The woman smiled, very slightly, as though smiling were an alien habit, one she had only recently learned of. “Well, there are at least two of us frogs, relishing the cool of the morning. Have you rested?”
“I must have. I didn’t wake.” Without warning, her eyes filled with tears. “I woke up thinking of Dovidi. I’ve left him. I’ve abandoned him. . . .”
“You feel guilty over that?”
“Of course I do. He’ll think I’ve abandoned him.”
“No. He won’t. Babies recognize things they have seen, smelled, tasted, or felt, but they don’t remember them separate from the event until they are older. Don’t you believe Awhero will keep him safe?”
Genevieve searched inwardly for the answer to that, finding a complete certainty. “I know she will if she can.”
“Then blame your hours of sleep on your confidence in her. Unless you believe it is your duty to be forever guilty of some unspecified sin. Some women do. If you are one of them, you will be little good to us or yourself.”
Though the woman had spoken as though she didn’t care, she was watching Genevieve with concentrated attention.
Genevieve thought about this, running her fingers into the tangled mass of her hair. “No. That’s not my duty, but I grieve over his absence. I miss him. He has been with me a while now, inside or beside.”
“Of course you miss him. If you had been less intelligent about his safety, you might have brought him with you as a foolish woman would, putting instinct ahead of good sense. If you had done that, neither of you would have survived. A baby wailing in the sands and those winged hunters would have been on you in moments. You were right to let him go. The old woman was right to take him.”
“Do you know her?”
“Certainly I know her. Awhero is what you might call a ham, an eccentric, a woman who has grown to love the part she plays. She has virtually invented the role of malghaste for others to copy, but she is nonetheless reliable. The child will be all right: dirtier than with you, more shared among caretakers than with you, passed about a great deal more from one to another, no doubt, but all right.”
Genevieve took up her comb and applied it to the tangle, working the snarls out. “I must get word to my husband . . .”
The woman shook her head, slowly. “There’s no way we can do that. Our runners tell us that the ship left the city three days ago. He knows you’re alive, and that is enough for now.”
“There was fighting!” she cried, suddenly remembering.
The woman made a shushing motion with one hand. “The Colonel was not injured in the fighting. In fact, all the Havenites survived except three. …”
“Who?” she cried. “Who was killed?”
“The two guards who were with your father and a man of religion who was killed after the ship left, despite his being, I am told, a member of the nobility. Your father and the Prince are now the guests of the Shah, and they are unharmed. Our messengers tell us that everyone who survived the initial encounter, Havenite or Mahahmbi, is irritated beyond measure, for many died by the guns of the ship, and those deaths, at least, were not supposed to have happened.”
Genevieve gritted her teeth at this cool analysis. “What was supposed to have happened?”
The woman grimaced. “Judging by prior and similar events, you and your family were to have been taken for an … exemplary use. After which your father was to have seen where his interest lay and the Prince was to have moderated his demands. Since your husband made himself unavailable for sacrifice, however, the religious gentleman took his place. Much, one supposes, to his dismay.”
Genevieve could not control her annoyance. “Whoever you are, you seem very cool about all this. Does any of it matter to you?”
A curious expression fled across the woman’s face, a mere flicker, leaving it as impassive as before. “My name is Melanie, Marchioness, and you do not yet know me or mine well enough to ask that question, much less to judge us. What you confront here, we have confronted for many lifetimes.”