pouch of some weight which he set, unopened, on the table. She began to open it
when he leaned forwards and grasped her wrist tightly.
‘It wasn’t me, ‘Lyra. I wasn’t there that night. I ran away, just like you did.’
His voice carried Illyra back those fifteen years sweeping the doubts from her
memories. ‘I was a child then, Walegrin. A little child, no more than four.
Where could I have run to?’
He released her wrist and sat back in the chair. Illyra emptied the pouch onto
her table. She recognized only a few of the beads and bracelets, but enough to
realize that she gazed upon all of her mother’s jewellery. She picked up a
string of blue glass beads strung on a creamy braided silk.
‘These have been restrung,’ she said simply. Walegrin nodded. ‘Blood rots the
silk and stinks to the gods. I had no choice. All the others are as they were.’
Illyra let the beads fall back into the pile. He had known how to tempt her. The
entire heap was not worth a single gold piece, but no storehouse of gold could
have been more valuable to her.
‘Well, then, what do you want from me?’
He pushed the trinkets aside and from another pouch produced a palm-sized
pottery shard which he placed gently on the velvet.
‘Tell me everything about that: where the rest of the tablet is; how it came to
be broken; what the symbols mean – everything!’
There was nothing in the jagged fragment that justified the change that came
over Walegrin as he spoke of it. Illyra saw a piece of common orange pottery
with a crowded black design set under the glaze; the sort of ware that could be