"I'll take the food," she said.
He brought tea and rice out onto the porch, and set it down on the far side of the steps. He took his own supper to the other end and sat down as the girl came up by the steps and took the bowl and the chopsticks. She sat down and began to eat without seeming to stop for breath. He had cooked twice and half again his ordinary supper, and given her a heaping bowl, which he saw diminishing with amazing speed. They sat on the porch, cross-legged, in the deep twilight. He ate his own without attention to manners, throwing looks her direction. She sat like a lump in the tattered coat, her bare head bowed over her dinner—black, thick hair bobbed off like a farmer-lad's, hands so thin the sinews stood up and made shadows when the fingers moved, eyes twice dark with the shadows around them when she looked up at him over the rim of the bowl.
"I could have cooked for us," she said with her mouth full. "See, you need some help up here. The rice is overcooked."
"It hasn't killed your appetite."
"Still could be better. Tomorrow I'll show you."
"And I'm telling you there's no bargain. You sleep on this porch tonight. In the morning I'll take you down to the village. I'll arrange for someone to take you in."
She shook her head; a slow, definite move.
He scowled at her, thinking of his solitude and his peace of mind; and thinking of the nights. Sometimes he damned the loneliness; but he had his ways: he got up each morning and he tended his horse and his garden; or he hunted or he mended whatever time and the weather had broken, and took no thought for the world at all. He refused to regret the court or Chiyaden or the fine clothes or the praise of men who had done nothing, when the need came, but save themselves.
Til this fool girl came talking about justice, disturbing his peace and, staring at him with her dark, mad eyes, making him think of other advantages of human company he had forsworn nine years ago, scrawny unwashed waif that she was. He was already promising her things he would never promise, to come down into the village and deal with the people; but she had walked a long and dangerous way on her foolish notion—a very long way from Hua province, and she had been appealingly clever about it. No eye would expect the girl bent under the peasant basket-pack, the oversized coat, the reed hat.
The basket changed the balance center, changed the walk, made the bearer neuter and neutral. It had fooled even his eye until he saw her walk without it.
Clever, he thought—if she had in fact thought at all about that part of it.
But even a man with a tatty basket could draw bandits and trouble somewhere along that road. Four weeks. He could not reckon how she had gotten as far as she had.
Except she was uncommonly lucky.
Or she was someone's spy, and she had had abundant help getting this far.
"I know livestock," she said. "Have you got pigs?"
"No. I hunt."
"I can take care of the horse. And I know lots of ways to cook rabbits."
"That's fine. Your new master down in the village will like to know that. And they keep pigs."
"I want you to teach me."
"To do what?" he asked. "To be a fool? You couldn't even make it back again to Hua. You're lucky to have gotten this far."
"I'll make it. And I'll get my revenge. Nobody will stop me."
Hua province. Gitu. The names conjured images of the court and Ghita and his hangers-on. The old anger stirred in him, outrage for old insults; he shook it off like unwelcome rain and said around a mouthful of rice: "Carrying a sword. You're just damned lucky the magistrates didn't lay hands on you. Don't you know the law?"
"That's why it's in the basket."
"You'd lose your right hand, girl. Do you understand that?"
"That's after they catch me," she said. "No one caught me. No one caught you. You rode right out, with the soldiers all hunting you."
"I ran for my life, girl. That's the plain truth of it."
"You killed the men they sent after you."
"I was lucky. It was a bad day for them. A better one for me. But I'll limp for the rest of my life. I don't know any damn secrets. I'm not a teaching master. I just live up here in peace, thank you, and I don't need a cook and I don't need a pig-keeper."
"You'll change your mind."
"Listen to me, girl. I'm not going to change my mind on this, no more than on anything else in the last nine years. That's one of the privileges of living alone, you know. I do what I want; and what I want is my mountain, alone; and my quiet; and no damn chattering girl to complicate my life. You talk too much. You're going down into the village where there's someone to take care of you, get you a husband and a roof over your head."
"No."
"The road down there is the border of the Empire. If I have to go all the way to the village I'm violating the terms of my exile. But I'll take you as far as the bottom of the mountain. I'll take you right into the village."
"No."
"That's all I can do. Forget about Gitu. Forget about Hua province. You're safe. You're out of reach of Gitu and Ghita, and you'll do well to stay that way."
"All you have to do is teach me. Then you don't have to worry about taking me anywhere, do you? I can go anywhere; and they won't catch me."
"Fool," he said. And he thought, looking at her in the soft twilight, that there might have been a handsomeness about the girl before she was hurt: and more than likely reckoning what could happen to a girl on the roads and in a raid—hurt in more ways than that wound down her cheek....
She was old not to be married. She was very young to be a widow. But that was entirely possible. That she had been raped was altogether likely, somewhere along her journey. He did not want to set off a flood of tears, but as he thought about it, the more it was likely that the girl, scarred and foreign and surely no virgin, would find no husband in the village, that she would spend her days as some family's nurse, someone's drudge or some farmer's untitled concubine. He thought of the damnable nuisance she posed to him; thought finally with a sense of comfortable moral sacrifice he had not felt in years, that there was a nunnery in Muigan, a few days north, inside Hoishi province, and there was a chance to do something charitable and maybe win a little virtue in the gods' record-keeping, if the gods in fact cared for anything lately. The little gold he had would have been a small thing to him, in his days in Chiyaden, but it was a great deal to border folk, in these uncertain times; and if he could give the girl dowry enough to buy her into Muigan nunnery, she would not be so ungracious as to forget her benefactor: she would make prayers for his well-being and his father's. That way he could do his father a service, discharging an obligation that had worried him, do himself one, if it mattered, and a girl with no prospects would find a decent life and a respectable old age, much more than she would ever find as a farm-wife in Hua province.
There was risk in that plan. Certainly he thought he should not entrust her or the money to some boy from the village. He had to go to Muigan himself and conspicuously violate his exile to do it. But probably the Regent would not notice it, or the Regent would hear the whole of the business and, understanding it for what it was, be sensible enough to let the matter lie and not stir up a long-settled problem. It had been a long time since someone had presented him a problem that had a clean, easy solution. He felt quite magnanimous then, congratulated himself on his good sense and his exemplary behavior, and gestured at her with the chopsticks. "I'll tell you what I'll do. You stay here and rest a day or two, then I'll take you a way through the mountains to Muigan up in Hoishi. There's a nunnery there—"