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Hayes was playing the reluctant but polite companion as Duncan and Conawago escorted him down the shadowed streets. The tinker—for Duncan still thought of him as such—seemed to have melancholy permanently etched on his features, and Duncan worried that the man he had come to admire for his intelligence and compassion would now endure only as a hollow shell of his former self. The night before, Duncan had awakened to the smell of smoke and found Hayes in the kitchen, his beard gone. He had revived the fire in the large hearth and was feeding his letters to Rebecca, carried for years as a sign of his devotion, into the flames.
“Voyageurs!” Will Sterret exclaimed from behind them now, not for the first time, as they passed a group of compact, bearded men in leather tunics who wore their
