Gaborn clung to the side of the slope of the millrace, hidden in tall grass. He watched the soldiers for two long minutes. They’d discovered their dead comrade, followed Gaborn’s and Rowan’s scent to the river’s edge.

Several men were looking downstream. Of course they expected him to go downstream, to swim past the giants, into the relative safety of the Dunnwood. It seemed the only sane thing for Gaborn to do. Now that he’d fled the castle, they wouldn’t expect him to sneak back in.

If they pursued him into the Dunnwood, they’d find his scent aplenty, for Gaborn had ridden through this morning.

But the fellow in splint mail was staring toward the mill, squinting. Gaborn was downwind from them. He didn’t think the man could smell him. Yet perhaps the man was just cautious.

Or perhaps he’d seen the ferrin above Gaborn, spotted movement. The ferrin was dark brown in color, standing before gray stone. Gaborn wanted it to move, so that the scout below would see the creature more clearly.

In his years in the House of Understanding, Gaborn had not bothered to study in the Room of Tongues. Beyond his own Rofehavanish he could speak only a smattering of Indhopalese. When he had a few more endowments of wit and could grasp such things more easily, he planned to make languages a further study.

Yet on cold nights during the winter, he’d frequented an alehouse with certain unsavory friends. One of them, a minor cutpurse, had trained a pair of ferrin to hunt for coins, which he exchanged for food. The ferrin could have gotten coins anywhere—lost coins dropped in the streets, stolen from shop floors, taken from dead men’s eyes in the tombs.

This friend had spoken a few words of ferrin, a very crude language composed of shrill whistles and growls. Gaborn had enough endowments of Voice that he could duplicate it.

He whistled now. “Food. Food. I give.”

Up above him, the ferrin turned, startled. “What? What?” the ferrin guard growled. “I hear you.” The word I-hear-you was often a request for the speaker to repeat himself. The ferrin tended to locate others of their kind by their whistling calls.

“Food. I give,” Gaborn whistled in a friendly tone. It was a full tenth of all the ferrin vocabulary that Gaborn could command.

From the woods above the mill, a dozen answering voices whistled. “I hear you. I hear you,” followed by phrases Gaborn didn’t understand. It might have been that these ferrin spoke another dialect, for many of their shrieks and growls sounded familiar. He thought he heard the word “Come!” repeated several times.

Then, suddenly, half a dozen ferrin were running around the paving stones of the mill house, coming down from the trees. More ferrin had been hiding up there than Gaborn had seen.