“You sit there. We got to collect a few things. Cup, you take this, and watch him.” The younger one nodded. “Oh, and in case that limp of his is just make-believe,” Sky said, “show him how you shoot.”
Cup unhitched a bow from off her back, and put an arrow to it. She turned in a slow circle, looking for a target. There was a knifestrike nest in a tree about a hundred yards away from us – last year’s, or the year before’s. Cup closed one eye, sighting on it, then let fly. The arrow went right through the middle of it.
“We’ll get that arrow back on the way out,” Sky said. “You watch him close, now. I know he looks like a long streak of piss, but he killed his friend back there, then tried to cook him and eat him. Stick him if he moves.”
“I didn’t do that!” I cried out, for them words was too much to bear. “That’s a lie!”
Sky give a kind of a smirk. “How’d he die then? Sliced his leg open, then burned off his own arm?” She turned back to Cup. “Watch him close,” she said again.
She and Mole went off towards the nearest houses. It seemed to me they was headed more or less to the place where I had left Mardew, but everything looked different to me now and I couldn’t be sure.
I sat down in the weeds with my splinted leg stuck out in front of me. Cup sit on a rock a little ways off. She took a knife from off her belt, left-handed. She still was holding the bow in her right.
“My name’s Koli,” I says.
She didn’t answer. Her face was all blank.
“From Mythen Rood.”
That didn’t get nothing neither. I thought I would try one more time, and then give it up. “Cup’s a funny name,” I says. “How’d you come by it?”
Cup give me a fierce look and jabbed the air with the knife. “You’d better shut up,” she said, “or I’ll stick you.”
“Sky said you could only do that if I tried to run.”
“She said if you moved. I just seen you move.”
“It’s true,” I said. “I did move.”
“Well, don’t you be doing it again!”
“I promise I won’t.”
She relaxed a mite now, having showed me she was fairly on top of my tricks, so I went about again to make friends with her. I done it with a mind on what might happen later if I tried to get away and was catched doing it. But I was also trying to get an idea of who these three was and where they come from.
“Cup,” I said, “I got to ask, for I’m sore puzzled. What happened to all the people here. I bet you know, don’t you?”
“They died,” Cup said. “Ages ago.”
“But there’s no bodies.”
“I don’t mean people come and killed them. Why, did you think it was us? Everyone always thinks it was us, but it wasn’t. Senlas says they died the best way there is. They just stopped being born.”
I tried to figure what that meant. I didn’t ask who Senlas was, not being sure I heard the name correct. “Stopped being born,” I said. “Like, with their babies not coming, or not thriving when they come?” For that was a trouble we had in Mythen Rood too, and was why we valued Ursala so much.
“Yeah. Like that.”
“Why is that the best way?”
“Dandrake! How stupid are you? All your kind is going to go down to death anyway. Our kind gets to ride in the wagon; yours don’t. So them that don’t get born at all has got it best.”
That give me to wonder a little. “Why, you’re the same kind I am,” I said. “There ain’t a spot of difference between—”
I didn’t get no further than that. Cup jumped up and come over to where I was in three quick strides. She shoved her knife into my chest, about an inch from where the DreamSleeve was tied. “Don’t say that!” she says, all fierce. “Don’t you say that! You see my face? You hear my name? I’m nothing like you, you dumb bastard! I’m gonna go up to glory, and get made again all out of Heaven stuff. You’re bound for Hell, and you’ll go there right now if you don’t shut up.”
I shut up. I didn’t even say I was sorry, for that knife had a wicked sharp point to it, and it was nearer my heart than I was