It was almost dawn when the three of them finally gave up on sleeping and finished their last preparations. Briar and Rosethorn had spent time before bed working with their traveling clothes. Sandry had made them from an unusual cloth, both the wool that most people wore and linen spun together with the wool. It was the linen that had mattered on delicate occasions, when Rosethorn or Briar could call on it to look more elderly, worn, and hard-used than it was. Their neat, clean traveling tunics and breeches turned into the weary clothes that poor farmers wore for days on end as they went about long hours of work. The braided trim came off, to be packed away. The wooden buttons lost their polish and developed cracks and splinters. Briar planned to send Evvy to buy straw sandals for them while he and Rosethorn swapped their horses for others more suited to poor farmers.

Using Evvy’s light stones they dressed, then quickly readied the horses and the cats. Two years’ of experience at having to leave some places quickly had made them good at being quiet.

They were drinking tea made over some of Evvy’s hot stones when Rosethorn raised the cat issue again. “Evvy, they’ll know to look for the cats. Can’t you —”

Evvy stared at her. “Then I’ll follow on my own. You don’t know. All those years in Prince’s Heights in Chammur — my cats were all I had. You never spent all your days with strangers looking to wallop you just for living. They were my blanket when I didn’t have anything else. When I had to eat rat, they shared with me. I am not dumping them with strangers in a foreign place.”

Two of the hot stones cracked and went to pieces.

“Sorry.” Evvy walked away from them, over to the wagon.

“We’ll grow plants from the carry-baskets,” Briar told Rosethorn soothingly. “If anyone asks, we’ll say we bought the plants at the market and we’re going to try them in the garden. No one will notice there’s cats inside.”

Steps — quiet ones — made them turn. Rajoni approached, carrying the smallest of lamps. She also had an old Trader woman with her. When they reached Briar and Rosethorn, Rajoni said, “When Grandmother learned what was going on — she had to log in your payment, understand — she told us we were fools.”

“My children sell a charm to disguise the woman and never think of seven cats,” the old woman remarked, and shook her head. “The soldiers capture you because of cats, then see charm to disguise woman and punish Traders. No.”

“She came to offer her help,” Rajoni explained when she realized Rosethorn thought the old woman was going to create problems.

“For a price,” Briar said quietly.

Both women raised their eyebrows as if to say, What else? Money was the main thing that kept Traders free and alive in the hostile lands where they made their living.

“Isn’t it the mimander who handles all spells, even purchased ones?” Rosethorn asked. He had come the night before and set the disguise spell before she went to bed. It had changed the look and feel of her from top to toe, everything about her but the way she spoke.

“The mimander still snores in his bed,” the grandmother replied crisply. “And we have no charms to sell that will disguise baskets of cats as crates of gabbling chickens. This is work that must be done over the baskets and over the cats.”

“But you can do it,” Evvy said. Her hands were bunched into fists. “Even their sounds?”

The old woman looked at her. “What do you offer, girl who changed the nature of diamonds?”

“But I didn’t,” Evvy said. “I just broke them in the way they want to be broken. What people call flaws in stones, those are really just opportunities, you know.”

“Diamond opportunities are beyond other lugshai,” the old woman said, using the word for non-Trader craftsmen.

Evvy grinned. “I have a few opportunities, then.” She went to the pack with her mage kit and dug in it. She soon returned with a piece of cloth. When she opened it, she revealed four long pieces of diamond that sparked in the light from Rajoni’s lamp. “These are diamond splinters. Your lugshai, or whoever you get, must fix these really well to a metal grip, then use them as a chisel on one of the flaws in a diamond. Diamond will cut diamond. It will cut the surface, too, so they have to grip the stone tight in some kind of vise, and it will break diamond, so they can’t hit too hard, understand? Have we a bargain?”

“Show me the cats. Then you can tell me if we have a bargain,” the woman told her.

Briar and Rosethorn stayed with Rajoni. “I still don’t understand,” Rosethorn murmured to the other woman. “We were always told about mimanders and their one specialty.”

“But they do not hold all the magic for the clan, any more than one mage holds all the magic for the village,” the ride leader replied. “Some of us have more or fewer talents for different kinds of magic, and some don’t want to limit themselves to one thing all their days. Grandmother discovered she could hide things when there was a killing riot against Traders and she hid her whole family. She was only five. She can un-sour and sour milk, tell if a well has gone bad, cleanse a water source if it is bad. And she can make my mother back down as fast as a monsoon rain, which looks like magic to me. Are your horses ready?”

By the time the cats had come to look and sound like chickens — and their baskets had come to resemble crates — Evvy and Rajoni’s grandmother were on good terms. Evvy was even allowed to kiss the old woman on the cheek before Rajoni took her back to the Trader carts. Then it was time for the three travelers to mount their riding horses, the weariest, scruffiest animals the Traders would allow them to keep, and lead their four packhorses to the market gate.