He could be friendless and cold here as well as anywhere. And tomorrow I’ll find a way into the city.

  He untied his shirt and methodically chewed and swallowed the crumbleroot, adding a bite of onion now and then to take away the bitterness. It was not good food, especially because his own body heat and sweat had made it all just a little soggy. But it filled him. He thought of saving some for tomorrow, but he knew the insects would have it before dawn, and he needed his shirt for warmth. He could go a day or two without food if he had to. He’d done it before, in a long winter, when the older children ate nothing at some meals so the little ones wouldn’t go without. And other times, when he could not face a cuffing from his father, Runnel would skip his supper and ask for no food when he came in late. Nor, on those occasions, had there been some favorite brother or sister who saved him something.

  He hollowed a place for himself among the cold damp fallen leaves near the cliff edge, so he lay on stone, and gathered more leaves to pull on top of himself where he curled on the ground. Others sought soil to sleep on, when they were caught out of doors, but to Runnel, the stone might be cold, but it wasn’t damp, and it never left him sore and filthy the way soil did.

  At this lower elevation it did not get as cold at night. He slept warmly enough that during the night he cast off some of the leaves that covered him.

  In the morning he had nothing to eat, and he could hear few birds through the din of the rapids just over the edge of the cliff. But he had slept well and arose invigorated, and today he did not even think of turning back. Instead he went to the right, mostly southward, skirting the edge of the cliff. The water tumbled farther and farther below, so that even though the ground he walked on sloped downward, it was ever higher above the water.

  He came to a wall, which he recognized as a continuation of the ruined wall he had passed through yesterday. Only this wall was not in ruins, and he could hear conversation; it was manned, and though the guards were careless enough to let their chatter be heard, the fact that anyone was keeping vigil meant that there must be something ahead of him that needed guarding.

  There was no door or break in the wall here, so there was no point in hailing the guards. Instead, Runnel walked along the woods well back from the wall, looking for a gate.

  It was a huge thing, when he reached it, and it was held shut by huge bars. It baffled him: The bars were on his side of the gate. He was inside whatever it was protecting. In the middle of the gate was a small door, which a man would have to stoop to get through. But it had the great virtue of being open.

  Runnel headed for it. Almost at once he was seized by the shoulder and roughly tripped.

  “Where do you think you’re going, fool?” said a soft voice.

  Runnel rolled over and saw a man standing over him, holding a javelin. Not a soldier, though, for the javelin was his only weapon, and he wore only simple cloth. A hunter? “Through the gate,” said Runnel. Where else would he be going?

  “And have your throat slit and all your blood drained into the river?” asked the hunter.

  Runnel was baffled. “Who would do such a thing to a mere traveler?”

  “No one,” said the hunter. “It would be done to a fool of a boy who wandered through the sacred forest, thus declaring himself to be a sacrifice, and a right worthy one, in the eyes of them as still think that water needs blood from time to time.”

  “How would I know it was sacred?” asked Runnel.

  “Didn’t you feel the bones of the dead among the trees? The soldiers who fell here to the bronze swords of Veryllydd still whisper to me—I don’t forget the blood that made this place holy. But the beasts I hunt for the sacrifice are like you—they don’t know it’s a sacred wood. They’re going about their business when I snare them or pierce them.”

  “Are you going to kill me, then?”

  “I was asked for two hares, and so I’ll find hares and bring them. If they asked for a stupid peasant boy from the mountains, then I’d truss you up and drag you in.”

  “All I want is—”

  “All you want is to be another useless adventurous lad from the mountains who’ll make himself a nuisance to everyone in the city until you give up and go back home where you belong. There’s nothing for you here.”

  “Then I am home,” said Runnel defiantly, “for home has always been a place with nothing for me.”

  The hunter smiled a little. “A sharp wit. With that mouth, and that proud look on your face, you’ll probably get beaten to death before you starve.”

  Proud look? How could he look proud, lying on his back in the dirt and old leaves? “Either way,” said Runnel, “I’d like to spend some of the brief time I have left inside the city of Mitherhome, but all I find is broken walls and broken bridges and rivers I can’t cross.”

  The man sighed. “Here’s what you do if you’re determined to suffer more before you go home. There’s another gate farther along. Don’t go near it. Nor should you go near the four houses that are just inside the gate. Skirt wide around them and go on in sight of the wall till you come to a place where the wall is broken down. Go through the gap, then head straight south till you come to the Uhetter Road. Try to act like you just left the road to take a piss and you’ve been traveling on it all day, instead of traipsing through the holy wood.”

  “Will the road take me into Mitherhome?” asked Runnel.

  “The road will just sit there,” said the hunter. “Your legs will take you to Hetterferry, and from there maybe you will and maybe you won’t figure out a way to get onto the ferryboat and into Low Mitherhome without your miserable country bumpkin rags getting too wet.”

  Runnel was curious. “Why are you helping me?”

  “I’m not helping you. I’m getting rid of you.”

  “But I’ve stepped in the sacred wood.”

  “I live in it. If the spirits of the sacred dead minded your passage, they would have tripped you with their bones or terrified you with their whispers, and they chose not to. Who am I to complain of you?”

