He told the story punctuated by the most basic of gestures, enough to suggest the tale’s outlines. As he spoke, she measured and she glued and she shaped, but he was not sure if she listened.

“Long ago, in the time of shadows, a bitter series of wars, feuds, and reprisals laid waste to the countryside and impoverished the lords and guildsmen and farmers and artisans of the Hundred. In the worst of days, an orphaned girl knelt at the shore of the lake sacred to the gods and prayed that peace might return to her land. . .”

The tale unfolded easily, but then, he had always found it easy to talk.

“. . . Now it so happened that the girl had walked as a mendicant in the service of the Lady of Beasts, and when the other gods departed, the Lady of Beasts remained behind.

“ ‘They are content,’ said the Lady of Beasts, ‘but I see with the sight of eagles and I listen with the heart of an ox. For this reason, I know that in the times to come the most beloved among the guardians will betray her companions.’

“ ‘Is there no hope, then, for the land and its people?’—”

He broke off, smiling humbly as he watched her hands.

At last he saw it take shape.

She was making a bow.

She looked up. The feverish gleam of those demon-blue eyes, touching his own gaze, startled him.

“A good bow demands patience,” she said, challenging his stare. “This one—” She touched the bow at her right hand. “—I’ll reflex on a form and store in a dry place for many months. Then maybe after two winters it will become a good bow. This other, if the glue sets properly and I give it more time, maybe it will serve until the other is properly cured. I’ll make a pair of simple bows from staves. But a cured bow is best if you want to reliably kill a man.”

He gaped, speech squeezed out of him by the force and content of her words. Her speech was fluid and easy although her vowels were clipped, very short, and she coughed certain consonants and slurred others. Had she known the language of the Hundred all along, or had it poured into her when her destiny enveloped her?

Telling neighed. Seeing raised her head to look upstream.

The girl rose, grabbing the captured bow and a handful of crude arrows, shafts with sharpened points. She pushed her cloak back over her shoulders, to leave her arms unencumbered. He stood, too, gripping his staff.

“What cursed use is it,” he muttered, “to wait so patiently, to spend these days in silence so the child wakens a little more—with such triumph!—only to be caught yet again by those hells-bitten criminals?” He was shaking, even angry, really just entirely twisted dry of the good humor he prized most of all as a Water-touched Blue Rat sworn to serve Ilu the Herald.