I couldn't think of words to say. Instead I stepped up into the wagon and took her by the shoulders. I sat her down. She'd been using a dry rag to poke at her face. Had she no sense at all? "Sit still," I told her tersely. "And try to be calm. I'll be right back."

I took her rag and damped it in cool water. I went back in and dabbed the blood away. As I suspected, the cut was not large, but it was bleeding profusely as cuts to the face or scalp often do. I folded the rag into a square and pressed it against her face. "Hold that there. Press on it a bit, but don't move it. I'll be back." I looked up to find her eyes fastened to the scar on my cheek as tears brimmed over from her eyes. I added, "Skin as fair as yours doesn't scar all that easily. Even if it leaves a mark, it won't be large."

The hugeness of her eyes of my words let me know I'd said exactly the wrong thing. I left the wagon, berating myself for getting involved at all.

I'd lost all my healing herbs and my pot of Burrich's ointment when I had abandoned my things in Tradeford. I'd noticed a flower that looked a bit like a stunted goldenrod in the area where the sheep were grazing, however, and some succulents sort of like bloodroot. So I pulled up one of the succulents, but it smelled wrong, and the juice from the leaves was sticky rather than like jelly. I washed my hands and then looked at the stunted goldenrod. It smelled right. I shrugged. I started out picking just a handful of leaves, but then decided as long as I was at it, I could restock a bit of what I'd lost. It appeared to be the same herb, but growing smaller and more straggly in this dry rocky soil. I spread out my harvest on the tail of the cart and sorted through it. The fatter leaves I left to dry. The smaller tips I crushed between two cleaned stones, and then took the resulting paste on one of the stones to the puppeteer's wagon. The girl looked at it with doubt, but nodded hesitantly when I told her, "This will stop the bleeding. Soonest closed is smallest scar."

When she took the rag away from her face, I saw that it had almost stopped bleeding. I smoothed on a fingertip's worth of the woundwort paste anyway. She sat quietly under my touch, and it was suddenly unnerving to recall that I had not touched a woman's face since I'd last seen Molly. This girl had blue eyes and they were wide-open and looking up into my face. I looked aside from the earnest gaze. "There. Now leave it alone. Don't wipe at it, don't touch it with your fingers, don't wash it. Let the scab form and then do your best to leave that alone."

"Thank you," she said in a tiny voice.

"Welcome," I told her, and turned to leave.

"My name is Tassin," she said to my back.

"I know. I've heard him roaring it at you," I said. I started to go down the steps.

"He's an awful man. I hate him! I'd run away if I could."

It didn't seem like a good time simply to walk away from her. I stepped off the wagon and paused. "I know it's hard to feel a strap when you're trying hard. But… that's how it is. If you ran away and had no food, no place to sleep, and your clothing all going to rags, that would be worse. Try to do better, so he won't take up the strap." I believed so little of what I said, I could scarcely form the words. But those words seemed better than to tell her to leave now and run away. She wouldn't survive a day on the open prairie.

"I don't want to do better." She'd found a spark of spirit, to be defiant. "I don't want to be a puppeteer at all. Master Dell knew that when he bought my years."

I edged away back toward my sheep, but she came down the steps and followed after me.

"There was a man I liked in our village. He'd made an offer for me to be his wife, but had no money just then. He was a farmer, you see, and it was spring. No farmer has money in spring. He told my mother he'd pay a bride-price for me at harvest time. But my mother said, 'If he's poor now with one mouth to feed, he'll only be poorer after he has two. Or more.' And then she sold me to the puppeteer, for half what he'd usually pay for an apprentice, because I wasn't willing."

"They do it differently where I'm from," I said awkwardly. I couldn't grasp what she was telling me. "Parents pay a master to take on their child as apprentice, hoping the child can make a better life."

She smoothed her hair back from her face. It was light brown, with a lot of curl to it. "I've heard of that. Some do it that way, but most don't. They buy an apprentice, usually a willing one, and if he doesn't work out, then they can sell him for a drudge. Then you're not much better than a slave for six years." She sniffed. "Some say it makes an apprentice try harder, to know he may end up doing scut work in a kitchen or pumping a bellows in a smithy for six years if his master isn't pleased."

"Well. It sounds to me like you'd better learn to like puppets," I said lamely. I sat on the tail of my master's cart and looked out over my flock. She sat down next to me.

"Or hope someone buys me from my master," she said despondently.

"You make yourself sound like a slave," I said reluctantly. "It's not that bad, is it?"

"Doing something you think is stupid, day after day?" she asked me. "And being hit for not doing it perfectly? How is that better than being a slave?"

"Well, you're fed and clothed and sheltered. And he's giving you a chance to learn something, a trade that would let you travel all over the Six Duchies if you became good at it. You might end up performing for the King's Court at Buckkeep."

She looked at me oddly. "You mean Tradeford." She sighed and shifted herself closer to me. "It's lonely for me. All the others, they all want to be puppeteers. They get angry at me when I make mistakes, and always call me lazy and won't talk to me when they say I spoiled a performance. There's not one kind one among them; none of them would have cared about my face getting scarred as you did."

There seemed nothing to reply to that. I didn't know the others well enough to agree or disagree. So I said nothing and we sat watching the sheep. The silence lengthened as the night got darker. I thought that soon I should kindle a fire.

"So," she began after a few more minutes of my silence. "How did you become a shepherd?"

"My parents died. My sister inherited. She didn't particularly care for me, and here I am."

"What a bitch!" she said fiercely.

I took a breath to defend my fictitious sister, and then realized I'd only be extending the conversation. I tried to think of something I needed to go and do, but the sheep and other beasts were right there before us, grazing peacefully. Useless to hope that the others would soon return. Not with a tavern and new faces to talk to after our days on the road.

I finally made excuse that I was hungry and got up to gather stones and then dry dung and sticks for a fire. Tassin insisted on cooking. I was not truly hungry, but she ate with a hearty appetite, and fed me well from the puppeteer's traveling supplies. She made a pot of tea as well, and afterward we sat by the fireside sipping it from heavy red porcelain mugs.

Somehow the silence had changed from awkward to companionable. It had been pleasant to sit and watch someone else prepare the meal. She had chattered at first, asking if I liked this sort of spice and did I make my tea strong, but not really listening for any answers. Seeming to find some sort of acceptance in my silence, she had gone on to speak more intimately of herself. With a sort of despair, she spoke of days spent learning and practicing a thing she had no desire to learn nor practice. She spoke with a grudging marvel of the dedication of the other puppeteers, and their enthusiasm that she could not share. Her voice dwindled off and she looked up at me with eyes full of misery. She did not need to explain to me the loneliness she felt. She turned the talk to lighter things, the minor irritations she felt, the foods they ate that she disliked, the way one of the other puppeteers always smelled of old sweat, of one woman who reminded her to speak her lines by pinching her.