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"No!" Jy
"Jy
But she fought her way free and fell from the saddle, landing hard on the dirt just beside her mother's body. She scrambled to her feet and ran toward the house.
"Stay out of there!" T'Kaar shouted after her.
She didn't stop. Instead she climbed the stairs and made her way to her room. Most of the house was in shambles. But her room remained relatively undamaged and she dove onto her bed and began to sob, clutching her blanket to her face. After several minutes she heard a footstep at her door. S'Doryn. She expected him to tell her that she had to leave. Instead, he tossed an empty carry sack onto the bed next to her.
"Anything you want to keep you should put in there. I don't expect you'll want to come back again."
"Thank you."
"T'Noth and T'Kaar are going to have a look around the rest of the village. I can stay with you if you like."
"No, it's all right."
"Then, we'll come back for you soon." He glanced around briefly. "This is a nice room. We'll have to make certain that your room in Lowna is just as nice."
He left her, and Jy
When the men returned, they had five survivors with them. All of them were children-boys and girls she knew and had played with at the sanctuary, in between lessons. Two of them were badly burned and one had lost a hand. But they were alive, just like her.
Of the two who were unhurt, one was a boy her age, named Etan, and the other was a younger girl whose name Jy
Etan sat on one of the Fal'Borna horses, looking terribly small, and he watched as Jy
"How did you find them?" the boy asked suddenly. "The Fal'Borna, I mean."
She paused and looked up at him, shielding her eyes against the sun. "My father sent me for help. He told me to follow the lake north to Lowna."
He looked over at S'Doryn and T'Noth, who were speaking quietly. "And now we're going to live with them."
"Yes."
"Do you think they'll let us be Y'Qatt?"
She shrugged. "I don't know. Do you want to be Y'Qatt?"
He didn't answer and a moment later S'Doryn called Jy
"It's only children who survived," she said, as he climbed up behind her. "Why is that?"
"I don't know, Jy
"But does that mean it wasn't the pestilence?"
"I'm not certain what it means."
They started riding out of the village. From what she had overheard of S'Doryn's conversation with the brothers, it seemed that they were going to stay in the low hills west of the lake until they were allowed to return to the Fal'Borna village.
"Is there anything else you can tell me about what happened yesterday, Jy
"Well, there was the old woman."
He looked down at her. "What old woman?"
"I saw her…" She was reluctant to mention her secret spot, until she realized with a pang of regret that she probably wouldn't ever be going back to it. "I met her in a dale near the village. She was working on some baskets to trade in the marketplace."
"And did she seem at all ill?"
"No, she was fine."
He frowned and faced forward again. "Still, she might have gotten sick later. She was Qirsi, right?"
"No. She was Mettai."
"Mettai?" He sighed and shook his head. "That's blood magic. If this is a strain of the pestilence that strikes at Qirsi magic, it probably wouldn't have come from her."
Again they fell silent, until Jy
"Did you bring it with you?"
She shook her head. "No. I was afraid it would remind me of yesterday. But now I wish I had."
Chapter 10
Dreaming Moon, second day of the waxing, 1147.
It's been more than half a turn since Licaldi appeared in our village, and I despair of knowing little more about her today than I did that first su
She seems contented to follow me around day after day, as I attend to my duties as eldest and do all that I must to keep my house-our house-clean and the garden growing. I remain concerned for her and I try to remind myself each day that she has another home, perhaps a family who are searching desperately for her as I write this. Still, I have to admit that I enjoy having her with me. I've become quite fond of her for though she doesn't speak of anything that happened to her before she came to Kirayde-and in fact seems to take great care in avoiding any mention of her past-she speaks at length of other matters, offering her observations on the workings of our marketplace, on the ease with which I use magic (she has expressed admiration for my skill as a sorceress, and I have to admit that I'm flattered), and on the various people she's encountered in my company. Through all of this, she shown herself to be quite clever and possessed of a sharp wit. She laughs freely and at times strikes me as being a fine, normal young girl.
But then a shadow falls over her eyes, or a remark slips out that seems to hint at her former life, and the light I see in her is extinguished as swiftly as a candle in a sudden wind. If I pursue these matters with questions, she withdraws, grows silent, even sullen, as if by asking I have committed some breach of trust. At these times it doesn't matter what tone of voice I use, gentle or hard: Licaldi remains reticent. And my frustration grows.
I sense that she is aware of my feelings. And here I mean far more than the obvious. Of course she knows how eager I am to know more about her- my questions, which I've repeated probably dozens of times, can leave little doubt as to that. But I think she knows as well that I've grown attached to her that in many ways she has rescued me from a life that was a good deal emptier than I ever realized. For too long I've lived without companionship, without love. I was starved for it, though I never knew it. Licaldi did, though. I'm just as certain of that as I am of the fact that she has seen horrors beyond my imagining. I'm not so foolish as to think that she chose this village for that reason, or even that she contrived in some way to end up with me. That was the will of the gods, who may well have marked us for one another long ago.