. He replied that it had to do with a new way to learn about the lives of the ancients by digging up their ruins, though that was as much as he could figure out from Benton’s letters.
    It sounded like a promising thesis, but I’d gone back to avoiding attention, so I just nodded. If the baron could pay five thousand gold roundels to redeem Sir Michael, he could buy his other son a place at university whether his master’s work was judged worthy or not.
    For Benton, I learned, was a son, as were Justin (who was doing well at the High Liege’s court, and might find himself in the treasury) and Rupert (who had probably returned home by now from looking at some new breeding stock).
    They all appeared to be older than Sir Michael, which gave me my first clue as to why a noble’s son was wandering the countryside as a knight errant. A wife’s dowry usually provides for the second son, but any others have to find their own place. Of course, there are better places than knight errant—in fact, almost any job would be better, an opinion I suspect the baron shared.
    Sir Michael’s mother and his sister, Kathryn, were also fine, and some of the neighbors with sons of the right age were beginning to talk of marriage. Old Nan had finally died, but Merriot was…
    Family gossip is boring if you aren’t part of the family, but I did glean a few interesting bits. The number of neighbors who wanted to marry Kathryn told me that Sir Michael’s sister was as Gifted as his father was rich.
    The magic-sensing Gift is the most important, and since most nobles select their wives for it, most nobles have it. But the sensing Gift brings with it a host of lesser abilities, which vary widely in type and strength. Some scholars hold that these other gifts aren’t true magic. When a magica rabbit freezes to hide itself, it literally becomes invisible—you can look right through it and see the grass it rests on. But the odd talents with which some humans are Gifted consist more of an exaggerated knack for something anyone might do. As the baron recently demonstrated, when he looked at me and saw past the outward indicators to the person I really am, though he had no way to deduce that with the senses granted most folk.
    Admittedly, some commoners have Gifts too; a knack for growing plants to sizes, or in places, that no one else can is the most common. And I once lost a considerable sum to a man who could sense the cards that were about to be dealt to him—not often the exact card, as he reluctantly explained to the skeptical judicars, just whether it would be good or bad for his hand. Like most of the lesser Gifts it worked erratically, and sometimes not at all, but he still found it very useful.
    Considering the wealth and power they control, it seems unfair that nobles should be blessed with these inborn talents so much more often than the rest of us. Of course, the possession of Gifts is one of the reasons they gain wealth and power, so I long ago decided to relieve them of a little of that wealth. After all, fair’s fair.
    Half an hour west of town we turned north on a road that skirted the Derens River. The Derens was too small for shipping, which made it a pretty good bet that we wouldn’t encounter any more towns—and villages large enough to support an inn are rare. The temperature sank along with the sun. I huddled in my cloak, trying to resign myself to sleeping in another barn. But just as the dusk was fading we rode into a good-sized village and up to the gate of an inn called the Pig and Briar.
    I can’t speak for the briar part, but the pig made itself evident the moment we rode through the gate. A servant had opened its pen to feed it and, for reasons known only to the porcine mind, it dashed out and ran across