She shrugged. "Gone," she said as her hand dropped down to brush the shoulder of the earless one. With her good hand, Broken Hand took hold of the elbow of Littlest.
"How came that about?"
She shrugged.
"What of other kin? Aunties and uncles? Anyone to take you in?"
She shrugged. The others stood stock-still with well-practiced silence. They had been alone long enough that they knew the routine.
"The temples take in such as these little criminals," said the Snake.
"We're not going there!" she said fiercely. "They just make slaves of us, and split us apart. City folk are that way, willing to make slaves of themselves, that's what my dad says. But our people don't do that. We're doing okay. We're doing good enough."
The Snake chuffed a laugh. "Doesn't look that way to me."
"What are you doing out here?" Joss asked before he lost her, for he knew how some clammed right up when faced with scorn.
She indicated the rib cage she'd been trying to pry up. "There was a battle here, oh I don't know, a year or two ago so they say."
"White Lion year," chirped Broken Hand. "During the Flower Rains."
"That's right," said Eldest. "We got rights just like anyone to come see what we may find, ver."
"Looters!" said the Snake with his habitual sneer. "Grave robbers."
"Shut it!" snapped Joss. He looked back at the girl, who appraised this exchange with a raised eyebrow and a nudge of the foot to Earless. "Looks like this field is well scavenged already. As it would be, since it's coming on three years since the battle happened. What are you finding?"
"You going to try to take it from us, ver?" she asked, not with any sort of challenge.
"If I was, I wouldn't say so at first, would I?"
He thought to crack a smile from her, but she just looked at him and considered what he had said with the flat stare of a child who has long since hunkered down to the serious business of survival and is doubtful she will make it. She might have gotten on better without the littler ones, but people often made that choice because they could make no other. Sometimes they even made it because it was the just thing to do.
"You're reeves," she said.
"So we are, as I said."
"Those reeves out of Horn Hall, they don't come around no more. You from Horn Hall?"
"We're not."
"Didn't think so." She shrugged again, as though ridding herself of a weight. "We none of us know why-that they stopped coming round, I mean. It just is that way now, and were that way from before."
"From before what?"
"Before we come to Horn."
"Where did you come from?"
The Snake moved off upwind, wrinkling his nose against the stink, but Joss held his position despite the strength of their sickly sweet-sour smell.
She looked away from him, blinking rapidly. "Dunesk Valley, up in the Ossu. We come from there. Can't live there now."
"What happened?"
She shrugged.
"Where do you live now?"
"Horn. At least, the folk mostly leave us alone if we bide in the alleys and bother no one. If we find something or other, maybe we can sell it."
"Found a ring," piped Littlest proudly. "I did!"
"Hush," said Broken Hand, pinching Littlest's skin until it whimpered.
"That was last month," said Eldest hastily. "Lest you're thinking it was just now."
Which, by the nervous set of their chins and the way her gaze flicked toward Earless, made him understand that in fact they had found something just now. In fact, they believed that two reeves might likely steal what they had. That's what they thought of reeves. It made him want to shout in frustration.
"You need to tell me what happened in Dunesk Valley," he said instead, because understanding a thing was often the only way to solve it. "I need to know, because I'm a reeve. You know it's our job to set things right."
"That's what we used to think, but them at Horn Hall just stopped coming."
"When was that?"
For a long while she was silent. Earless let go her hand and edged a few steps away, crouched down at the bank, and ladled some water into his mouth. The Snake had backed up and was staring toward the distant boulders. Peddo was nowhere in sight.
Then she started talking in a voice as flat as her gaze, as if all emotion had long since been crushed out of her. "Dunesk's about a day's walk, by the trail, and one time we come down to Horn a few years back-"
"Snake year it was," said Broken Hand.
"-that's right, just after that one made his second year." She pointed to the littlest. "Four years ago," Joss said.
She nodded. "We came down because Dad and Uncle had hides to trade. But then the raiders came. There was all kinds of things they were doing, so our dad he sent us into town because it isn't safe up there no more. We sleep on the street. Mostly folk leave us alone, not always."
That not always made him wince. She was old enough, if a man had a fancy for veal, which he did not, and anyway any child was old enough for those who had a taste for that manner of cruelty.
He asked, "What of your dad? Or your uncle? Are they still living?"
She choked. "I hope so."
"It sounds awful, living in Horn as you do. You ever thought of going back home?"
She would not meet his eye. "Awful is what they do in the villages, if they catch you."
"What do they do?"
She shuddered and would not speak, and when finally he offered some dry flat-bread out of his pouch, she pointed at Littlest, who lifted his left arm out from behind his back to display a scarred and seamed stump. For a moment Joss couldn't figure why he was doing it.
Volias said, with real revulsion, "Lady's Tit! They cut off the little wight's hand!"
Earless scrambled back from the stream's edge, and Eldest broke the bread into four pieces. They inhaled it, so it seemed, because it vanished in a blink.
"Look there!" said Volias, pointing to a spot behind Joss's back.
On occasion Joss found himself confused by the way the ground changed when you were standing on it as opposed to when you were flying above it. Angles of sight shifted; blind in one place, you found you could see in the other; unexpected vistas revealed themselves because of the curve and elevation of the ground or when mist hid from the sky what, with feet on the earth, you could see perfectly well.
The woodland scrub had seemed, from the air, to separate the rocky ground from the stream, but in fact the land sloped down into a hollow where the densest growth took advantage of damper ground to flourish, and rose again to the stony ground. Seen from the ground, the rock formations were taller than they had seemed from the air, with a hundred hiding places and defensive posts. Seemingly oblivious of the reeves, their eagles, and the four children, a person bent, rose, walked the ground, bent and rose again. The figure was dressed in some manner of loose, black robe. From this distance, Joss thought it must be a woman, but he couldn't be sure.
"That's another like us," said Eldest, seeing how they were looking that way.
"You've seen that person before?"
"Yes, ver. So we have."
"She's a scavenger, like you?"
"So she must be, ver. We come out here all the time. We saw her first time a few month back-"
"It was Fox Month," said Broken Hand. "It was so cold at night, beginning of Shiver Sky. That's the first time we saw her out here."
"That's right," said Eldest. "We see her now and again. Not all the time."
"You ever talk to her? Have any trouble with her?"
"Nah, she don't talk, except one time she stopped us and asked us if we saw any strange thing that had an outland look to it. She's looking for some dead person, maybe her lover or her son. I don't know and wasn't thinking to ask."