years that bought you my services. No. These buns were fresh this morning. Eat one, don't pick at them. It wasn't money. I did that for Reby's big blue eyes, that you've made all blue and white, and I did them for the hunger and pain I saw in the boy's eyes when I found him.'
Rebeke shifted on the stool, setting aside the bun he had pushed into her hand. 'What does it matter?' she asked him gruffly. 'You found them.'
'It matters to me,' Mickle insisted. He looked at her long and expectantly, waiting for a reply, a sign. None came. Rebeke merely looked at him gravely over her mug's rim. 'What do you plan to do with them?' demanded Mickle suddenly.
Rebeke set down her mug. 'I plan to send them home. I can't go into it, Mickle, not in detail, but I have to put things back as they were before.' 'Nothing can go back as it was before,' he warned her. This time when he sighed he seemed to crumple, his shoulders drooping low as with a weight. 'Reby,' he asked softly. 'Reby, how do I even know it's you? What have you left of yourself for me to recognize and love? When you vanished it near killed me, and that Dresh boy like to go mad. Turned him bad, some say, though I don't know what he became or where he went. Reby, why did you do it?'
'Care for them.' The gold pieces made a heavy chink as she set them together upon the table. 'And hire a servant for yourself, Mickle. This place wants looking after. You should treat yourself better.'
'Why did you come back, if only to leave again?' Mickle asked, but he asked it of the clattering doorslats. Dawn light spattered briefly onto his floor, fading as softly as his tears.
FOURTEEN
'What do you make of it?' Vandien asked the black warhorse that plodded easily beside the wagon. The horse snorted. His ears were pitched forward and Vandien saw a sudden tension shiver across his muscles. Giving an anxious whicker, he broke into a trot. The greys tried to copy him, but Vandien held them in. He peered forward through the dusk to where some bulky object had been dumped squarely in the middle of the road. The black horse was snuffling at it when he reached it, and Vandien took the wagon around it in a swerve. First team and then wagon left the smooth roadbed for the deep turf with a sway and a jounce. Vandien pulled them in sharply as he realized what he was passing.
It was not Ki. As he knelt over the body, he was torn between relief that she was not dead in the road, and vexation that he had not caught up with her. Surprise had made him recoil from the strange body when he first touched it. But now he bent to look closer. A Brurjan. Starved to death, by the look of her. The softly expelled breath of the creature before him sent a shudder through him. His common sense urged him to back softly away, remount the wagon and continue his search for Ki. A starved Brurjan was no business of his; wise Humans did not intrude themselves on Brurjan affairs. He drew softly away from her. She twitched, swallowing with a gulping noise. Unwillingly he paused to watch as she moved her blackened lips and crinkled her eyelids in an effort to pry them open. Then he sprinted back to the wagon to fetch the waterskin.
Her large head filled his lap. The quills of her crest rattled dryly when he raised her shoulders. Gingerly he pried open her jaws to bare her razor teeth clenched in a death mask. One sudden chop of those jaws! Vandien silenced the thought and trickled a little water between her teeth. It vanished, some leaking out the corners of her mouth. Her thick tongue moved behind her teeth, but the rest of her remained still. It was too late for her. Suddenly she choked, sending a spray of water into his face. He supported her shoulders as she struggled to clear her throat. She was feebler than he had imagined a Brurjan could be. His only prior attempt to match strength with one had proved that one didn't need to open a tavern door to leave by it. He had breathed softly around cracked ribs after that meeting. But this one was also thinner than he had ever seen a Brurjan, and the more he looked into her wasted face, the more subtly wrong it appeared.
Thin as she was, she was too large a limp body for him to drag into the cuddy with any sort of gentleness. So he covered her and pillowed her where she lay upon the road. She didn't move again, but her breathing seemed steadier. And each time he poured water into her, she resisted him a bit more. The black horse hung over her like a ponderous guardian as he went about making a simple camp. Vandien guessed she was the mysterious rider, and the gear in the back of the wagon was hers. But how it hadcome to be there, and where Ki was now, were questions still to be answered.
