like the ones you meet here running shops. Gorgeous savages. Poets. Musicians.
“It was a mad life. It was wonderful, and stupid, and exhausting. We committed excesses you couldn’t begin to imagine. We starved, we wandered in the rain, we danced in our rags and picked flowers by the side of the highway. It was everything Festival is supposed to be, but with a soul, Smith!
“The Sunborn joined me to a Yendri man, and blessed our union in the name of racial harmony. I suppose I loved Hladderin well enough; greenies make reasonably good lovers, and he was drop-dead beautiful too. But I loved the Sunborn more.
“When Mogaron Spellmetal joined us, he suggested we all go live on his family’s land. Away we went, dancing and singing. I bore Hladderin a child … what can I say? He was a pretty baby. I was never the motherly type, but his father thought the world of him.
“He was just six months old the day House Spellmetal showed up with their army.”
“You don’t have to talk about this part, if it’s painful,” said Smith.
“I won’t talk about it. I still can’t… but during the fighting, a grenade blew out the back wall of the garden. And when it was over, I ran like mad through the break, and so did a lot of others. I looked back and saw Hladderin fall with one of those damned long black arrows through his throat. Right after him came Ramack carrying the blind girl, her name was Haisa, she’d been a special favorite of the Sunborn’s because he said she was a seeress. She was in labor at that very moment. Her baby picked that time of all times for its inauspicious birth!
“Ramack and Haisa got out alive, though. I waved to them, and Ramack spotted the ditch where I’d taken cover, and they joined me there. We managed to crawl away from the slaughter, and by nightfall we were safe. I don’t know what happened to the others.
“Haisa had her baby that night. It was a little girl.”
“Burnbright?” asked Smith. Mrs. Smith nodded.
“We hid in the wilderness for a couple of weeks, weeping and trying to think what to do. It was hard to get our brains engaged again, after all that long ecstatic time. Ramack decided at last that the best thing to do was to throw ourselves on the mercy of the authorities. We hadn’t heard yet about how Mogaron had died, you see, or his father’s blood oath, and since Ramack had never really been a believer in the Sun-born, he didn’t mind recanting. In the end he and Haisa went off to Karkateen and gave themselves up. You know what happened to them. At least the assassins missed the baby.”
“Why didn’t you go?” Smith asked.
“I wasn’t willing to recant,” Mrs. Smith replied. “And I had my child to think of. But what kind of life would he have had with me, under the circumstances, being the color he was? I’d heard the stories of the Green Witch, as we used to call her on the caravan routes. Our nasty little lord’s sainted Mother. Hladderin had told me she took in orphans.
“So I carried him up to the Greenlands, and I climbed that black mountain. I came to a fearful black gate where demons in plate armor leered at me. But a disciple in white robes came down, practically glowing with reflected holiness, and took the child off my hands and promised to keep him safe. And that was that.
“I went down the mountain and took sanctuary myself for a while, in the Abbey at Kemeldion. When the scandal had become old news, I changed my name to Smith and got a job cooking for your cousin’s caravan line. It was work I knew, and, besides, it seemed like a good idea to keep moving.
“I kept track of what the Karkateen authorities had done with Burnbright, which was the alias they had sensibly given her. When your cousin needed a runner to replace one that had quit, I suggested he pick one up in Mount Flame. By sheer good luck he got little Burnbright. I’ve looked out for her ever since, for her father’s sake.”
Loud in the sleeping house, they heard the sound of footsteps approaching. A moment later the kitchen door opened, and Lord Ermenwyr looked in. He was very pale.
“I wonder whether I might get something for indigestion?” he inquired. “But I see I’m interrupting serious talk.”