Dawn Wind by Rosemary Sutcliff Read Free Book Online Page B

forward across the moon-whitened wall. A figure with the same sharp-edged delicacy as the shadow appeared in the doorway, and a husky voice edged with fear, begged, ‘Don’t let the dog hurt me.’
    ‘I’ll set the dog on you this instant, if you don’t come into the firelight and show me what you are,’ Owain panted, strangling at Dog’s collar with both hands. ‘Peace, Dog! Be quiet! Quiet, I say!’
    The figure came slowly down the steps and into the firelight.
    Owain found himself looking at a girl of maybe twelve years old, a dark creature with arms and legs as thin as bare bone sticking out of the tattered remains of a filthy tunic. She had come close in to the fire, and they surveyed each other, while Dog, ceasing to growl, stood watchful at his Lord’s side. The girl stood poised, flinching and wary, as though ready to run at any moment, yet at the same time defiant, staring back at Owain with the most extraordinary eyes, grey as rain and fringed all round with black lashes. He did not notice that she smelt, for he had grown used to smells since Kyndylan’s war-host marched from Viroconium, but he did notice that there were dark sores round her mouth, and something crawled out of her matted hair and disappeared into it again.
    ‘Who are you, and what do you want?’ he demanded furiously. ‘Is it you who have been spying on me all day?’
    She answered the second of his three questions, which was the one most to the point as far as she was concerned. ‘I smelled the meat cooking.’
    There was a faint whine in her voice that he did not like. He stooped and picked up the hare, which was cool enough to handle now, tore off one of its back legs, and tossed it to her as though she were a dog. ‘There, take it.’
    She snatched it up and crammed it against her mouth with both hands, tearing and worrying at it; but all the while her eyes never left his face. In an unbelievably short time the bones were bare. She pulled them apart, licking the last threads of meat from between them, then dropped them and held out her cupped hands in the gesture of the trained beggar. ‘I am very hungry. Let my Lord give me the other leg.’
    So that was what she was: a beggar. Savagely, Owain tore off the other leg and dropped it into her pleading hands; then he began hurriedly to eat as well, lest she should ask for more and more until there was none of his kill left for him at all.
    So they ate standing, staring at each other beside the fire. The girl finished first and stood sucking the bones, her eyes fixed on the remains of the hare which he still held; but Owain refused her silent pleading—fair was fair, it was his kill and he had given her nearly half of it anyway—and ate on to the end, stripping the nutty white flesh along the backbone; then he gave the carcass with a few rags of meat still on it to Dog. He was angry at having been frightened, even more than at having lost so much of his supper, but against his will he was a little glad to find that he was not the only human being alive in the dead city; and after he had licked his fingers, he demanded, ‘What is your name?’
    ‘Regina,’ she said, licking her fingers also, and the greasiness round her mouth.
    Owain had enough Latin, though people did not use it much in everyday speech nowadays, to know what that meant. He laughed. ‘Queen! That’s a likely name for you, isn’t it? Were your father and mother of royal blood, then?’
    ‘I never had a father nor a mother,’ Regina said, as one stating a simple fact. ‘I lived with an old woman, but she died last winter. She made me beg for her, and when I did not bring home enough, she used to beat me. Once I tried to kill her, but she tasted the killing-herbs in the broth, and beat me until I could not stand.’
    Hearing her husky level voice and seeing the look in her eyes as she spoke, Owain did not doubt that the story was perfectly true. But for the moment there were other things about her that