Sleep and rest had never come easily to Rose.  Not since she could remember, that was.  Perhaps at some time before the empty, black stretch in her imagination where the memories of her life before joining Willam’s troupe had been a time where she could pass the night away without dream-terrors, but such a time was at best hypothetical in the face of her difficulties.<br/><br/>Wine would bring sleep without dreams, but should she take too much she would answer for it in the morning.  Too little, and she would find the dreams waiting for her on the far side of midnight.  And if they should come upon her before the morning came, Rosabella would toss and turn, call out, even scream wordless invectives in the face of whatever torments lurked in her sleep.<br/><br/>Some wise women in towns and villages past had suggested various herbs and poultices, folk charms or rituals that she could use to banish her demons, and she had tried most of them.  None had helped, some had hurt, but like a man in whose breast beat the heart of the eternal optimist, she had gone back time and time again to search for a new cut of root, a new pressed oil, a new seed pulp that could help her.<br/><br/>Most of the time, she gauged her intake correctly, as she had the night that Willam told her that they would be wintering in her native country.  She slept in past dawn, a luxury she only enjoyed when the troupe was not at travel.  Thorne had not come to the bedroom, a fact Rose noted with a glance at the unruffled sheets along her side.  It made her wonder what other ways the dark-skinned beauty found to pass the time, which was enough to send a maddening tickle through her center as errant thoughts and images crossed her mind’s eye.<br/><br/>“Oh you’re a wool-headed cloud-dancer,” she told herself as she rolled out of bed.  It and other choice comments regarding her attention span had spilled forth from Willam’s lips in the past, given her habit of being so easily drawn into fanciful imaginings.  Early on, it had been wondered if she was simple, for she could stare into a cup of water for hours at a time, or be snatched away into a private world of sensation by the feel of sun on her face or the touch of moss beneath her fingers, giving no notice or heed to the outside world until forcibly retrieved.  That she might have been feytouched was a similar concern that went unspoken any time she had given her caretakers cause to whisper about her at the worst of times.  But such times had grown fewer as she had grown up, and if she was not quite normal, at least neither was she as dreamy as she had been.<br/><br/>Her breakfast was a heel of bread and dab of butter, cold slice of beef and wine watered so much it would have been kinder to leave the wine out altogether, and she ate quickly and without pleasure.  She must have been the last of the group to rise, for only the innkeeper and the boy were downstairs, the chairs upon the tables and floor newly swept.  She did not actually have any duties that she could recall at the moment, and so set out from the inn without a care or plan for where her feet would take her.<br/><br/>In deference to the weather, she threw over her shoulders a cloak of thick green wool, but her style of colorful, flowing skirts and blouses would not be concealed entirely by such plain conceit.  She had a skip to her walk as she wandered Arges, feeling the brisk cool breeze on her cheeks and the promise of a fresh new day upon her shoulders.