Slowly she crawled to the flap of the tent, where a crooked stick held the wool covering to one side. Warily she peeked out. The mist outside was thin and sunlight had trickled down to the forest floor, its noise muted to a dull clatter. She looked around for danger, but couldn’t seem to find any. There was a low fire burning some ten feet from the tent, its glowing embers surrounded by a circle of stones. A cookpot hung from a tripod arranged over the flames, and whatever was in it smelled good. Hunger stirred in her belly, and she wondered whether she dared take some of the food. Surely it would be all right. The priest and the rakh-woman would hardly rescue her and then not feed her, right? Especially since she was so very hungry.
She had just started toward the cookpot—timidly, like a skerrel braving open ground—when a footfall behind her set her heart pounding so hard against her rib cage that she could hardly breathe. She jumped up and was about to fun when a kindly voice said, “Easy, girl! The camp’s warded tight, and Tarrant says there’s nothing within miles to hurt you.”
She whirled around to find the priest behind her. He was half naked and dripping wet, and over one arm he carried a load of soaking wet cloth. “Give the stew a few minutes to cool so you don’t burn yourself. Here.” He came over to the fire and lifted up the pot by its hook, setting it aside on the stones to cool. She carefully kept her distance. “There’s a stream if you want to get clean,” he told her, nodding back the way he had come. He began to take the pieces of wet cloth from his arm and hang them on the tree branches surrounding the camp, so that the wind would dry them. One was a shirt, she saw, and an undershirt, a jacket, leggings . . . she watched while he laid out all his garments of the day before, except the woolen breeches that he was wearing. He kept those on for me, she realized. So that I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable. The thought quieted alarm bells that had been ringing in her head, and she relaxed a tiny bit. The priest must have seen it, for he grinned.
“Feeling better, are you?” He knelt by where the cookpot was and picked up a tin cup that was lying beside it. With a wooden spoon he began to ladle the hot stew into it. “I thought a good night’s sleep might do it for you. Here, try this.”
He handed her the cup. Her first instinct was to try to avoid coming in contact with him, but then she bit her lip and just reached out and tried not to worry about it. Her hand brushed against his as she took the warm metal cup from his grasp . . . and it was all right. He felt just as gentle as he sounded. She relaxed just a tiny bit more, and studied him as she blew on the hot stew to cool it.
He was a big man. Not merely tall, the way her father had been, but thick and solid. His face and arms were a leathery brown, but where his body had been protected by clothing it was a lighter shade, not unlike her own. Wet hair curled on his chest and arms, but not enough to obscure the half-dozen sizable scars that marked his barrel-like torso, or the multitudes more that had healed enough to become no more than faint ridges along his flesh. There was one particularly bad gash along his left arm, a ridge of angry pink that ran from his elbow halfway down to his wrist. He saw her looking at it and smiled. “That’s from the last expedition. Skin takes a long time to get its natural color back, you know.” There were parallel ridges along his rib cage on one side—claw marks?—and a welter of stripes across his back that she couldn’t begin to interpret. She was almost grateful that the Light wasn’t strong just then, because then she would have seen even more, and there would have been too much to make any sense of it. Best to take these things slowly, she thought.
He handed her a wooden spoon and she scooped up some of the cooling stew. The scent of cooking vegetables and some aromatic meat tingled her nose. “Hesseth went hunting,” he explained as she tasted it. Hot. Very hot. But, oh, it was so good . . .The heat and the smell of it blossomed within her as she ate; she felt more alive than she had since leaving home.
He rubbed his jaw as he sat down opposite her, somewhat self-consciously. “I guess they gave my razor to Calesta. Hope the bastard cuts himself with it.”
She shivered at the sound of the demon’s name. He was scooping some stew up for himself, and didn’t notice. Or so she thought.
“You all right?” he asked softly.
She managed to nod.
“Were you there very long? With the Terata, I mean.”
His voice was so very gentle. Like the rakh-woman’s touch. Hard and strong but infinitely tender.
“Three days. I think. I’m not sure.” Again she shivered, remembering. Following them through the forest. Trying to run when she realized what they really were. Driven forward at spearpoint . . .
“Easy,” he murmured. “That’s over now, Jenseny. You don’t have to go back there, ever.”
“I was so scared,” she whispered.
“Yeah. Truth to tell, so were we.” He spooned up some of the stew and tasted it. “Even Tarrant, I think. Though he puts on a damned good show.”
Tarrant. That was the third one in their group, the pale-skinned sorcerer. He didn’t like her at all. His gaze was like ice, and when he looked at her she could feel her very blood freeze up. But he was also fascinating, in the way that dead things could be both terrible and fascinating. She remembered an animal she had found in the forest, the first day after she had left her father’s keep. It was a small thing, golden and furry, and it must have been killed in a territorial fight because although its neck was torn up it hadn’t been eaten, just left there for the scavengers to find. When she had come across it, the body was still warm, and the blood-spattered eyes were closed as if in sleep. She remembered putting her hand on it, driven by a terrible fascination, feeling its warmth like the heat of a living thing. For long moments she knelt there, her hand on its tiny body, waiting. For a heartbeat, maybe. An intake of breath. Anything. It seemed incredible that anything which felt so alive could be so utterly dead. So perfectly silent.
Tarrant was like that, she thought.
The priest had gotten himself a portion of the stew as well—his own tin cup was battered and bent, and had clearly seen better days—and he ate in easy silence, glancing at her occasionally but never looking at her for so long that she felt uncomfortable. She found that she was able to relax a little, for the first time since leaving home. This man wasn’t going to hurt her, and certainly the rakh-woman wouldn’t. Tarrant, now . . . that was another story. But Tarrant wasn’t here. She drank in the sunlight and the safety and the warm fullness of her meal with a grateful heart, while the knots in her soul slowly began to untangle.
The next time the priest looked at her—kind, his eyes were so kind, it was hard to imagine a man like that killing anything—she nodded toward the tent. “Doesn’t she want breakfast, too?”
The priest smiled, and took a deep drink from a cup by the fire. “It’s her sleep time now.”
“Don’t you sleep at the same time?”
“Not while we’re traveling. This way one of us is always awake, in case there’s trouble. She’ll have her turn later.”
“Why don’t you sleep at night?” she asked. Night was only a vague concept to her—in her rooms at home lamps might be lit at any hour, and all night meant was that her father was more likely to come—but now she had seen the sunlight and the twilight and midnight’s darkness, and was struggling to sort them out into some kind of order. “Don’t most people do that?”