Ducking under the hut door, I yawned. I pondered whether she feared it would be clumsiness, my ignorance, or my magic powers would cause some damage.

Inside it was dim and warm from an iron brazier already fired. The bent boughs and stem of the blue fir impressed inward through the mud wall; a witch’s clutter was everywhere. Thick rugs lay over the floor. I sat there, and soon stretched out, lazy as a dog in the sun. A drowsy inclination came over me again to draw her down at my side, but I never stirred. I could hear the rumble of the sea turning in its chains, and smell the smoke of the sultry flames and the smoky scent of a woman’s body, and I needed no other charm to wile me asleep. She would be safe enough with me that night. Possibly too safe for her liking.

4

I woke when the sun, lifting above sea and cliff, had begun to stream in through the hut doorway. This pale midmorning light was like a beacon of danger to me. I came alert, raw to the memory of the hunt, the killing, the four who lived to dog me, sure they were on my track and close behind.

I rose at once, and clattered my head against a mummified lizard suspended from the low ceiling.

A copper pot was silkily bubbling on the brazier, giving off an aromatic herbal steam. Hwenit and her cat were gone. Outside, gulls were crying and the goats maaing faintly, but no other sounds.

Then a woman came in with the sun at the door, bearing a reed-woven mat, and on it a dish and a cup. She had come silently, but they were a silent people—comely, too, from the look of it. The stranger smiled and set the mat and the food before me on the rug.

“I am Hadlin,” she informed me. “By what name may I call you?”

The thought of the hunt on me, I answered, “Your witch calls me Mordrak.”

“Then so will I, if it will be agreeable,” said Hadlin, kind, sensible, and very sweet, as if she guessed me in some trouble.

The name Mordrak did well enough certainly. Its roots were in the black tribe’s word for ivory or white bone, but its construction suggested also their obsolete title for a warrior—the black people eschewed fighting, and I would come to learn they never slew even an animal save in self-defense. Their clothes were woven of reed flax and bartered wool, they ate no meat, not even the fish obligingly to hand in the ocean. The food in the dish was, I found after, a steak of beans and chestnuts, baked over the fire, tasty in its own way but curious at first. The drink was goat milk, though, at various seasons, they brewed and drank honey mead.

I sat down again to eat, thanking the woman called Hadlin. She turned to leave and murmured as she went, “Peyuan will seek you in a little while.”