Omeir rewraps the parcel with trembling hands and re-stores it inside the sack and studies the sleeping girl in the moon shadow. The bite mark on his hand throbs. Could she be a ghost made flesh again? Could the book she carries contain the magic of the old gods? But if her witchcraft were so powerful, why would she be alone, desperate enough to steal his partridge from his fire? Couldn’t she have simply turned him into a meal and eaten him? Turned all the sultan’s soldiers into beetles, for that matter, and stomped them dead?

Besides, he tries to reassure himself, Grandfather’s stories were just stories.

The night wanes and he longs to be home. In another hour the sun will rise over the mountain, and his mother will pick her way through the mossy boulders to fill the kettle at the creek. Grandfather will restart the fire, and the sun will send shadows quivering through the ravine, and Nida will sigh beneath her blanket, chasing one last dream. Omeir imagines climbing into the warmth beside his sister and twining his limbs with hers as they did when they were little, and when he wakes it is late morning and the girl has untied herself and she is holding her sack and standing over him, studying the gap in his upper lip.

After that he does not bother to bind her wrists. They move northwest along undulating plains, hurrying across open fields from copse to copse, the road to Edirne occasionally coming into view far to the northeast. The wound on the girl’s head no longer weeps and she seems to never tire, while Omeir has to rest every hour or so, fatigue sunk into his marrow, and sometimes as he walks he hears the creak of the wagons and the bellowing of animals, and senses Moonlight and Tree beside him, huge and docile beneath the beam of their yoke.

By their fourth morning together, they grow dangerously hungry. Even the girl stumbles every few steps and he knows they cannot go much farther without food. At midday he spies dust rising behind them and they crouch off the road in a little brake of thorns and wait.

First come two banner men, blades knocking against their saddles, the very image of conquerors returning. Then drivers with pack camels loaded with plunder: rolled carpets, bulging sacks, a torn Greek ensign. Behind the camels in loose double-file through the dust march twenty bound women and girls. One howls with grief while the others shuffle in silence, their hair uncovered, and their faces betray a wretchedness that makes Omeir look away.