  “So you serve Yeggut, the water god, and yet you allow me to live?”

  “There is no water god,” said the hunter kindly. “I’m employed by the priests who put on the sacrifices to please the ignorant people who think there’s a water god. Anyone with even a scrap of sense knows that the watermages do their work, not by praying to some god, but by speaking directly to the water itself.”

  “So…doesn’t that make the water a god?”

  “It makes the water water, and the mages mages,” said the hunter. “Now go away. And don’t even think of asking me for food, or I’ll pierce you after all and let them pour you out to give Holy Yeggut a drink.”

  His mention of “drink” made Runnel thirsty, but he made no request and walked, then ran, deeper into the wood, away from the wall.

  He worked his way west and stayed far enough away from the next gate that he saw neither it nor the houses the hunter had described. Not much farther, he came to the ruined wall, and followed it till he found a gap. Then he went back toward the south and found yet another gap, which must have been the one the hunter meant, but it made no difference except a few extra steps. Then he reached the corner of the wall where it turned eastward, and here again was a well-maintained tower with guards in it, looking out over the wood. How stupid, thought Runnel, to have a wall that you can simply walk around, and yet defend one short section of it. Are your foes so lazy you can let most of your wall fall down, and they won’t even bother to walk through it?

  Soon he reached the road. There was no one in sight. He stepped out and walked east along the shores of a different stream. This one was shallower and broader—it looked like it could be forded. And sure enough, he soon came to a place where wagons on another road from the south crossed the river and joined the Uhetter Road.

  No one hailed him, though as he neared the wagons he got some suspicious glances. Not wishing trouble, Runnel skirted them widely and ran on ahead, to make it obvious he wasn’t there to steal or beg or whatever it was they feared he’d try. I’ve errands of my own.

  Soon the road ran between houses and shops. From some of the houses came the smell of food, and when Runnel saw that people were going freely in and out of one of them, he concluded it was a roadhouse and he went inside.

  He was stopped at once by a burly man, who said, “Have you got money, boy?”

  Runnel looked around, confused. “What’s a money?” he asked.

  The man laughed nastily and shoved him out. “What’s a money!” he said. “They come stupider and more arrogant about it every spring!”

  So getting a meal would be harder than Runnel had thought. In Farzibeck, any home would open its door to a traveler, and ask no more of him than news or whatever gift he chose to give. Who ever heard of a roadhouse demanding a particular gift—especially one that Runnel had never heard of! How could he have brought a “money” when he didn’t know what it was and had no idea where to find one and couldn’t have guessed in advance that they’d even want such a thing?

  Madness. But from the way other people in the roadhouse laughed at him, he could only conclude that everybody here knew what moneys were, and knew the innkeeper would demand it of them. So it was a city thing, and he would have to find out about it. But not here.

  Not far into the town of Hetterferry, he came to a dock on what looked to be another lake, though not as large as the Mitherlough. He soon realized, from the conversations he overheard, that this was the river called Ronnyrill, which flowed down in three streams from the lake high above, then on to Ronys and Abervery and other strange, exotic-sounding places. Much good that would do him, though. What mattered to him was that the real city of Mitherhome was plainly visible, not more than a stone’s throw away at the nearest point, but the torrent of water pouring out of the deep gash in the cliff made a more impassable barrier than their ridiculous wall.

  When he asked a man about the ferryboat, he once again heard the word “money.”

  “Does everyone here demand the same gift in trade?”

  In reply, the man smiled and reached into a pouch tucked into the sash that bound his shirt closed. He pulled out a single half-blackened disc of bronze. “Money,” he said. “You get it by working, and then you trade it for things you want.”

  “But it’s so small,” said Runnel.

  “So’s your wit,” said the man, and turned away.

  At least now he knew how to get money—you worked. That was something Runnel knew how to do. He walked along the dock till he came to a boat that was busy with men carrying crates onto a large raft. A man was standing by a crate, apparently waiting for one of the other laborers to come and carry the other end with him. So Runnel squatted and put his hands under the crate, and said, “Let’s do it.”

  The laborer looked at him, shrugged, and took up his end. Together they carried it onto the raft, which seemed to Runnel to be as big as his whole village. Runnel stayed with the job for half an hour, working as hard as any of the adult men. But when it was done, everybody else got on the raft and pushed off, leaving him behind. He wanted to cry out to them that all he wanted was to cross the stupid river, what would that cost them? But he knew that they knew what he wanted, and they had chosen to take his labor and pay him nothing, and there was nothing he could do about it. Begging wouldn’t change their minds—it would only invite their scorn. Besides, the men he had helped were hirelings themselves—they were not the men who could have rewarded him with passage. Runnel had been a fool.

  He was very, very hungry now—and thirsty, too. The water of the river didn’t look terribly clean, despite having just come out of the canyon. From the look of it, all the waste of the city was dumped into the Mitherlough above and got carried down in the torrent. So he would need water to replace what he had sweated out.

