By noon the next day, the cheering had stopped.
It had accompanied them through Harrowmere's gate, where women held up children to see the returning god. Returning, the criers said. Not surrendering, not losing. Soldiers came home, the river opened, winter became possible. Selka had heard that kind of language before. Usually she was the person paid to give it a second voice.
Downstream, in the occupied villages, people watched from doorways.
The carriage traveled on six iron-rimmed wheels. Four horses pulled it, relieved by four more. Ruun stood when it could and sat when the ruts jarred the iron against its ribs. Its temple stone occupied the space where a passenger should have put her feet. Selka walked most of the morning.
They stopped at a village with its grain house boarded shut. Darr wanted oats and a replacement harness. The local overseer wanted three prisoners released from a ditch gang. Neither proposed paying.
“Ask them where the oats are,” Darr told Selka.
“They understand you.”
“Then ask more persuasively.”
The overseer folded his arms. Beside him a woman held an empty basket. Her mouth had collapsed around missing teeth, but her stare was steady.
“We have seed,” she said in Torren speech. “That is what you haven't found yet. We put it where the rats couldn't get it.”
“I'm not asking where,” Selka answered in the same language.
“You will.”
Darr watched their faces. “What did she say?”
Selka translated it exactly.
“Peace needs horses,” he said.
“Spring needs seed.”
He rubbed the back of his neck, then ordered two bags taken from the escort cart. Barley, their own ration. The overseer accepted one, refused the other, and sent a boy for the oats. Selka caught the boy glancing toward the carriage.
“Can it hear us?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“All the time?”
“Only when you're speaking.”
That seemed to disappoint him. He ran off.
The woman with the basket approached Ruun. Two soldiers moved to block her. Selka stepped between them and let her pass.
The woman held out a piece of gray bread.
Ruun looked at it. “I do not eat that.”
Selka translated. The woman shrugged and ate it herself, without ceremony. A laugh escaped from somewhere in the watching crowd.
“What does it eat?” she asked.
“It won't tell me.”
“Then it's a child after all.”
Ruun understood enough Torren speech to turn its head. Water moved beneath its cheek, darkening it.
“She has lost teeth,” it told Selka, “and still uses them.”
Selka almost smiled. She kept the comment to herself.
They moved on with oats, a mended harness, and one fewer sack of barley. Darr walked beside her until the village disappeared around the bend.
“There are men here who'll put a knife in us tonight,” he said. “You know that.”
“I know.”
“Kerr might be hungry too.”
She had no answer good enough for either hunger.
Late in the afternoon Ruun beckoned her. One of the lower carriage irons had slipped, cutting into the back of its knee. She climbed aboard and pushed against the latch. It would not move.
“Hold still.”
“I have been holding still.”
She borrowed a hammer and struck the catch from beneath. The iron lifted. Ruun's foot shifted with a sound like a bucket emptied on stone.
“Does it hurt?”
“You are asking now?”
She put the hammer down. “Yes.”
The god examined her. Beyond it the road unrolled through stripped orchards. Soldiers had cut the trees for firewood, then burned the stumps to prevent cover. Fresh shoots had found cracks in the black ground.
“It hurts differently when I move,” Ruun said at last.
She settled beside the stone. It was cold against her leg despite the warm body beside it. Shell marks curled across its worn surface, and in one corner someone had carved the outline of a small boat.
“Is that your temple?” she asked.
“A step.”
“You made them haul a step?”
“I liked that step.”
There was nothing to do with that answer except accept it. Selka tucked the borrowed hammer under the seat so she would not have to ask for it again.
Ahead of them a scout came back running. The road dipped toward the river. Through the bare branches she saw the bridge: one arch whole, one arch broken, and something long and white turning beneath the gap.