'Do you forget to whom you speak?' Rebeke asked sternly.
'No. And neither should you. I'm speaking to that street brat Reby, who's gone from being under my feet begging for a sweet cake to barging in here and filling up my bed with sick folk. Look what you've done to an honest baker and a pretty little maid. Here I am a disreputable man of leisure, and you a grotesque spectacle and skinny as a rail. You must be hungry. What can I fix for you?'
Rebeke surrendered with a chuckle. 'Tea. And save your good-old-days routine; neither one of us would go back. You've found them for me, Mickle, and I thank you. I know they'd be in good hands until I need them. But I warn you, not out of harshness, but to save your tender old heart. Do not get too attached to these waifs. When I need them, I must take them from you. So cherish them and heal their hearts, as always you had a knack for. But don't tie their lives too tightly to yours, lest your heart bleed when I tear them away.'
Mickle had bustled about as she spoke, poking up his hearth fire and clattering mugs and filling the kettle so carelessly that water spattered the floor. If he had heard one word, he gave no indication. 'It's heartless you've become, Rebeke,' he scolded her. 'Heartless. Oh, you may remember an old man who was kind to you when you had no one, and so you throw him coins, more than are good for him. But I should like to know what's become of my little miss with the big blue eyes in her thin little face? I grew you up to be a lovely thing, and just when I thought I had you settled with that lad ... what was his name? Grew up and became the herbalist's apprentice?'
'Dresh,' Rebeke breathed unwillingly.
'Just when I thought I could look forward to babies crawling after crumbs in my shop, what do you do? Disappear one day without a word. Time passes, and I think you're dead. Then money begins to come to me, but no words to go with it, just a tragic rumor. That you'd gone to the Windsingers, even though all know that the Windsingers prefer to steal babies to grow up their own way, and you near a woman grown. Then a few nights ago, you give me the turn of my life when I walk into my kitchen and find you here. Nearly gave up drinking on the spot. Well, missy, just you know this.' He poured tea into the heavy mugs and set one on the table before her. 'I've done as you bid me. The honey's in that pot. But let me tell you, it wasn't the money you've sent me all these 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.