“I’d like you to meet my brother,” Marga said. “He’s in the parlor. I’ll leave you alone, if you don’t mind helping yourself totea.” Her words were polite enough, but her tone suggested she had no intention of going anywhere near the parlor no matter what Clement said.

“Meet her brother?” said Gilly doubtfully, in Shaftalese.

“Cake,” said Clement, handing over her wet cape for Marga to hang up in the hall.

“Oh, cake,”said Gilly sarcastically as he followed her toward the parlor. “Well, if he’s waiting in there to shoot you, at least you’ll shield me from injury. And maybe I’ll have time while he’s reloading to shout that I’m a helpless cripple. And maybe he’ll slice me a piece of cake.”

Clement stepped through the door with her hand on her saber. The emaciated man who huddled miserably by the fire looked up at her entry, but certainly seemed unlikely to attack her.

“I can tell you what you want to know,” he said. “But first I want my Davi back.”

He sat silent while Clement got Gilly settled in a comfortable chair. It had been a long time, Clement judged, since Gilly had even been able to sit in comfort–somehow, she must get him an upholstered chair. She brought him a steaming cup of tea and a great slice of the splendid cake that had been sitting untouched on the side table. “What are you trying to do to me?” Gilly moaned.

“Eat slowly,” Clement said. “Or I’ll make you eat another piece. We’ve got to stay here long enough for all those soldiers in the kitchen to get their bit of cake.”

She turned to the miserable man by the fire and asked if she could serve him some tea. He looked startled, and then disgusted. Nearly five months had passed since Clement took his daughter from his arms, but the sight of the tough old woman at the garrison gates with the child’s name wrapped around her chest had reminded Clement of that family nearly every day. She particularly remembered the way this man had tried to soothe his screaming daughter’s terror.

She said, “You want your girl back before you’ll talk to me? What exactly have you got that makes you think you can make such a bargain?”

The man turned to face her then. He had looked terribly ill five months ago; now he looked half dead. “One of my husbands was in the garrison that night it was burned down,” he said. “And then he ran with those people for a few months. All over the land he went, having what he said were adventures. Then he was hurt and they brought him home to recover, but he died. I can’t do farmwork any more, so I took care of him. He told me some things–he wouldn’t have, but he wasn’t in his right mind towards the end. When I’ve got Davi back, I’ll tell you what he told me–all of it.”

“I’m not setting out to fetch your girl until I know what it is you know,” said Clement impatiently.

He said, “Kill me if you want. I’m dying anyway. When I told my family they couldn’t stop me from coming to you, they abandoned the farm. They figured you’d come after them, I guess, to try to force me to talk. Now there’s nothing you can do to me, nothing you can kill that isn’t dead already. Do what you want.” His tone was flat, bitter, and utterly without hope. He sagged wearily in his chair.

“Friend,” said Gilly, with his mouth full of cake, “I suggest you give the lieutenant‑general a little more than that. She’s got to commit a whole company of soldiers to a foul‑weather journey, and she’s too good a commander to do that for nothing but a vague hope. Give her an idea of what you know, anyway. You can do that, can’t you?”

The farmer, apparently roused out of his lethargy by the sight of Gilly’s remarkable ugliness, gave him a frankly puzzled look. He wanted to ask Gilly something. It would have been a rude question, something like what are you,prompted as much by how Gilly spoke as it was by how he looked. But the farmer apparently could not bring himself to be so rude.

Clement sat down, and crossed her legs, and endeavored to look as if she really didn’t care about the outcome of this conversation. She sipped her tea.

Eventually, the farmer turned to her. “This group that calls itself Death‑and‑Life, they want to do something that will rouse all of Shaftal to join them. Then they figure they can exterminate all of you by spring. I know what that thing is that they’re going to do. I know when, and I know where.”

Clement set down her teacup. “It’s almost winter already.”

“It is,” the farmer said indifferently. “Maybe you’d better stop wasting your time.”

She looked at Gilly. He was rapidly, regretfully, eating the remainder of his cake. “How will I recognize Davi?” Clement asked the farmer. “And how do I contact you when I have her? Through Marga?”

As they discussed the details, Clement cut another slice, wrapped it in her handkerchief–the first clean one she’d had in almost half a year–and put the cake carefully in her pocket to give Gilly later. “It will be some time before you hear from me,” she told the farmer. “Fifteen, twenty days.” Because she was unhappy to know that an entire farmstead had emptied itself for fear of her, she wanted to add coldly that theirs had been an absurd overreaction. But even now she was reconsidering her decision to let the farmer go unmolested, wondering if after all it might be better to hand him over to the torturers. Perhaps, she thought, his family had been wise after all.

She lay a coin on the side table for Marga to find, and left the parlor with Gilly sighing sadly at her elbow.

In the kitchen, the dozen soldiers stood or squatted around the hearth, with pieces of cake in their hands, not eating, not bickering with each other, but listening raptly to a woman who sat on a stool at the table, with a bowl of beans at her elbow. She was telling them a story, in Sainnese.

Some of the soldiers glanced at Clement pleadingly, asking her not to interrupt, so Clement let Gilly in and closed the door behind them. Marga silently offered Gilly her stool, but he gestured that he could continue to lean on his cane. The storyteller, without pausing or seeming to notice the new arrivals, continued to weave her tale, which had to do with an arrogant man, a magical forest, and a vicious wild pig. Having arrived as the tale was finished, Clement could not follow its import, but the storyteller was an extraordinary sight. Though she was dressed in a plain servant’s outfit, and covered to the knee with a stained apron, her dark, angular face could not be disguised as ordinary. She had black hair, black eyes, skin of such deep brown it would disappear into shadows, a face that was all hollows and jutting angles. She had seen some action recently, for that face was marred with fading bruises.

Her tale was finished. The soldiers uttered sighs like children when the show is over, and only then remembered their uneaten cakes. The storyteller, though, seemed to be waiting for something. Some of the soldiers gave another one a nudge, and he cleared his throat and told a soldier’s tale that Clement had heard many times before, usually told better. When he was finished, though, the storyteller gave a bow, as though to thank him, and her hands, which had been gesturing to illustrate her tale, returned to the drudge’s work of shelling beans.

The soldiers stuffed their cake in their mouths and reached for the rain capes that were drying on hooks by the fire. But they paused and glanced at each other hopefully when Gilly grated in his unlovely voice, “I’ve never heard that tale before. Might I trouble you to tell another?”

The woman said, “I am a gatherer of stories, and I will trade with anyone, story for story.”

Gilly seemed nonplused, but one of the soldiers said, “Iness will make the trade for you, sir. Iness knows lots of tales.”

“Well,” said Gilly, “Perhaps I will accept that stool after all.” He perched on Marga’s stool with his hands resting on his cane. Clement, standing beside him, leaned down so he could explain himself. He whispered, “Winter entertainment.”