Dawn Wind by Rosemary Sutcliff Page B

seemed all right.’ She was leaning on the remains of the door timbers as she spoke, her pointed chin in her hands as she stared through. ‘He once gave me a copper coin. I was the only beggar he ever did that to.’
    ‘How did that happen?’ Owain said, staring into the little courtyard beside her.
    ‘I ran behind him in the street on all fours, and brayed,’ said Regina. ‘He threw it at me to go away.’
    They hid the paunched hare in a convenient hole in Kyndylan’s private colonnade, and spent part of the rest of the day making their lair more comfortable, getting in more firewood and more grass for bedding. They found an old rust-eaten sword in the ruins of a house, and brought it in to spike the hare on when the time came to cook it. It seemed to have become an accepted thing that the lair was for both of them now. Owain never asked her where she had slept before; maybe she had had no particular hideout but had merely curled up in a different corner every night.
    He went back to look at his snares much earlier that evening than he had done yesterday, because of Regina, but even so, she did not come with him that time, but slipped off by herself at the last moment on some business of her own. The snares were all empty, and one of them had been interfered with by a fox. He reset it, and came back through the wild burial ground and the dead streets of Viroconium to the store-room at the far end of Kyndylan’s Palace.
    Regina was not there, and suddenly the little dark lair looked empty without her. But he had scarcely had time to notice that when he heard the patter of bare feet and saw her coming towards him along the broken colonnade, with her tattered skirt gathered up in front of her, very carefully, as though she had something precious hidden in its folds. Dog, who had by now accepted her into their company, swung his tail in greeting, and thrust a hopeful muzzle at whatever it was she carried; and Owain cuffed him away, but looked curiously in the same direction himself. ‘What have you got there?’
    For answer, she opened the gathered-up folds of her skirt, and he saw that the treasure was a few handfuls of yellow grain.
    ‘Where did you find that?’
    ‘It is in the baskets under the big baker’s shop in the Forum. The rats eat it too. There are still a few cats—you can hear them singing sometimes at night when there’s a moon. But there aren’t enough to keep the rats down, and so they eat the corn. But there’s still quite a lot left.’
    So that was how she had kept alive all this while. He had not thought to wonder until now. When she first appeared, her coming had been so startling, and afterwards it seemed so much a matter of course, that either way he had not thought to wonder how she had lived before.
    As she spoke, she had gathered the folds of her skirt into one hand, and with the other she was picking out a few golden grains. With a curious deliberate delicacy, as though she was doing something familiar that delighted her, and making it last as long as possible, she scattered them almost singly, a few on the broken pavement, a few more on the half wall of the colonnade.
    There had not seemed to be any birds about when she started, but on the instant, with a purr of wings from all directions, they were there; dust-coloured sparrows cuddling to the ground, a robin perched on long legs, a rose-breasted chaffinch, a shy thrush hovering on the outskirts of the throng; and the grey flagstones were alive with them among the gold-spangling of the scattered barley.
    And then, with a flash of jewel-blue through the air, a tit darted to her feet, where she had dropped the last grain of all.
    Dog stiffened, thrusting forward his broad muzzle towards the impertinent feathered atom on the pavement; and the tit, waking to the presence of unknown monsters, started, spread its wings and made a sound like an infinitely small cat spitting; and losing its head, darted off in the wrong direction, through