El says, “Don’t you like Lord Thelan?”

The woman flushes. “He’s charming enough, and he’s almost as smart as our blessed lady. But he’s still a bastard, and she’s a proper heir, so don’t you forget it.”

“What difference does it make to me?” El asks, not angrily, but out of curiosity.

The chatelaine gives her a long look over. “You’re a strange one, that’s sure. Get on, now, go back to the pen. I feel that bad for your sister. She doesn’t deserve it, and they’ll treat her roughly. She’s still too young, for one thing, as anyone ought to know. And she’s got that fey look about her that makes men like him want to make her cry. And the other thing too, of course, such a cruel thing. But there’s nothing any of us can do about that.”

El doesn’t argue with her. In the chatelaine’s mind there is nothing she can do, so therefore it’s true there’s nothing she can do. If anyone is going to save Ao, it’s going to have to be El.

Inside the pen there’s a shed fitted with crude bunks. Ao is seated on a lower bunk, stroking the head of the older child who is maybe four or five and deeply, almost disturbingly, asleep.

She looks up as El comes in. “The poor mite has clean hair, El. Someone cared for this little child.”

“What about the baby?”

Ao shakes her head with a frown. “Those fools gave it too much sleep-bane.”

The baby is quite thin but, like the older child, it looks cared for, with a clean face and a little wrap of a tunic, into which someone has stitched the symbol of a flying dragon as a sigil of protection against the evils of the world. But the poor infant is dead, no longer breathing.

El picks up the body. “We don’t have anything to feed it anyway. Better the poor thing burns with its people.”

“I could have … traded myself, for goat’s milk,” says Ao in a whisper. “A few have offered already.”

El presses a knuckle into her sister’s head. “No! Nothing we can do for this one. But maybe we can help the other one along.”

“Maybe it would be better off dead too,” Ao mutters, but she keeps stroking the child’s head. “It’s got a cut on its foot that will go bad without treatment. Fetch me wound-seal from the garden. You know where.”