Other girls were giggling and chatting as they sat combing out their damp hair in the sun. I wondered about joining them but they were watching youths wrestling on a smoothed expanse of sun-baked clay. The lads were naked but for belts around their waists linked to leather bands around each thigh by plaited leather straps and a brief loincloth to prevent an opponent getting an unexpected handhold. The object seemed to be to drag your opponent off his feet by these straps. I spared a moment to appreciate the game as well as the players but decided the lasses wouldn’t welcome me.

Then I heard a hastily stifled giggle somewhere behind the laundry. A seemingly casual stroll took me round to a drying yard where shirts and blankets flapped in the breeze. I ducked beneath a swathe of sodden cloth and found a huddle of children shirking whatever tasks they’d been set. Some were throwing knobbly bones from some sizeable fish’s spine into a circle scored on the ground while others tossed a turnip studded with feathers between themselves. They all looked at me with vivid curiosity.

“Good day to you,” I said with a friendly smile.

“What’s your name?” asked a pert little girl with an upturned, freckled nose and dark eyes telling of mixed blood somewhere in her line.

“Livak,” I told her. “What’s yours?”

“Gliffa,” she answered promptly. “You’re not from here.”

“No, I’m not.” I swept a vague arm in the direction of the sea. “My people live in a forest that covers the land with trees taller than your houses.” That should intrigue youngsters from a land where trees rarely reached above knee height.

“What brings you here?” Gliffa was clearly a child always asking questions.

“I wanted to see the sea.” I shrugged.

“What happened to your hair?” demanded a small boy, his own locks close-cropped to little more than gold fuzz.

“Nothing.” I sat down, cross-legged. “It’s always been this colour, same as all my people.”

“Are you gebaedim?” the child asked suspiciously.

That was a word I’d caught last night. I shook my head. “What’s that?”

“Gebaedim live in the western lands.” One of the older girls leaned closer to study my hair and eyes. “They look like real people until they’re out of the sunlight. Then you can see they have shadow-blue skin and black eyes like a beast’s.” Smaller ones who’d been looking distinctly nervous relaxed at her authoritative pronouncement.

So Sorgrad had been right. I smiled again. “We call them the Eldritch Kin.”

“You’ve seen them?” The crop-headed lad’s blue eyes were awestruck.

“No one has, not in a long age.” I shook my head reassuringly. “We tell tales of them. Would you like to hear one?” That won me eager nods all round.

“There once was a man called Marsile who chased a hare inside an Eldritch man’s earthen fort. The Eldritch man made him welcome and offered him guest gifts.” The story of Marsile was one I could tell in my sleep and I gave the children the version my father had told me as a little girl, full of miraculous things like the leaf that prompted fish to throw themselves out of the water when Marsile tossed it into their pond, and the sprig of blossom that made him proof against any fire, even a dragon’s breath. My personal favourite was the purse that called coin to keep company with any he put in it.

“When evening came, Marsile told the Eldritch man he must return home to his wife.” I lowered my voice and leaned forward, the children unconsciously doing the same. “The Eldritch man was angry. He said he had only given the gifts because he thought Marsile intended to marry his daughter and, truth be told, she was a great beauty.” Versions I’d learned later in life detailed the Eldritch maid’s charms in terms emphatically not for children, as well as elaborating on just what Marsile did with her to make the Eldritch man so angry. I moved on to Marsile’s desperate bargaining for his freedom.

“Finally, the Eldritch man agreed to let Marsile go, but,” I raised a warning finger, “only if he remained for one night, while the Eldritch man went to Marsile’s house and took what he wanted, in return for the gifts he had made him. Because, as we all know, a gift once given cannot be taken back.” The children all nodded solemnly; that rule evidently held even in these poverty-stricken lands.

I told them of Marsile’s frantic night worrying about what he might lose, rather than his enthusiastic romping with the Eldritch daughter according to the taproom version. Some stories had the Eldritch man making just as free with Marsile’s wife. In those the hapless man returned to find a year had passed for every chime he’d spent within the earthen ring and the Eldritch man’s final gift to him was a brood of black-haired brats at his hearth and a wife who ever after burned his food as she pined for her magical lover. But that wasn’t a tale for children either. What they wanted was a rousing finish.

“As the sky began to pale, the Eldritch man returned and told Marsile to leave. He warned him he’d release his hounds if Marsile wasn’t beyond the river by daybreak. Marsile ran but the sun came up and he hadn’t reached the river. He heard howls behind him and running paws,” I drummed my hands on my thighs and the little ones shivered. “He ran for his life with barking ever closer. He dared not look back, even when something caught at his cloak. He ripped it off and threw it away, hearing the dogs stop to worry at it. But he soon felt their icy breath on his heels again so he threw away his bag, then his jerkin. He emptied his pockets, he lost the leaf, he lost the enchanted blossom and the magic purse but just as the sun came up over the eastern edge of the land, he reached the river. He threw himself in and swam to the other side.” The children all heaved a sigh of relief.

“He scrambled out and finally looked back.” I paused, looking at the intent faces. “Huge black hounds prowled on the far bank. They had eyes as white as snow and frost dripped from teeth like icicles.” I sat back. “Then the sun melted them into smoke.”

The children cheered and clapped but as always, there was one less appreciative in my audience. “They couldn’t have reached him anyway.” An older lad at the rear of the group spoke up with confident disdain. “Gebaedim can’t cross water.”

“Then how did they get to Kehannasekke—” The lass broke off and looked guiltily at me. I might tell a good story but I was still an adult and I’d bet her braids this wasn’t something they were supposed to discuss.

“We’re safe as long at the hargeard holds.” The older boy scowled at her. “My father said. ”

I saw him nervously tumbling three conical shells and a pea-sized reddish stone from one hand to the other. “What’s that game?”

“Just nonsense for the little ones.” He looked slyly at me. “Could you find the stone?”

I pursed my lips. “How hard can it be?”

“It’s easy,” he assured me, with all the instincts of a born huckster.

“You’re not supposed to play that,” piped up some sanctimonious miss.

“I won’t tell,” I grinned.

The lad glared at the dutiful one. “We’re only playing for fun. That’s allowed.” He sounded a little too defiant for that to be strictly true.

I was happy for him to think we weren’t playing for anything of value as I studied the shells beneath his rapidly moving hands. We play this trick with nutshells and a pea back home and call it the squirrel game. I had been a handful of years older than this lad when I’d first learned it, practising till my fingers cramped once I realised a penniless lass on the road had to choose between deception or prostitution and I had scant inclination for whoring. I knew exactly where the lad’s piece of gravel was and put my finger unerringly on the shell next to it. “There.”

“No!” He’d need to learn how to hide his triumph if he wanted to keep people playing long enough to empty their pockets.