Tales of the Dragon's Bard, Volume 1: Eventide by Tracy Hickman, Laura Hickman

the deeper her bowed lips settled into a frown.
    Harv was better than the price he asked for his carpentry. He was truly a gifted craftsman, in Merinda’s opinion, but he never seemed to value his own work highly enough when it came to the coin of the realm. He thought of himself as a poor country carpenter, and, in the words Merinda found herself swallowing daily, that was why everyone else thought of him that way too. She knew he was better than that, but the prices he settled on for his work would keep them—keep her—in this little shop in the country forever without the recognition that her husband so rightly deserved.
    Harv loved her as dearly as she loved him. He had built the shop for her so that she could contribute to their income through her own considerable skills as a milliner. So it was that each winter he would make his trips to the neighboring towns and she would spend her lonely hours in the shop making hat after hat after hat in an ever-increasing inventory of haberdashery that anticipated the Spring Revels and her own high selling season.
    Queen Nance herself had ordained the Spring Revels throughout the kingdom as a celebration of the end of winter and the return of the growing season in the country. It was, perhaps, the one time of year when all the highborn folks of the larger cities like Mordale suddenly found the country in vogue. Mordale would become desolate as the wealthy, the powerful, and the fashionable would flee the city walls and inundate the countryside, making great pretense of “getting back to the old and simpler ways.” Playing at farming became the order of the day, and, Merinda reminded herself with every drop of glue and needle stitch, the purchasing and wearing of country hats was a practice led by the Princess Aerthia herself.
    It was with this object in mind that Merinda, as late in the fall as she dared, made her annual journey to Mordale. There she would stay at an inn whose reputation was tolerable and whose rates were within her careful budget. She then would spend her preciously counted days not in seeing the great castle there, or the cathedrals, or the tournament lists, but in visiting every hat and clothing shop possible in the city. She would come away with precious few purchases but a wealth of information regarding fashion trends and which designs would be most desired in the spring to come. Then she would make her way back to Eventide, draw up her order for materials from Charon’s Goods, and settle in for a winter filled with furious hat making—dreaming all the while that someday she would be presented at the great castle, be invited to the cathedrals, and be a popular figure in whose company others wished to be seen in the tournament lists.
    Her local trade was dedicated but few in numbers and consisted primarily of the ladies of Cobblestone Street, who came by with more of an object to talk and less to purchase hats. The men of the town found Merinda’s shop such a warren of femininity that they would cross its threshold only under the direst of circumstances—usually at the insistence of a young woman on their arm. Men of the town purchased their hats from the more sensible establishment of Charon’s Goods next door, even though when they ordered their hats from Mordechai Charon they fully knew that he would simply have his wife, Alicia, order them in turn to be made next door by Merinda Oakman.
    So it was a mystery that morning, as Merinda was working on a hat in her storefront, that she had spied three odd men and a centaur passing back and forth in front of her shop.
    They would pause for a time facing each other in front of the leaded glass panes of the display window and wildly gesture in animated conversation as the snow fell in a great blanket of large flakes about them. The youngest of the men—Jarod Klum, by the looks of him—would stare straight at Merinda through the window and then bolt off in one direction or another, followed closely by the