  Back home, if you needed a drink, you knelt by a brook or runnel somewhere and drank your fill. It was all clean—there was no village upstream of them. And they left it clean—it was a matter of piety not to dishonor Yeggut by polluting the streams that flowed near them. But they had heard from travelers that the sewers of the great cities flowed right out into the water, as if the god were nothing to them. Now, having heard what the hunter in the sacred wood said of the god, Runnel believed the tale.

  That meant he needed to find water from upstream of this town. It would mean leaving again, and it occurred to him that once he set foot on the Uhetter Road he would probably let it carry him all the way back to Farzibeck.

  He took a different street away from the dock, and almost immediately found himself at a public fountain, with water gushing from the mouths of three stone fish into three pools into which women were dipping jars and pails to carry back to houses and shops.

  Grateful for the bounty, Runnel dropped to his knees beside one of the pools and splashed water up into his face.

  Almost immediately, he was once again seized by the shoulder, and once again he was hurled down, though this time he sprawled, not on dirt and leaves, but on the hard cobblestones of the street. A large woman loomed over him, her jar standing on the ground beside her.

  “What do you mean, putting your filthy hands right in the water! And then washing the dust from your own face right back into it for the rest of us to drink!”

  “I’m sorry,” said Runnel. “But don’t you dip your jar in? And isn’t it standing on the ground right now, getting filthy?”

  “But it’s my jar,” she said, “and I only set it down to drag your filthy head out of the fountain.”

  “I didn’t put my head in,” said Runnel.

  “Might as well have! Now get away before I call the guard on you!”

  “I’m thirsty,” said Runnel. “Where else can I get water?”

  “Back in your hometown!” she roared. “Or pee into your hand and drink that!” Then she picked up her jar, made a great show of brushing off the bottom of it, and dipped it into the fountain, her huge buttocks pointed directly at Runnel.

  The stones had bruised him about as well as Father ever did. Runnel knew how to move carefully and slowly until he knew exactly where it hurt most, so he’d know how to get up with the minimum of pain.

  “Are you all right?” asked a young woman.

  “You mean apart from being thirsty, hungry, embarrassed, and bruised?”

  “All right, then, be proud,” she retorted, and carried her jar to the fountain.

  “What did I say?” asked Runnel. “You asked how I was, and I’m thirsty, hungry, embarrassed, and bruised. It was an honest answer.”

  “And still you have that proud look about you,” she said, after a mere glance. “I see you think you’re better than anyone.”

  “I know that I’m not,” said Runnel. “And if there’s a proud look on my face, Yeggut put it there, not me.” For the first time, Runnel wondered if there was something wrong with his face, and that was why his father hated him.

  The girl’s jar was full. She rocked it up so it stood in the fountain, then turned and faced him, her hands on her hips. She was a girl who worked hard, for her bare arms were muscled and her face was brown. But she was also clean, and so was her clothing. He had never seen a girl in clothes so clean. She must wear it no more than a week without washing.

  “You’re not mocking me?” asked the girl.

  “Why would I mock you?” said Runnel. “You were kindly to me, asking how I was, which makes you the best person I’ve met so far in this place.”

  “You say fair enough words,” she said, “but your face and your voice and your manner still look disdainful. The god was unkind to you. That face should have belonged to a lord or a mage—then no one would mind the proud look.”

  “No one in my village ever told me,” said Runnel. “They must be used to me, having seen this face since I was a baby.”

  “Oh, and you think you’re not a baby now?” she said, with a bit of smile at the corners of her mouth.

  “Now who’s the mocker?” asked Runnel.

  “That’s different,” she said. “You really are small.”

  “I can’t help being young. I’m growing, though—I’m taller than I was. I can work hard. I do what I’m told. I can’t help my face, but I can bow my head and hide it—see?”

  He tucked his chin onto his chest.

  “Couldn’t get much work done in that position,” she said. “But no use asking me for work, I haven’t any such thing in my gift. I’m a servant myself, though not a slave, thank the god, so I get a coin now and then, and the master couldn’t make free with me even if he wanted to, which he’s too old even to wish for, thank the god.”

  “Then let me carry your waterjar for you, and you can let me ask your master for work.”

  “It’s a great household, lad,” she said. “You wouldn’t speak to the master, you’d speak to Demwor, the steward.”

  “The what?”

  “The man who rules the servants, under my master. The man who keeps the counts. The guardian, the—you’ve never heard the word ‘steward’?”

  “There’s not more than three servants in my whole village, and no house with two of them.” Runnel thought of each of them, all of them old, and belonging to houses once headed by men who went off to the wars and came home rich. They had been captured by the men’s own hand as spoils of war, which made them slaves by the decision of the gods. Now the men were long dead, and the servants were old, and hardly anybody cared that they weren’t free. The only reason Runnel knew was that when he was little, he asked why one of them had never married, and then the whole business of servants was explained to him, and the other two were pointed out as well.

  And here he was, volunteering to be a servant himself. Only, like this girl, he intended to be one who was free, and made a—what was the word? A coin now and then.

  “If you drop the jar, I’ll be beaten for it, free or not,” she said. “And no payment for you—I have no coin to spare. Nor kisses neither, in case you thought.”