"Would you relax, Boots?"

"As soon as you get the last of it out of my foot, yes, why then I will be happy to relax," she shot at him. He was frowning, one corner of his mouth turned down in concentration, and her tone seemed not to unsettle him in the least.

They were in a secluded glen between a mountain and an incredible fortress of boulders which seemed to have tumbled down directly from the heavens. Many of them were taller than Nathaniel, most of them were slick with moisture and a deep green moss. They had been crossing the rockfal when Elizabeth had mis—stepped and landed with all her weight on a nest of deadwood.

Moccasins had their limitations, oh, yes. Any of her boots, which had been such an extravagance and had earned her her nickname—those silly, vain, immoderate, oh so lovely boots with their leather soles—would have kept her feet protected. The muscles rolled and cramped in her lower leg.

"When my hair got plucked I got water in my eyes, often as not," Nathaniel said in a conversational tone.

Unexpectedly intrigued, Elizabeth came up on her elbows. "Your hair plucked? Your scalp, for battle?"

"Aye, and the rest of it." He grinned without looking at her. "It's not attractive to the Kahnyen'kehflka, in case you didn't know. Chest hair and the like."

"But you—" She paused, looking at him hard. He had shaved this morning, as he did every morning, with a straight—edged razor. More than once she had wondered why he bothered, but she liked him clean shaven, the line of his jaw and the angle of his chin, and so she had not said anything at all. Every evening, in spite of his careful attentions, his cheeks were rough with new growth, something she had learned to anticipate and also to appreciate. She looked at him now, the deep, thick growth of the hair on his head and the way it hung in waves over his shoulders. It struck her that there was little hair on him otherwise, and that this might be unusual.

"If you pull it out by the roots and you keep doing it long enough, it gives up eventually," he explained.

Elizabeth twitched as another splinter was pulled from her foot.

"You mean to say that you plucked the hair from your chest? Every day?"

"Not me," said Nathaniel. "There was an old woman in the Turtle long house she did the tattooing and the hair pulling, mostly. Said I had a good face and that it would be worth the trouble to get rid of the hair, so I could find a wife. Took me on as a project. Every morning and every evening she'd just about sit down on top of me to keep me still and she'd go to work on me with her shells."

"You're making this up," Elizabeth said.

"I ain't," Nathaniel said, distracted momentarily from his story while he concentrated on her foot. Then he pulled another sliver. "She had shells tied together with a piece of rawhide, notched on two edges so she could grab with them. Or she used her fingers, for the scalp."

"I'm glad to see she didn't mind those growing back," Elizabeth said dryly. "So how long did it take?"

He shrugged. "I guess maybe three years, at least until my chest was clean enough to suit her."

"Well, I would hope that was enough," Elizabeth said. "What else could she have had in mind? Not your legs—" Her voice trailed away.

Nathaniel said, "She was trying to do me a service, but I drew the line below my belly. Thought any girl who couldn't see past the hair on my—" He raised an eyebrow at her—"legs wasn't worth worrying over."

"The question is why you put up with it at all," Elizabeth said, flustered.

"Maybe I was just vain, did you think of that? And besides, Ya—wa—o—da—qua told stories while she worked." He was squeezing the tender flesh of the ball of her foot between two fingers, and then he plucked suddenly and made a satisfied sound. "Not much more to go," he said. "But there's one pretty deep, so you hold tight now, Boots."

Elizabeth had been propping herself up on her elbows, but she lay back down and put an arm across her eyes. "What does her name mean?"

"Ya—wa—o—da—qua? Pincushion. Don't laugh, it's true. Hold still, Boots." There was a sharp jab of the needle; she thought she was prepared for it, but she reared up anyway, and there was Nathaniel, grinning. There was a swipe of her blood on his cheek, and a wickedly long and bloody sliver on the end of the needle. "I think that's the last of it. You did good."

"I sniveled," she corrected him, out of sorts. There was blood running down her foot; it was a most disquieting sensation.

"But nicely," he allowed. He helped her up and then to the stream, where he saw her settled on a boulder with the injured foot in the water. This stream came off the mountain and it was ice—cold even this far into the spring, but it numbed the ache in her foot and she swished it back and forth, not unhappily. Nathaniel was rummaging in the packs, his back to her.

"We'll make camp here and get you poulticed. There's a storm coming on anyway.

"So say the black fly Elizabeth agreed, rubbing her neck. The exposed skin from collar to her hairline was raised to washer board consistency by a hundred tiny welts. After a few days of dampness, the black fly moved in armies of thousands and millions, and today there had been a particularly difficult confrontation with them. Her skin felt warm to the touch and she was almost light—headed with it, but she knew that in the morning it would be gone. Until the next encounter with the little beasties. She cast an irritated look at Nathaniel; he was scratching, too' but less. He had coated his face and hands with ointment, and it had kept him relatively protected.