This tairan’s jacket was of thick and white-grey fur, so bulky and dense that it reminded Yu of the downs on a chick. It was heavily stuffed, with a faint oily shimmer, like it had been treated. Not soaked through, Yu noticed. Noticeably damp but not ruined. At least partially water-resistant, then. Whoever had made it knew what they were doing.
Her trousers were a different thing. They were a strange hybrid of leather and cloth, the outer surface still cracked with frost. It looked like they had once been padded with some sort of wool, but the stuffing had shifted out of shape. Some parts were ripped out entirely, others were frozen into stiff clumps. As he worked, Bubs cut and probed them out. Whatever he got, he placed on the tray. The torn fabric resisted stubbornly, as Bubs worked his way around the mess, though that was probably less credit to the garment’s maker and more affirmation of general mianid weakness.
While Bubs worked, voices from the common room seeped into Yu’s awareness. Far distant, at first, then sharper, as he let them in.
“Only the ker and the selder are registered,” the krynn was saying. His voice was taut, the words stretched too thin, too measured to sound natural. “I am only a traveller.”
That last line. The insistence on neutrality. It pricked Yu’s nerves.
“So is Kel-Khadar, the borman,” the krynn added quickly. “We were born in these lands. We are free to roam.”
Yu knew that there was no standard on passes in most of the northern Midlands. Beyond the Barnstreams, record-keeping was patchwork at best, a sprawl of ledgers and half-kept birth registries. But in the settlements, it was different. With the issues around tairan ancestry, the Barnstreams had become meticulous in tracking the identity and lineage of individual people. Every birth, every union, every move from one settlement to another was recorded. Beyond that, the administrations tried hard to trace and sort the last three hundred years — at least within the settlements that were still tairan-held.
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