You risk it and flag the cart

You walk.

Not fast enough to make the dress climb, not slow enough to look like you are waiting to be collected. One hand stays on the hem. The other hangs because you need it if you fall. The road is packed dirt and last light, and the cart-bell comes on steadily from the west, then closer, then you can hear the mule as well as the bell.

You step into the middle of the track when you can see the shape of it and you raise your arm.

It stops.

A man sits the bench with the reins in one hand and a cap pushed back. Older than you look now. Not old. Sleeves rolled. He looks at your cleavage first, then at the bare feet, then your face, and he does not pretend he did not do it in that order.

"You flagging or crossing?"

"West," you say, and it is still Lenna's voice. "Town. I can walk if you don't—"

"Get on before something else does." He jerks his chin at the board behind him. "Not in the crate. That's sealed. Sit up here or sit on the tail. Tail's cleaner if you don't want me looking down your dress the whole hour."

You take the bench because the tail means anyone coming the other way sees the hem first. The board is rough. When you sit, the rag rides up anyway and you clamp your thighs and pull it once. He pretends to check the mule. He does not look away as well as he thinks.

The cart starts. The village lamps fall behind the third bend and the ditch-grass sound do not follow.

"Name," he says, after the road has gone to trees on both sides.

"Charlie."

He snorts like that is a man's name on a woman's chest and does not fight you for it.

"Hal. This load is for Wellmark. You hear of it?"

"West. An hour. Walls. People who write names."

"That's the place." He flicks the reins. "You came off a village wall."

It is not a question. You can still feel the cap when the cart hits a rut.

You shudder involuntarily. "yes, not that I planned to" you say.

"Then don't stand by the well in town after the evening bell if you've got no house mark and no paper. Clerk there will put you in a hole that makes Lenna's look like a fence. You look like a woman with no tag. They treat that as common."

You keep your eyes on the road. The dress is doing nothing to hide how the cart-bounce moves your chest. You hitch the neckline. It falls again.

"I don't have coin."

"Didn't think you did." He reaches under the bench without looking and puts a heel of bread in your lap, a bit dry, a bit of rind still on it. "Eat that. Bent Nail will take work if Marr is in a mood. Tray, slop, upstairs if you're stupid after the bell. Don't sleep in the dirt on Green Road. Road charges for that and I am not scraping vines off a stranger at dawn."

You eat. You did not know you were that hungry until the bread is in your mouth. Crumbs go down the front of the dress and lodge in the cleavage and you have to fish them out with two fingers while he watches the mule and also does not.

"Someone in town makes clothes?" you ask, because Lenna put that in your head and it has been sitting there the whole walk. "Or faces. I put a woman's clothes on and I—"

You stop. You do not have a sentence that does not sound mad.

Hal glances at your face, then at the stained hem.

"There's a stall by the well. Copper on a stone, hand on the stone, it spits a word. Folk use it when they think they've been cursed. Costs more than bread. Needle Row will sell you new cloth that has never been worn if you can pay like a house. Looks like that isn't an option. Worn bins are cheap and they carry through whoever sweated in them." He shrugs one shoulder. "I haul bolts. I don't haul answers."

The trees thin. Lamps come up ahead, real ones, not cottage shutters. A gate of sorts: two posts, a man with a spear who is mostly bored, a painted board you cannot read from here. Beyond it the street is narrow and alive in a low way — ale, a hammer still going, a woman laughing too loud. You can smell milk and soap and stone that has had people on it all day.

Hal slows the mule.

"I drop this crate at Needle Row in the morning. Tonight I sleep at the Nail if Marr has a bench. You want off at the gate, get off. You want the inn, you can walk behind the cart and I will not charge you. I will also not fight Marr for your room."

The bored spear-man is already looking at your dress. At the stains. At the fact that you have no shoes. Behind him, further in, there is a well-square and a long civic wall with a row of ports in it, lamps hung over the holes on purpose. One port already has a woman in it: ass and hands on the street side, the rest of her gone into the stone. The street does not wait for you. It is already using someone.

Hal sets the brake.

"Gate or the Nail," he says. "I am not sitting here while you think with your chest out. Pick."

The bread is gone. The rag is still hers. You are still Lenna from the outside, Charlie in the panic, and Wellmark is the stones under the mule's hooves.