"I see blood on her, but--the maid is unharmed!" cried one man in
disbelief.
"There's blood in the grass!" cried another.
"It's a miracle!" cried a woman in a quivering voice as she sank to her
knees and raised her hands to the sky. "Gods be praised!"
Old Geth surveyed the scene with a sage and skeptical eye, considering
all as he shook his tired old head, looking down at the mysteriously
unharmed girl. She had suffered so much already. What Slavemaster
Habrunt had accomplished was good enough at the fore, but--where would
it lead to in the end?
But finally he threw up his hands in the air and bowed low his hoary
white-haired old head, as he cried out loudly with the others, "Ahh,
what a miracle is done here, for with mine own eyes did I see the
cruelly flayed flesh of this poor wretched girl, and her wounds all
laid open like gaping mouths and the slitted bellies of so many gutted
fish!"
"Aye," cried out a stout middle-aged slave-woman, picking up on the
pretense the better to seem a part of the miracle herself, although she
could not have cared less if Si'Wren had lived or died. "The red flesh
closed up again before my very eyes!"
Si'Wren, watching them all as if they were mad, found no difficulty in
holding her peace in the face of such folly.
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