Fire, Vandien found, was damned hard to make here. For one thing, he could find no tinder. If any sort of bush had ever dropped a branch near the road, then someone had eaten it. There wasn't a dry twig to be found, nor even a bush that smelled resinous enough to kindle. Vandien in desperation took the dried meat out of its storage box and wrapped it in a clean cloth. The box became firewood. Then he struggled long before he could persuade sparks to jump from his flint and kindle the box shavings. When the fire did burn, it did so grudgingly, giving out little light and less heat. Vandien coaxed a pan of water to a fickle boil and warmed in it bits of dried meat and finely chopped roots, hanging over it impatiently as the stew simmered. A mug of tea he brewed for himself, taking a sort of strength from its warmth, trying to resign himself to the delay. The greys, freed from harness, cropped grass beside the road.
At last the stew was ready. With a thick wooden spoon he stirred and mashed until it was a lumpy gruel. He let the pot sit on the ground and cool a bit while he gathered his courage and energies. He thought longingly of sleep, then took up his stew pot and closed in on the Brurjan resolutely. He set the pot on the ground and sat down close beside her, propping her head and shoulders against him so she would not choke. 'Eat,' he told her softly, wondering if she was alive enough to hear.
Her lips parted stickily. 'No,' she groaned.
'It will make you feel better. Try. Here.'
A feeble flop of her arm knocked the spoon from his grasp. 'No.' It was a growl now. 'Let me die as I am. You have filled my mouth with water gone bad, and I can smell what you would give me now. Stewed flesh. Gah.'
Vandien retrieved the spoon from the grass and sniffed at the pot. Nothing smelled spoiled to him. He knew Brurjans ate meat; she was raving, or he had heard her wrong. He brought the spoon to her mouth again.
Her teeth snapped, taking off the wooden bowl of the spoon. He thought it a dying reflex, until she spat it out at him. She broke her crusted eyes open to glare at him balefully through the slits. 'Leave me to die in peace!' she gasped. 'If I cannot come to the Limbreth, at least let me know I died trying. Ki shall carry my name to them.'
'What of Ki?' Vandien demanded, but with a last glare she shut her eyes and would say no more.
While he was not a patient man, he was seldom moved to violence against the helpless. But not only his logic but his curiosity had been strained to their limits, and impulsively he acted. He lowered her head to the ground and rose to stand over her. He flipped the spoon handle off into the darkness as he measured her, then took a breath and stepped across her prone form to straddle her body. She was big, and she didn't seem as weak as when he had poured the water into her. Maybe that had done her some good, though it would make his task harder now. Her eyes were sunken deep in her face and her flesh stretched over her bones in planes and angles. Well, live or die, he told himself and her. He dropped a knee neatly on each of her shoulders, pinning her to the earth.
Her huge jaws opened, the double row of teeth far too close to his flesh, but Vandien was ready and he set the edge of the bowl atop her lower teeth and tipped it. She closed her jaws with a snap, but the bowl was wedged in her mouth and Vandien had the leverage.
'Drink or choke, dammit!' he heard himself roar. She chose choking, and soup spattered them both; buthe was adamant. He tipped the bowl up higher, and it was only when he saw the bottom of it that he released his grip on it and sprang clear of her.
Her arms, no longer pinned at her sides, came up at him in claws. Her eyes blazed red as she rolled onto her belly and tried to come after him. But she got no farther than her hands and knees before falling again. She spat at him and then sank down, gagging and gasping. 'Bastard!' she hissed at him. 'Nameless whelp of toothless parents! Bird bait!'
'Glad to see you're feeling better.' Vandien brushed stew from his shirt front. For one so weak, her spitting accuracy was remarkable. He squatted down a cautious distance from her. 'Where's Ki?'
