36

Clutching her sodden cloak about her face to hide her scar, Pirra hurried after Hylas, who’d gone ahead to find Havoc. For two days they’d been desperately seeking Userref while the storm continued to rage—but still no sign of him.

Rounding a bend, she found Hylas confronting a gang of fishermen with three-pronged spears and weird purple skin. A flock of soggy sheep huddled in a pen adjoining a tumbledown farmhouse, and trapped between that and the pen was Havoc: wet, snarling, and terrified.

“Leave her alone!” shouted Hylas, grabbing one of the spear shafts.

“Don’t you dare hurt her!” screamed Pirra.

“That thing’s after our sheep!” yelled a fisherman.

Everyone shouted at once. Havoc seized her chance and shot off into the woods. “What’s going on?” bellowed a voice.

At the door of the farmhouse Pirra saw a mountainous old woman swathed in what seemed to be a wet leather tent. She had a face like a purple sponge and only one eye, which lurched from Pirra to Hylas—and glared at him. “You!” she rasped.

“Who’s she?” said Gorgo, jerking her head at Pirra.

“Just some girl,” said Hylas.

Gorgo snorted, and he sensed that she saw through Pirra’s disguise, but didn’t care.

They were all in the farmhouse, including Gorgo’s elderly dog and the sheep, and her sons were busy ransacking the place. The air was a fug of wet livestock and dye-workers’ stink of urine and rotting fish.

“Do you know this woman?” whispered Pirra beside him.

“I met her when I first got to Keftiu,” he hissed.

“Is this their farm?”

“No, but I wouldn’t point that out!” Then to Gorgo, “Are we prisoners?”

Gorgo ignored that. “A few nights ago,” she said accusingly, “we hear of Crows on Setoya. Then this storm washes away the Plague, so we come to see what we can find. Suddenly there’s a lion attacking our sheep—and now you! You tell me what’s going on!”

“We’re hiding from the Crows,” said Hylas, “and we’re looking for—”

“Crows are gone,” snapped Gorgo. “Man called Deukaryo ganged up with a whole crowd of farmers, forced them at spear point onto a fishing boat.” Her laugh shook her vast bulk. “Some lad on board with a bandaged head yelling about the Angry Ones. They’ll not be back to Keftiu in a hurry.”

A dreadful thought occurred to Hylas. Maybe the Crows had found Userref; maybe Telamon had the dagger.

Pirra had thought of that too. “You’ve got to let us go!” she cried. “We’re looking for an Egyptian, we have to find him! Did the Crows catch him?”

Thunder shook the farmhouse. “You’re not going anywhere in this,” growled Gorgo.

Pirra was curled up asleep and Gorgo sat snoring by the fire with her dog at her feet. Hylas listened to the creak of the rafters and wondered if the same storm was battering Messenia—and if Issi was sheltering somewhere, thinking of her brother.

Ever since Kunisu, his mother’s death had weighed on his heart like a stone. He knew Pirra was wondering what was wrong, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell her.

And he was worried about Havoc. Whether or not they found Userref, they couldn’t stay on Keftiu, or someone would recognize Pirra and drag her back to Kunisu; but what about Havoc?

He was roused by the smell of singed fur: The dog’s rump was beginning to scorch. Quietly, Hylas shifted its bottom, and it thumped its tail in its sleep.

“You’re a long way from Mount Lykas, aren’t you, lad?” rasped Gorgo.

He met her cloudy eye. “I never told you I was from there.”

“You didn’t need to. I knew your mother.”

He went still. “My mother’s dead. Her ghost came to me in the Great Court at Kunisu. How did you know her?”

She spat a gob of purple snot. “She was a Marsh Dweller; an Outsider of the coast. They got on well with us Messenians. I was older than her, but we were friends.” She gave a rumbling laugh. “We both fell for handsome foreigners. I fetched up here. She went north to the mountains near Mycenae—”

“Mycenae?” said Hylas.

“He was Mountain Clan. But you must know that, you’ve got his tattoo.”

Hylas stared at the mark on his forearm. “But—this is a Crow tattoo. They did it when I was a slave, I turned it into a bow by scratching a line along the bottom.”

“Well, it’s the mark of the Mountain Clan. You’re the image of your father.” With a blotchy purple paw, she scratched her chins. “They quarreled. Your mother knew the Crows would invade, but he didn’t believe it, so she took you and Issi and went south.”

“You—you know my sister’s name.”

Gorgo shrugged. “Means frog in your mother’s tongue. She liked frogs.”

Hylas was reeling. His father had been Mountain Clan, the clan that had refused to fight the Crows. His father had been a coward.

“She never got as far as Messenia,” muttered Gorgo. “You were too small.”

“So she left us on Mount Lykas,” said Hylas in a low voice. “Wrapped in a bearskin.”

“Bears,” grunted Gorgo. “Sacred to your father’s clan. She left you and went to fetch help.”

With a stick, Hylas jabbed at the fire. “Why didn’t she come back?”

“She got sick and died,” Gorgo said brutally. “By the time her father heard about you, some peasant had taken you to his village.”

Her father . . . Hylas remembered the scrawny old Outsider who used to teach him the ways of the wild. “He was my grandfather. He never told us, why didn’t he tell us?”

“Who knows? I heard all this long after, when someone from my village turned up here. Maybe the old man couldn’t bear to talk about her, maybe he blamed your father for her death—”

“He was right about that, wasn’t he?” Hylas burst out. “If it hadn’t been for my father, she wouldn’t have died and we wouldn’t have spent years slaving for some lousy old peasant!”

“Well, it’s done,” snapped Gorgo. “You’re not the first boy to lose his parents.”

Shortly before dawn, Hylas shook Pirra awake. “Come on,” he muttered. “Dawn soon, we’re free to go.”

“Didn’t you sleep?” yawned Pirra.

“No,” he said curtly.

Outside it was still dark and as stormy as ever. As they headed off beneath the dripping trees, Gorgo appeared in the doorway and called to him.

“Watch yourself on the road, lad! Odd people about. My sons saw a weird one a while back. Face smeared with lime, said he was in mourning. Could’ve been a madman—or an Egyptian.”

“Where was he heading?” cried Pirra.

Gorgo jerked her head. “Turonija. East along the coast.”