Dawn Wind by Rosemary Sutcliff

interested him more. ‘What are you doing here alone in Viroconium?’ he demanded, frowning. ‘If you are alone. I thought the town was empty.’
    ‘No.’ She was rubbing her bare feet one over the other where the warmth of the fire fell. ‘It was not empty. I was here all the time.’
    ‘Since the Saxons came?’
    ‘Yes, since—then.’
    Owain said hoarsely, ‘Tell me what happened.’
    ‘There was a great stir all through the city, and they cried that the Saxons were coming and all the farms that way’—she pointed south and east with a bony finger—‘were burning. And all the people caught up food and the things they wanted most to save, that were light enough to carry, and ran away into the hills. I ran with them, but only a little way, and when the Saxons had gone again and the fire died down, I came back.’
    ‘Why?’
    She looked at him with those strange rain-grey eyes wide and grave. ‘It is the only place I know.’
    Owain was silent a moment; then he said, ‘Weren’t you afraid to be here all alone, with the town dead and empty?’
    ‘No. I would have been more afraid where the others went, into the hills. There were no roofs to hide you from the sky.’
    ‘There aren’t many here.’
    ‘There are little dark corners. Besides—’ and her voice hardened with vicious satisfaction, ‘Viroconium I like better without people in it.’
    In the complete silence that followed, Owain heard the wind rising, rustling the scorched leaves to and fro. Despite himself he was aware of a sudden ache of pity. He did not want to feel it, because he knew that it was the beginning of things coming back to life in him and that coming back to life would hurt like the blood running back into a frozen limb.
    Regina heard the wind too, and shivered, creeping a little closer to the fire, her thin wisp of a face sharpened with entreaty; and he saw that she was afraid she had made him angry—and he had a fire. The beggar’s whine was back in her voice. ‘You’ll not turn me away? The wind blows so cold now that it is autumn. Let me sit near the fire. See—not very near, just where a little warmth reaches.’
    Owain glared, guarded and resentful because she was making things come alive in him, and it hurt; oh, how it hurt! But he knew that he could no more turn her away from his fire than he could have turned Dog. ‘There is fire to spare for both of us. Stay if you must,’ he said grudgingly. And she sighed and folded up on to her heels as though she had been there all along.
    Owain sat on his haunches with Dog sprawled against him, and went on staring at her, while she leaned forward holding her hands to the flame. They were so thin that the fire shone through them red, and he could see the delicate shadows of the bones. ‘Why have you followed me and watched me in secret all day?’ he asked at last.
    ‘I wanted to see what you were doing, and I was afraid if you saw me you would throw stones at me.’
    ‘Did people often throw stones at you?’
    ‘Oh yes, quite often.’ She turned the backs of her hands to the fire. ‘What were you doing? Why have you come to Viroconium?’
    Owain stared into the fire and scratched the scar on his arm. ‘I was with Kyndylan’s war-host—I and my father and my brother—when we gathered here in the spring. And after—after it was all over’—his voice began to shake and he steadied it carefully—‘I thought that if there were any more of us left alive, they might gather here again; and if I came back, I—might find them.’ It was odd: with their sitting down by the fire together, something had changed between him and the girl. A little while ago he would not have told her that; he would simply have bidden her go tend her own business.
    She looked at him quickly; all her movements were as though quicksilver ran in her veins. ‘There was a battle? And the Saxons won?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘No one came,’ Regina said.
    Owain shook his head, still staring into the