“Well.” he continued, “there are a few things we can infer.” He waited but she was still silent. “Okay, they didn’t torture him for information.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he was killed here, while you were sleeping. Yet you and the children never woke. Why? Magic-possibly. A sleeping draught-less likely. No one, anywhere, heard a sound the whole time Terrel was dying. I think magic, a spell to contain any sound he or his torturers made.” He shook his head. “A lot of effort. Why not just kidnap him, take him somewhere else, interrogate him there? But, no, they did it here, there- fore it had to be for one of two reasons: to set an example, or to exact revenge. Probably revenge.”
“I don’t understand.”
“If he was killed as an example, well, there were other ways they could have done it, less hazardous ways, and more obvious ones. Besides, as I said, lots of people were doing what Terrel did. He wasn’t a big enough fish to go to such lengths for. No, it has to be vengeance.” Cade ground his teeth together, the skin of his face pulled tight, making his scars stand out in high relief. “They broke every bone in his body, Sarah. Think about it. That’s not a normal torture, and as far as I can discover no one else has been killed this way. He was killed that way because … be- cause someone knew.”
“About what happened, his hands,” she said.
Cade looked surprised. So Terrel had told her. “Yes.” He said no more.
The two sat, lost in their memories. She recalled a warm night, a storm coming in, her new husband sitting on the bed telling her the tale of his deformity in a monotone. He, his mother, and Cade had come to Down- wind; forced there because, with the death of their father there was no money, and there was no family to help them. Terrel’s mother found what work she could, buying Terrel a slate, working hard to find the chalk. It had made it all livable for him, given him a hope for another way of life.