spirit of the dead, then knelt beside the corpse.
The steel armor alone would be worth a fortune, but it
was terribly heavy, and Matya was not entirely certain she
would be able to remove it. However, the knight wore a
leather purse at his belt, and that boded well for Matya’s
fortunes. Deftly, she undid the strings, peered inside, and
gasped in wonder.
A woman’s face gazed out of the purse at her. The tiny
face was so lifelike that, for a moment, Matya almost
fancied it was real – a small, perfect maiden hidden within
the pouch.
“Why, it’s a doll,” she realized after a heartbeat had
passed.
The doll was exquisitely made, fashioned of delicate
bone-white porcelain. The young maiden’s eyes were two
glowing sapphires, and her cheeks and lips were touched
with a blush of pink. It was a treasure fit for a lord’s house,
and Matya’s eyes glimmered like gems themselves as she
reached to lift it from the purse.
A hand gripped her arm, halting her. Matya froze, biting
her lip to stifle a scream. It was the dead man. His fingers,
sticky with dried blood, dug into the flesh of her arm, and
he gazed at her with pale, fey eyes.
The knight was very much alive.
*****
“Tambor . . .” the knight whispered. He lay slumped
against the wheel of Matya’s wagon, his eyes shut. “She
sings . . . Tambor . . .” His mumbling faded, and he drifted
deeper into a feverish sleep.
Matya sat near the small fire, sipping a cup of rose hip
tea and watching the knight carefully. Twilight had
descended on the grove of aspen trees where she had made
camp, transforming all the colors of the world to muted
shades of gray.
Tambor, Matya thought. There’s that word again. She had
heard it several times in the knight’s fevered rambling, but
she did not know what it meant, or even whether it was the
name of a place or a person. Whatever it was, it was
important to him. As important as that doll, she thought.
Even now, in his sleep, the knight clutched tightly at the
purse that held the small porcelain figurine. It had to be
valuable indeed.
While Matya was not one to go out of her way to help
others when it was unclear what – if any – reward she might
gain from it, neither was she without a heart. The knight
would have died had she left him there by the road, and she
would not have wanted that weighing on her conscience to
the end of her days. Besides, she suspected there was a good
chance the knight would die regardless of her aid, in which
case the doll would be hers, free and clear. Either way, it
was worth her while to help.
Getting the knight into her wagon had been no simple
task. Fortunately, Matya was a strong woman, and the
knight had roused himself enough to stumble most of the
way with her help. She had hoped to make Garnet by
nightfall, but she had tarried too long at the crossroads.
Shadows were lengthening, and the town still lay many
leagues ahead. Knowing night was not far off, fearful of
Rabbit stumbling into a hole or missing the trail in the dark,
she had made camp in the grove of aspen by the road.
She had tended to the knight’s wounds as best she
could. The cut on his scalp was shallow, but he had lost a
good deal of blood from it. More troubling had been the
wound in the knight’s leg. She had found the broken shaft of
an arrow embedded in the flesh behind his knee. Goblin
arrows were wickedly barbed, Matya knew, and there was
only one way for her to remove the arrow tip. Steeling her
will, she had pushed the broken shaft completely through
the flesh of his leg. Mercifully, the knight had not
awakened. Blood flowed freely from the wound, which she
had deftly bound with a dean cloth. The bleeding soon
stopped.
The night deepened, and the stars came out, one by one,
like tiny jewels in the sky above. Matya sat by the fire to eat
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