Only what a stupid thing to say to a slave who was no longer her own person!

The girl smiled softly. It was hard to tell if she was happy or sad. “Truly, sometimes a person isn’t given a choice.”

Impulsively, Avisha reached toward her, but drew back before she touched the other girl’s arm because the gesture seemed so intrusive, so bold, so intimate. “Eiya! I shouldn’t chatter so much. That’s what Nallo says.”

“I don’t mind your chatter. I like it. You remind me a little of my sister. Maybe it’s only that we’re of an age.”

“I was born in the Year of the Ox.”

“Why, so was I! Who is Nallo?”

“My father’s wife.”

“She’s not your mother?”

Avisha looked at Zi, sprawled on the shawl and snoring with toddler snuffles in the blessed shade. “My mother is dead. My father remarried soon after. That’s Nallo.”

“A second wife! Is she kind to you, or awful?”

“She’s got a murderous temper, and she slapped me once! But then Father got angry at her, and he never loses his temper, so she apologized and she never did it again. How I wish she was here. She’s very tough-minded. Nothing scares her.”

“Where is she?”

“They took her to the reeve hall. They said she was chosen by an eagle and she has to be a reeve even though she doesn’t want to be one.”

“Is that how it goes? You get chosen by an eagle? Even women?”

“Of course even women,” said Avisha. Really, out-landers were so ignorant! “If an eagle chooses you, then you have to be a reeve. Isn’t it that way where you come from?”

“We don’t have reeves where I come from. Although I suppose that’s not true anymore. I come from here, now.” The girl’s expression brightened momentarily, then darkened as she recalled a bitter thought. She sighed heavily. “Hu! Enough of feeling sorry for myself. What of your father, then? Where is he?”

It was like being slapped in the face.

“My father’s dead, isn’t he?” Avisha snapped.

The girl flinched, and the echo of the words—not the sound but the ugly anger in her own voice—made Avisha cringe with the vivid memory of the ruined village, the swarming flies, the sweet stink of rotting flesh, and the acrid stench of burned houses. Of the way the mellow green cloth of her father’s jacket and trousers had rucked up around his corpse. She mustn’t bring that anger with her now, or she’d never save herself and the children. She heaved in breaths, shaking.

The outlander draped an arm around her shoulders. “You’re safe here.”

“How can we be safe?” Avisha sobbed into her hands. She’d hammered it in for so many days. “We’ve no close kin. We owe rent to the landlady, so she wants to sell our labor, so we’d have to become slaves. All I can hope for is that some outlander I don’t know might want to marry me because people say I’m pretty, and that counts for something, although you must wonder what I’m frothing on about thinking too well of myself since I must look like a field hen with my feathers all everyway for I haven’t had a bath in days and our clothes must be stinking, and all torn besides. And I have the little ones and I can’t just let them go. I wouldn’t anyway, and it would be a terrible dishonor to my father’s memory to sell their labor just to save myself. Now what will we do? Who will want us all? Why would anyone agree to take us in?”