“She was alone when we found her,” Armun said. “Just her and a mastodon. The rest of the sammad killed by the murgu. She has been with us ever since. She has dreams that wake her at night.”

“Poor baby,” Merrith said, then passed Ysel back to her mother. “Do you know what sammad it was?”

“Sorli, sammad Sorli.”

Merrith gasped and clutched her hands to her breasts. “Then she is dead, my daughter is dead! She and her hunter, they went with sammad Sorli. Melde. Dead now, like her sister.”

When she heard this Armun went rigid, holding the baby so tightly that she began to wail. She controlled herself, caressed the infant until it stopped crying, until she could talk. Yet her voice still trembled when she did.

“At first Darras would not speak when we found her, could only cry. She had watched them all being killed. Later I could talk to her, she told me about it, how she had been alone in the forest. Told me her name. Darras. Told me her mother’s name as well.” Armun hesitated, then forced herself to speak. “She spoke her mother’s name. It was Melde.”

The two women looked at each other in shocked silence and it was Merrith who managed to speak first.

“Then this child—my granddaughter?”

“She must be. I must talk to her. She never told me, but she must know her father’s name.”

At first Darras did not know what was happening, could not understand it. Only when the relationship had been explained over and over again, often enough to make it clear to her, only then did the long-hidden tears come as she clung to her grandmother and wept.

“You will live with me,” Merrith said, “if that is what you want to do. If Armun says it will be all right.”

“She is your daughter’s daughter. She is yours now. You must put your tent close by so we can be together always.”

Her tears changed to laughter and Armun joined in and, after a little while, even Darras managed to smile through her tears.