Lena awoke an instant too late to comprehend what Paul had howled into the night—she only knew that she had heard. Benedict too awoke with a grunt, but he sucked himself right back to sleep, with five or six soft clicks of his tongue in his empty mouth. Lena breathed gently beside him and listened.
“Mammig! Mammig!”
An instant later the door cracked against its hinges, flung open as wide as it could fly, and Drileu felt its jolt sparking down her spine. The damp wind gusted in after with a gravelly hiss of blown rain or sleet or sand, and Drileu felt it in her teeth. She was a fisherman’s wife, and this house on the shore was her body, as her husband’s boat was his on the sea.
Food. A cup of wine. Perhaps merely a nap. Aelfden did not know what Brother Columba was about to press on him, but he already knew he did not want it. He had no appetite for anything, not even for the sickeningly-sweet indulgence of sleep.
“Come in, child,” Cian said wearily. “I know you can hear me.”
Lasrua could hear him. Even when he did not speak, she could hear his breath whistling through his lungs like the wind through naked boughs.
Food. This body’s appetites were on the scale of this body: monumental. Araphel had been obliged to plan his journey around the availability of hot meals, jugs of ale, and warm beds long enough to let him stretch out his big body and snore. He considered himself fortunate that it was at least more willing than Brude’s to sleep alone.
The whistling stopped only long enough for the silversmith to call, “I come, I come!” The banging never stopped at all. He had such perfect time that when he picked up his tune, he simply skipped the notes he meanwhile ought to have trilled.
Condal squeaked, “A new nightgown? We won’t be needing nightgowns for the party, too?”
“Sounds like a fun party!” the dressmaker laughed.
“Eithne!”
The word seared Dantalion’s throat as it wheezed out of him in a whisper. His lungs were on fire. He was speaking torrid smoke.
Lasrua had been walking for so many hours that even after she stopped, the muscles of her thighs continued twitching in tandem. Her head had been so long bowed that her icy hair crackled over her shoulders as she looked up, and the straggling locks that had frozen to her fur collar yanked on her temples before coming unstuck.
“I don’t think she’s cut out to be a lady’s horse, but that’s what she has become, so the lady will just have to make the best of her.”
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