“The Tajeddo healer came down later to change the poultice on his hand. The woman came with him. She sat silently watching while the healer scraped off the old poultice and pressed the new one in its place. It was the heat of the day and the sea wind had died. The sun seemed be standing still in the sky above Istra. He lay very still on his cloak while the healer worked, blinking the sweat from his eyes and licking it from his lips, trying to pace his breaths as the signo had taught him. In Cesin it would be the end of the barley harvest; now they would be sowing the rye, before the first frost. Already it would be cool enough in the early nights that you could see your breath on the air; and they would have lit the hypocaust under the floor in the big house at Vessy, and redaubed the chinks in the old stone walls against the wind off the lake. It was—it took him a moment, counting it off in his head—five years to the month since he was home for the harvest. He had been fourteen then and very nearly to his manhood. That year at harvest the bodies of the executed Dobryni still hung in the oaks below the city walls on the north bank of the river, facing the causeway. He had not been down to the river all that harvest season. Afraid of ghosts, Taure said—Taure, who was four years older and afraid of nothing, who went out in the river wood with the huntsmen for deer and boar, and who did not mean any harm by his words, but who did not understand, could not understand, because he had not been looking in the Dobryno’s eyes as the man died. It was not fear—not, at least, as Taure supposed it. He, Torien, did not fear the dead. The dead had followed him five years now, familiar as kin. But he had let Taure think it was fear, because he did not know how to explain that it was shame.”