Close beside the cooking fire, Si'Wren, forbidden to form words, hummed
and sang in sweet soft crooning sounds.
Keeping her voice low, she sat tirelessly beside the sleeping rack
where Habrunt lay prostrate, hovering attentively over his tormented
form and watching over him with tender devotion.
The others, preoccupied with vastly more important concerns now, could
not be bothered to deal with Si'Wren anymore for her imagined
blasphemies.
As one made ritually invisible, as well as silent, and an outcast for
life, Si'Wren was lost in a world of her own. Clearly, she had eyes for
no one but Habrunt. She saw nothing besides this mighty man who, laid
low, remained on the rack and languished perpetually before her.
They had done this to him, and behold; they were now dead whereas he,
Habrunt, still lived.
* * *
The compound's front gates boomed loudly as someone pounded at the
door. In the drifting predawn mists of the interior yard, people
cowered and watched from their doorways, peering fearfully across the
compound, waiting for Old Maskron to go answer or at least send someone
to see who it was.
Old Maskron finally came out to peer through the gray-white veil of
dense fog with eyes reddened and pouched from lack of sleep and too
many years of heavy drink and overmuch worry, his face a scowling mask.
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