“That being so,” snapped Agnes, “why are you not covered with weeping sores and white scales? Why hasn’t your nose fallen off?” Her face got red, and she began to cry.

“Enough!” said Aunt Bel. “I’ll not come walking into the village with the pair of you snarling like dogs fighting over a bone! For shame!”

“It’s a long way to walk,” said Artald. “From the border with Salia all the way up to here. Days and days walking, a month maybe. They must have been right desperate to leave their home.”

“They looked desperate to me,” said Stancy. “Poor creatures. Who knows how many they started with and how many lost along the way. It’s the fault of those Eika raiders.”

“Mayhap not,” said Henri, “for it seemed to me there was peace in Medemelacha, and order, too. I saw no beggars on those streets.”

“Driven out or murdered,” suggested Aunt Bel, “so as not to bother them who didn’t wish to share. Who stole all good things for themselves.”

“Perhaps,” said Henri, “but I saw Eika and human folk working side by side. None of them looked like they were starving. I don’t know. What do you think, Alain?”

Alain had been staring at the clouds, wondering if the light had changed, heralding a change in the dense layer and perhaps promising sunshine. The talk had flowed past him, although he heard it all. “War brings hunger in its wake. What is this now, these clouds, these sickly fields, this fear and these portents, if not echoes of an ancient war?”

“It’s God’s will if the sun don’t shine, or the rains don’t fall,” said Artald. “So Deacon teaches.”

“That storm last autumn was not made by God,” said Alain. “That was made by human hands, in ancient days.”

They looked at him, as they always did, as if they did not know if he were a madman or a prophet, and then looked at each other and away again, at the trees, at the clouds, at the startling appearance of a robin hopping along the ground under the skeletal branches of an oak.

“Look there!” cried Stancy. “Look at that!”

“Mayhap spring will come after all,” said Henri.

The others kept walking, but Alain halted and with a gesture commanded the hounds to move away down the road. Blanche hovered beside him as he moved slowly forward until he was close enough to kneel and stretch out his hand. He breathed, finding the rhythm of the wind in the weeds and the respiration of the tree. The bird hopped toward him, then onto his palm, turning its head to stare at him first with the right eye, then the left. That gaze was black and bright, touched with a shine.

“Come quietly and slowly, Blanche, and kneel beside me. No fast movements.”

Scarcely breathing, she crouched next to him and held out her hand. After a moment, the robin hopped onto her fingers, gave her that same piercing examination, and abruptly spread its wings and flew away.