There was nothing save for a glint of distant firelight on her tumbled hair to show that a woman lay there, for the slim leg from which the muffling folds of her cloak had fallen back showed cross-gartered breeks. She had taken to her boy’s riding dress long ago, for the great warmth. Her cheek was cuddled against Pharic’s shoulder, and there was a certain likeness between them that was not there when both were awake.
I stretched until the muscles cracked behind my shoulders, trying to draw a little strength into myself. My belly felt weak, and my head swam so that it was as though the whole mess hall lifted and fell gently under my feet like a galley in a quiet sea. I doddered down the hall, picking my way among the sleepers, but in the light of the fire that threw enormous shadows under their sunken cheekbones and pinched noses and brows, they had the gaunt set jaws and sunken eye sockets of those already dead. The famished shadow that had been Cabal stalked at my heels. So far he had escaped the death draw, but his turn must come soon. . . . I opened the door, and thrusting it gently to behind me, went out past the two wretched ponies into the night.
After the crowded mess hall (not so crowded as it had been, though) that stank like a fox’s earth, the smell of the thaw struck at me keen and chill as the blade of a knife; there were no stars, and despite the snow it was very dark, with the kind of breathy darkness that makes one aware of the world as a living thing.
In places, where our feet passed most often, the snow had become black slush, but it still lay unblemished over the shallow mound where the woman of the Dark People lay beneath the bones of nine war-horses. She had protected us well from the Saxon kind, I thought, but even she was powerless against the White Beast. I made my usual round longer than usual, but when it was finished I knew that I still could not go back and lie down again beside Guenhumara.
On an impulse, I turned in through the entrance to the Praetorium, and crossed the narrow courtyard to the quarters that I had shared with her, and went into the small chamber that had been my sleeping cell before she came and was now my armory and office. I felt for the lantern on the roof beam, took it down, and opening it, felt inside. There was about half the candle left, and when that was burned out, there would be no more. We had eaten the small amount of tallow that was saved from the fire. Well, soon enough now, we should have no more need of candles. I struck flint and iron and got a light, and then, with the lantern, wandered through into the bigger chamber that was Guenhumara’s, and set it on the wicker chest against the wall; then stood looking about me, wondering why I had come, and what I should do now that I was here.
The chamber had a lived-in look that spoke vividly of Guenhumara, who still came here sometimes during the day. The soft beaver-skin rug on the piled rushes and bracken of the bed place still softly hollowed where her body had pressed it, a gold eardrop hanging half out of a painted wooden casket; even the faint scent of her seemed to hang on the cold air as though she had only that moment passed out through the door and left something of herself behind. I stooped and pulled a handful of rushes from the bed place. Somebody must cut the lengths for tomorrow’s draw; it made a good enough reason to myself for being there. I rummaged in the box of painted wood — there was a running deer on the lid — and found Guenhumara’s silver scissors among a tangle of small gear and woman’s things, huddled my cloak about me and settled down on the inevitable packsaddle to cut lengths of brown rush stem into my iron cap fetched from next door. Cabal crouched down beside me, his great gaunt head on my knee, and broke into the deep snoring throat-song that in him meant contentment in my company; and I broke off to pull his ears in the way that he loved, wondering what I should do with him if I drew the long straw tomorrow; then returned idly to my clipping.
The light of the lantern was beginning to sink, and the shadows gathered in the comers of the room; the dim blue and gold and russet saint in the embroidered hanging seemed to waver on the edge of living movement. I did not hear footsteps coming nearer through the thawing snow, but suddenly the door latch lifted, and as I looked up quickly, the door opened, and Guenhumara stood on the threshold.
I sprang up. “Guenhumara! What are you doing abroad in the dark of the night?”
“I came to look for you; you were gone so long, and I was afraid.” She came in and snibbed the door behind her, and stood with her back to it. All her bones stood out in the sinking lantern light, and the tendons in her neck stood out like cords, and her lips were chapped and flaked and bleeding, and my heart flew out to her like a bird out of the cage of my breast.
“I did not think you knew when I went out. I hoped you were asleep,” I said.
“I always know when you go out. What is it that you do here in the dark of the night?”
I looked at the work of my hands. “Ruin your scissors by cutting up lengths of rush with them.”
She came forward from the door, and looked into my battered helmet and then at me, and held her hand to Cabal. “More dogs tomorrow?”
I shook my head. “Na, tomorrow we draw lots of another kind.”
“What kind, then?” She sat down rigidly on the chest top.
And when I told her, she said, still looking into my helmet, “A straw for a life. . . . Every life in the garrison?”
“Not so many. A straw for each of the Companions, and only for such of the Companions as are within reason free of scurvy.”
“Has the gash in your shoulder healed up again since yesterday?” she asked after a moment, and I knew what she meant.
I said, “Within reason free. If we keep to those who have no taint at all, it is in my mind that there will be none to draw the straws, at all.”
“And so you also will draw?”