“Riddle. A question with a strange answer, or an answer with strange sense, or so my daughter says. She’ll be along by and by to guide you south overland. We want no part of you, nor of those pawners who came after you.”
“They actually came into harbor after us?” Chance’s question was more curious than fearful. Well, it wasn’t him the pawners were after.
“They did so. The Demon with them is already complaining that he is blind and deaf here in our land. So, we say, let him get out of it.” He smiled sarcastically. “And let you get out as well. You Gamesmen have no Game here. Your Demons cannot read any thought but their own; your Seers cannot see further than their eyes will reach. Your Sentinels can make no fire but with steel and spark, as any child can.”
“Your land truly is outside the Game? Almost I thought Chance was jesting with us when he said it…”
“No jest. Here, no Game of any kind. Howsoever, we bear no malice, either, and will send you away as you would. South, I think you said.”
“I thank you for helping us,” I mumbled, only to be stopped by his harsh laughter.
“No help, lad. No. We want none of the nonsense of the Game, none of its blood and fire here. If you are gone, so will the pawners go. It is for our own peace, not yours.”
So I learned that people may be kind enough while not caring a rather. He sent his girl child to us after a bit, she with long, coltish legs, scarred from going bare among the brush, and hair which fell to her waist in a golden curtain. Tossa, her name was. Riddle held her by the shoulder, her eyes level with mine, unsmiling, as he spoke to Chance.
“We have none of the Festival brutishness here, sir. These your boys need be made ‘ware of that. See to it you make it clear to them, or you’ll not walk whole out of our land.”
Chance said he would make it clear, indeed, and Yarrel was already blushing that he understood. I was such an innocent then that I didn’t know what they were talking about. It made no difference to me to be guided by a girl or a lad or a crone, for that. Tossa threw her head up, like a little horse, and I thought almost to hear her whinny, but instead she told us to come after her quick as we might and made off into the true night which was gathering.
Oh, Tossa. How can I tell you of Tossa? Truly, she was only a girl, of no great mind or skill. In the world of the Game she would have been a pawn, valued perhaps for her youth or her virginity, for some of the powerful value these ephemera because they are ephemera, and perhaps she would have had no value at all to spend her life among the corn. But to me¾to me she became more than the world allows in value. Her arms reaching to feel the sun, her long-fingered hands which floated in gestures like the blossoms of trees upon least winds, her hair glinting in the sun or netting shadow at dusk, her laugh when she spoke to me, her touch upon the bandage at my head as she said, “Poor lad, so burned by the silliness abroad in the land”…
She was only teasing me, so Yarrel said, as girls tease boys, but I had no experience of that. Seven days we had, and seven nights. She became my breath, my sight, my song. I only looked at her, heard her, filled myself with the smell of her, warm, beastly, like an oven of bread. She was only a girl. I cannot make more of her than that. Yet she became the sun and the grass and the wind and my own blood running in me. I do not think she knew. If she knew, she did not care greatly. Seven days. I would not have touched her except to offer my hand in a climb. I would not have said her name but prayerfully…