Chapter 9: The Pot

The pot rang against the stones and rolled, and the stew went across the snow in a long brown stain.

Steam rose from it, and the smell of onions floated over the silent camp.

Nobody moved.

Lois looked at the spilled stew, and at the man in the lion cloak, and something in her went very quiet and very hot.

She had fed six hundred children a day for twenty-six years.

In all that time, she had never once seen a grown man waste food in front of a hungry child.

"Pick it up," she said.

Hurn turned his head.

"Pick. It. Up."

She pointed at the pot.

She did not raise her voice.

She used the voice she used on the eighth-graders who threw milk cartons.

Hurn did not understand a word.

He understood the tone.

For one long second, the two of them stared at each other across the steam.

Then he said something to the camp, loud and flat.

He swept his hand at the sacks that lay in a pile at the cave mouth.

"He says, those are his," Ilu whispered at her side.

"He says, the pot is the pot of a stranger, and the stranger's food is the leader's food."

"He says, he is the leader."

"The leader," Lois repeated.

Hurn strode to the sacks.

He drew a flint knife from his belt and slashed the nearest one open.

Rice poured onto the snow in a white rush.

He scooped a fistful, held it up to the camp so they could see, and said another sentence.

The hunters near him grunted.

Two of them took a step forward, hands out for the sacks.

And Lois did the thing she'd done for twenty-six years when a line got out of hand.

She stepped between them and the food, folded her arms, and planted her feet.

The hunters stopped.

It was not courage that stopped them.

It was the absurdity of a large pale woman in a puffy coat.

She stood in the snow with a ladle sticking out of her pocket, looking at them exactly like their mothers.

"You're going to wait your turn," she said. "Like everybody else."

A young woman in the crowd made a small, choked sound that might have been a laugh.

Hurn's jaw went hard.

He raised the knife.

"Hurn."

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