As for himself, Mags had eaten dead crows, dead sparrows—even a dead cat, once . . . it was almost second nature to think of any beast only as a potential meal.

Which, he knew in the next moment, would have been a terrible, and very hurtful thing to say. You didn’t stroke the fur of your dinner the way this girl was petting the dead rabbit. And you certainly didn’t weep over it the way she was doing. And now, here, he found himself thinking of one of the other kiddies, a creature of indeterminate gender that had attached itself to one of the barn cats, and the cat to it. The Pieterses did not have “pets” as such—every animal in their lives was either food or a beast of some use. But the child and the cat had been almost inseparable until the child took ill the past winter and died. And the cat had vanished.

He coughed slightly to alert her to his presence. She looked up, huge brown eyes bloodshot, tears pouring down her delicate face, and that was when he noticed that she was wearing the rust-red uniform of a Bardic Trainee, and he felt some of Dallen’s anxiety ease. “Hey,” he said awkwardly. “I heard ye. Ye maybe should go inside. Yer gonna get cold out here like this—”

She stared at him blankly, then sobbed. “He’s dead! I went back to my room to feed him, and he’s dead!” Anything more she might have said was lost in the torrent of sobs that followed.

Awkwardly, Mags sat down on a garden seat opposite her. “They don’ live very long,” he suggested. “Mebbe ’twas his time—” Not the most tactful of things to say, perhaps, but at least it didn’t cause her to cry harder.

“He wasn’t very old!” she sobbed, stroking the rabbit’s brown fur. “He was only four!” Mags grimaced. He really didn’t think rabbits lived much longer than that; certainly that seemed to be about the average life for a cat around the Pieterses’ mine, and cats were about the same size as rabbits. But the young girl wasn’t done. “M-m-my best friend Kaley gave him to me; she found a nest a-a-and gave Bumper to me to k-k-keep me c-c-company.”

Mags furrowed his brows. “Keep ye company? Why?”

“Everyone at h-home is always so b-busy,” she replied, head down, voice muffled. “Kaley had to go to w-work at the inn, s-so she didn’t have t-time anymore.” The girl looked up at him for just a moment, then back down again, flushing, and broke into sobs again.

Mags was freezing, but gamely remained. “I don’t know anyone here,” the girl said forlornly. “And I-I-I am not really good at meeting people.”

Mags contemplated the irony of that statement, given that he was so bad at meeting people he could just as well have been invisible.