the streets for the length of ten heartbeats, then picked her up and carried her into his home.
His mother and father looked up from their meal, amazed and silent. “If I judge rightly,” he said softly, laying the girl on the hearth beside the dying sea-grass fire, “she is the youngest child and only living heir of Ranes Reji—Andiene—with blood price and shelter death on her head.”
“Do you know her beyond all doubt?” asked his father.
“No, but how many of her age and riches would seek rough shelter on this night?” He held up her hand so his father could see her soft skin, unhardened by work, the three gold rings, two of them gem-set, and her nails grown so long that they curled and touched the second joint of her fingers, the few nails that were not broken and torn back from her fingertips.
“Fel led me to her, under my boat,” he said.
His father and mother looked at each other, exchanging understanding and agreement without one question or word. Kare rose from the straw mat where she sat leaning against her husband’s knee. “Son, turn your back a little while, and your father’s chair, also.”
Ilbran obeyed, without question, but in some bewilderment. “Do I smell laswit?” his father asked softly.
“I’ve not been smoking it. I’ve been keeping bad company,” Ilbran said with a feeble chuckle, and he explained.
Hammel laughed. “You are lucky he did not decide you were his best and only friend, and follow you back.”
“He found a girl. She will keep him occupied the rest of the night—and pick his pocket, too.”
His father reached out and touched the dried blood of the claw-marks on his arm. “And what about you? Have you been playing with cats?” Underneath the light tone was seriousness, a little worry. Ilbran shook his head. He called Fel to him, and stroked the courser’s lustrous black fur, soft and thick even after the long summer.
Kare hurried to the storage chest, then back with a ragged brown robe, warm felted lanara. “Ilbran, give me your dagger. Oh yes, you may turn back now. Turn your father’s chair, too.”
With the dagger, she neatly pared the unconscious girl’s fingernails down almost to the quick. “There,” she said proudly, “does she not now look one of us?”
“Not exactly,” said Hammel. “If you would take some soot from the hearth and rub it into her face and nails, it would better the resemblance.”
Mother and son laughed. “That is unjust,” Kare said, but Ilbran looked down at his hands, huge and grimy, and was glad he could not see his face.
The girl, the princess, did not look one of them, and no dirt or disguises would change that. The noble families were a race apart. For centuries, they had chosen their own kind. He looked at her—the light bones, the hair straight as a silver shield, her skin fairer than most, almost golden. Though her eyes were closed, he knew that they would be gray as a sunless sky, not the brown or blue of the common folk.
He reached out and stroked her silver hair, matted with dark blood. “Maya, do you think if it were cut short, it might curl? Then, she would look less like a changeling.”
“I doubt it,” his mother said, but she cut off the girl’s hair to the nape of her neck, and threw it into the fire. The hair coiled like snakes as it burned; the stench reminded Ilbran of things best forgotten. Kare dampened a rag and washed what was left of her hair, patiently rubbing it again and again, combing it with her fingers to work out the mats. The rag came away brown and red.
“What ails her?” asked Hammel. “That is not sleep.”
“I do not know. She has no wounds. This on her robe and hair is the blood of others.” Kare picked up the stained Festival robe, where it lay crumpled on the hearth. The fire had dried it. She stroked the cloth, fine woven lanara, flowing through her hands like water, where the stains had not stiffened it. “It seems a pity to destroy it. Richer cloth than I have ever touched. So easy to bleach the stains out.”
“It would be our death if it were found,” Ilbran said.
She ripped the robe in strips with his dagger, and fed them into the fire.
“The rings also,” Ilbran said.
“The fire will not touch them.”
“I’ll walk down to the sea strand. Let them return to where they came from.”
“No,” Hammel said.