Tavern - voices rumble up through the floorboards. The indistinct muffle pierced again and again by a bellowing laugh, some snatches of a merry fiddle-tune, friendly cat-calls.
Above the warmth and noise of the Comb and Wattle a skinny red-haired lass lies in a narrow bed. Her freckled face partly smothered by her pillow as she pushes her hot damp face into the clean old linen. The friendship of the room below rises past her, up through the creaking floorboards and the worn bright rug; washes past her unfelt, seeping through the walls and ceiling of the cheap, spartan chamber and lost into the world.
Across from where Steora lies in her misery, a neat bed. Empty of her room-mate and once-friend, Gyth. Steora lifts her blotchy pink face from the pillow and looks over to the bed of her betrayer, then begins to howl again, telling her misery to the empty room.
' ... I never don' nothin'. No ... I baint done nothin' wrong... I HAD ter tell them! Stupid Gyth. She got a head full o' bloody moonbeams... she don't know nothin... iffen i hadn't said where to find Him... they'd only ha' come back ter bother us..'
Steora rubs her eyes roughly with the back of her hand as she sits up on her bed, gulping down her tears.
'She hadn't ought ter have told him! Stupid bloody Gyth burnt man lovin' stupid fair-haired addle-pated stupid gyth...'
She glares accusingly at the empty bed, as though expecting the imagined figure of her friend to respond to her well reasoned arguement.
' i don' like the chetwood gang, wi' their big swords and mean old eyes. Stupid helm-giffer and his stupid master Oldgrove. I duresen't want them botherin' us. so i tells 'em where he is, so's they'd leave us be...They'm allus botherin' us an we aint done nothin' wrong!'
A crumpled pillow flies across the room, hitting the imaginary Gyth a satisfying wack in the face.
'Tis alright fer -you-! You get wine an' cake an' songs an... feh.. I bet I knows what else you gets from the burnt man eh! eh? big 'sausages' ... thats what you gets! Allus i get is steora do this, steora go diggin', Steora get bloody chased by bone-men and wraith-walkers and bloody helm-giffers an...'
'nothin'... I gets nothin'. No horse, no gifts ...nothin' but this stupid bloody worthless thing!'
Her hand closes over the dark ring on her thumb, trying to yank it away, but the ring will not move from a thumb swollen by heat and crying. A new flood of hopelessness floods over the young girl, far from home, a stranger lost in a sea of foreigners, swimming in a darkening world out of her depth.
'you up an' told that burnt man what i said, an' I wager he was all 'good gyth, clever gyth' .. but I has ter stand there while he -stares- at me! he got eyes like they'm burning you up in ice... t'aint my fault now ... whatever happens next! Tis -your- fault Gyth. I had ter tell him summat good! or he was goin' ter ... ter...'
Steora shrieks in terror at the promised fate of a girl who ever dares betray the burnt man again.
