‘But what was he doing there in the first place?’ demanded Kindly.
‘Waiting for Lily and me, of course. Ironic, isn’t it? He was there for the same reason his murderers were — albeit they were only after Lily, of course, since they didn’t know anything about me. But that’s how I know he wasn’t killed at the same time as Hare. He can’t have been. The Texcalans and the Otomies didn’t overhear Lily saying we were going to Hare’s house until after Hare was dead.’ I looked expectantly at Lily.
‘It’s true,’ she said quietly. She kept her eyes fixed on the ground in front of her. ‘I killed the merchant. I stabbed him in the back with that wooden spike.’
There was a long silence. The King broke it eventually. ‘Are you going to tell us why?’ he asked mildly.
‘Yaotl was right: I had been to Hare’s house before. It was on Eleven Wind.’ A quick calculation told me that had been the day before my auction. ‘I hadn’t arranged to meet him there — to be honest, I was hoping to find him out, so that I could have a look around. I wasn’t planning to steal anything,’ she added hastily, ‘but you’ve got to remember I had no idea what his message said. I thought if I could find it and find out what it said in advance, it might give me an advantage. At least I would be able to tell Mother of Light what she was buying.’
‘So what happened?’ I asked.
‘He wasn’t there. There wasn’t much in the house, just a few odds and ends, a sleeping mat and so on, and the big wicker chest. So I had a look in it. And — well, one thing led to another. I took a few things out of it to look at them and soon I had practically everything on the floor.’ She took a deep breath, but nothing more came, as though she were reluctant to go on.
Maize Ear cleared his throat loudly.
‘I’m sorry,’ Lily whispered. ‘It’s difficult… That was when Hare came back, while I was looking at his things, trying to work out whether any of them looked like a message or not.
I didn’t hear him. He came up behind me. He… There was a struggle. He got me on the floor. I kept screaming at him to stop. I was only looking, I had Mother of Light’s ring, but I don’t think he heard me. He’d been drinking. I could smell it on his breath. He was holding me down with one hand — he was stronger than he looked — and pulling at his breechcloth with the other.’
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Lily’s father looking sick.
‘Then all of a sudden there was someone else in the room.’
‘Little Hen,’ I suggested.
‘She must have pushed the box out of the way. She started screaming. She threw herself at Hare, waving this sharp piece of wood. He heard her in time, though, and he managed to get off me and knock the spike out of her hands. Then he…’ She took a deep breath which turned into a sob.
‘Go on,’ said Maize Ear grimly.
‘I didn’t have any choice! He was hitting her, while I was still on the floor, and then he had his hands around her neck. He was mad; he’d have killed her. So I picked up the spike and stabbed him. It was all I could do.’
She was crying now, shaking violently, with tears streaming uncontrollably down her cheeks, and even while my head was whirling with the facts of her story, the things I had begun dimly to guess at now playing themselves out vividly in my imagination, I thought that at last she had been able to speak about this. Some people carried such terrible secrets inside them throughout their fives, letting them gnaw away at them until they were close to death, when they could at last unburden themselves to the priests of Tlazolteotl, the Filth Goddess. I was relieved that perhaps this would not be Lily’s fate.
I felt an urge to put an arm around her and whisper some words of comfort, but to my astonishment her father got there first. It was the first time I had ever seen the old man show her the faintest sign of affection, but now he held her against him and crooned softly to her as he might have done when she was a little girl: ‘Never mind, love. Never mind. Have a good cry.’ Then, in a voice that was more like what I was used to from him, he muttered: ‘It’s not as if anyone gives a toss about Hare anyway!’
‘Let me see if I can guess what happened next,’ Hungry Child said. ‘You and the girl buried Hare under his chest. What happened to my ring?’
As Lily seemed beyond speech at the moment, I answered for her. ‘I think the girl just ran off, through the back of the house, because there was just one set of bloody footprints in the courtyard. Lily buried Hare by herself. Little Hen wouldn’t have been any help with that, anyway. As for the ring — Kindly found it hidden in the wall, by the doorpost. Lily took her time wedging it firmly in there, because for the moment she wasn’t sure what to do with it, and Hare’s empty house seemed the safest place in which to hide it. Remember she was planning to come back the next day,
