The Spirit Stone - Katharine Kerr [122]
The boy gave her a watery smile and set his burdens down on the table. With a nod towards Laz, he turned and trotted out of the cabin. Laz put the bowl of stew down in front of her, then picked up the white stone and began to wrap it in its various sacks.
‘What did you see in it?’ he said.
‘The black pyramid on our altar back in the shrine.’
‘What?’
‘Just that. It was like I was looking out of the black stone and seeing the shrine. You said you saw Evan, but I don’t understand how you could have.’
‘No, no, I must confess something. I was just guessing. I saw some sort of figure, but it’s very cloudy to me, that crystal, so I didn’t know who it was.’
‘It was Rocca. I wish you’d stop lying to me.’
‘I wasn’t lying. Merely guessing.’
She decided against starting an argument. In the basket lay thin rounds of soda bread, blackened along one edge. They would do, she supposed, for spoons.
‘I have some cheese in that sack,’ she said, ‘and some apples. They’re still a little green, but they’re ripe enough.’
‘We’ll save those for our breakfast.’
The stew contained carrots, onions, and turnips as well as chunks of venison, and though luke-warm, it tasted half-way decent and safe enough to eat. Sidro scooped up mouthfuls with the bread, then ate the scoop when it grew soaked with cold gravy. She’d refrained from eating meat for so long that she could only manage a little before she felt disgustingly full.
‘Where do you get all this food, anyway?’ she said.
‘Raiding,’ Laz said. ‘Where else? We hunt for the deer, though.’
‘Raiding? You mean stealing from farmers.’
‘Who else raises food?’ He paused to wipe his mouth on his sleeve.
‘I suppose you kill anyone who objects.’
‘Of course. We’re not Gel da’ Thae any longer, Sisi. We’ve reverted to our savage tribal roots. We’re outlaws, you know, and that’s what outlaws do. Why should we stay civilized when our fellow citizens would like to torture us to death? And in the public square, too! The gall! If I’m going to be forced to scream and moan and piss all over myself, I’d at least like to do it in private.’
‘I’ve heard about those raids on the Lijik border. They get blamed on Alshandra’s men.’
‘Most of them are done by Alshandra’s men, that’s why. I happened to witness a particularly nasty incident myself earlier this summer, when I was flying over a farming village. They killed all the men in cold blood, just lined them up and cut them down. Then they dragged the women away—to sell, I suppose, in Taenalapan and Braemel.’
‘As if your pack is any better!’
‘But we are. If the farmers don’t object, we don’t kill them, and we only steal what they can spare. Farmers who starve to death plant no crops. Besides, we don’t take slaves—hence our lack of hard coin to pay the farmers with. I’ve come to the conclusion that taking slaves is a very bad thing.’
‘What?’ She was honestly shocked. ‘Why? Everyone keeps slaves, well, except for Vandar’s spawn.’
‘I wish you’d stop calling the Ancients Vandar’s spawn. The name is meaningless and really rather stupid, given as he fathered none of them.’
‘But—’ She choked the words back. The sacred teaching no longer mattered, she reminded herself, now that she was damned.
‘As to why,’ Laz continued, ‘consider yourself, born into slavery and utterly incapable of living free even though I made you legally free. As soon as we had our difficulties, what did you do? You joined a cult of fools and madmen who ordered you around, and why? Because you were so accustomed to being ordered around. You couldn’t stand being free, could you, Sisi? You didn’t know how. That’s a horrible thing to do to someone, like pulling the wings off a butterfly.’
Sidro felt as stunned as if he’d struck her in the face. Laz flashed her a brief grin and returned to eating his dinner. She took another piece of griddle bread, had one bite, then merely crumbled the rest between her fingers while she tried to bring to heel the yapping pack of thoughts that Laz had awakened in her mind.
Every evening after dinner,