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wasn’t sure he could even stand up just now, let alone attack a person. His eye drawn by the pitcher, he raised the fur across his lap and slid the knife out of sight down next to his right thigh. He licked dry lips and set both hands out atop the cover, spread and still. He most certainly didn’t want to frighten off that charitable young woman. Was the man’s voice one of those he had heard in his daze upon the rockslide? Vulture, or rescuer? The dog sat back down.
    “What were you doing with it?” asked the woman in suspicion, coming no nearer.
    “I… it… it drinks blood.” He wondered if that sounded as deranged to them as it did to him.
    “All knives do,” observed the man, his hand not leaving his own hilt.
    Not like this one . “I drink drink,” Inglis essayed hopefully.
    “Travelers get dry in the mountains,” said the woman, in a tone of careful placation. “They think because they are not hot, they are not thirsty.”
    “I… yes.”
    She circled wide around him to the hearth, collected a clay cup faintly familiar from last night, and filled it from the pitcher. She extended it to him with a long reach. He took it with a hand that shook, then both hands, and gulped down its contents, an unstrained barley water flavored with mint. Invalid stuff, far from a noble beverage, but it was warm, seeming both food and drink. He extended the cup back. “Please…?” He drained it three times before he stopped guzzling . He caught his breath and nodded thanks.
    “Who are you—traveler?” asked the man.
    “I, uh… Inglis k—” He cut off his too-famous kin name. “Inglis.” Oh. Should I have offered an alias?
    “Where were you bound?” asked the young woman. “Towards Martensbridge, or Carpagamo? Either way, you took a wrong turn.”
    “Pass from Carpagamo’s closed,” said the fellow, “Unless he was the last man to come in over it.”
    Inglis shook his head. He followed the dog’s interested gaze to the cloth sack. Gingerly, the woman held it out to him. His clumsy fingers found it contained generous lumps of some soft white cheese, sheep or goat, captured between parsimonious slices of heavy barley-and-oat bread, and strips of dried smoked meat of uncertain origin. Venison, perhaps. Inglis, after a moment’s hesitation, tore into it as if he were a wolf indeed.
    After allowing the first couple of frantic swallows, the man asked, “Where’s your horse?”
    Around his mouthful Inglis answered, “Left her lame on the Crow Road. Then I walked.”
    “Oh.” The man’s mouth pursed in disappointment.
    It came to Inglis that the young woman must have prepared this repast for him, with her own hands. He eyed her more closely over his chewing. Her face was mountain-broad, lips and cheeks rouged only by cold, her body work-lean; her youth lent her a passing prettiness. The fellow was not much older. Hunter, shepherd? Both? Up here, all men put their hands to all tasks, as the turning seasons ordered them. The two shared the light hair and blue eyes of this mountain stock, close kin surely.
    “Who are you?” Inglis asked in turn after his next swallow. “Where is this place?”
    The woman smiled hesitantly at him. “I’m Beris. That’s my brother Bern.”
    Bern offered more reluctantly, “This is the summer grazing camp for Linkbeck, the village in the valley. Our hunting camp in winter.”
    So, he’d not traveled quite so far back in time as the place’s crude look suggested. Not to the world of Great Audar’s era, when these mountain tribes had held their high fastnesses against the invaders as the Wealdean forest tribes had not. Or maybe the Darthacans had taken one look at the damp precipitous country and decided they didn’t want it that much. The Temple’s invasion in these lands, replacing the old ways with the new, had been a slower process, more a gradual weeding out than a violent burning over. With a chance, a hope, if not a prayer, that they’d not uprooted everything