Chapter 10: The First Sleep

"Ellory. Ellory!"

Hands had him by the shoulders.

The pit came back, dirt and torchlight and the grey Stone gone quiet.

Saren knelt in front of him with white lips.

"I am here," Saren said. "Look at me. What did it show you?"

"A meadow." Ellory's voice came out hoarse. "And a boy with my face."

Saren's hands tightened. Then he let go, deliberately, one finger at a time.

"Later," he said. "The sappers have run for the camp, and they will be back with a hundred men by dawn."

"Can you climb?"

They climbed.

By the time the sun came up, they had dropped the winch ropes into the pit and laid the broken boards over the hole.

They had pushed the overturned cart across it.

It would not hold a good search. It would hold a hasty one.

They walked back to the hill in a grey drizzle, without speaking.

Gwenith's cave was empty but for the two of them and the dead fire.

Lowen had taken the twelve villagers up to the high ground at first light, and Gwenith had gone with them to see them settled.

She had left a pot of oat porridge on the hearth.

She had left a note under a stone: Back by dark. Don't kill each other.

Ellory sat on the floor with the bowl in his lap and did not eat.

Saren sat across from him, as far as the cave would allow.

"Who was he?" Ellory said.

Saren was silent so long that the rain on the rocks seemed loud.

"His name was Aldwyn Marl," he said at last. "He was the last of the Keepers of the Wold."

"He came to my cave on a dare, at nineteen, to see if the stories of the serpent were true."

"He had my face."

"He had your mark." Saren's eyes dropped to Ellory's collarbone.

"The crescent. All the Keepers had it. It was how a witch knew a witch."

"And he sang you into the ground," Ellory said.

"Yes," Saren said.

"Why?" Ellory said.

"I do not know," Saren said. His voice was very quiet.

"He did not say. He sang one night, and the song was a chain."

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