While Pip was still sitting on the sun-warmed bricks watching the space under the washing bench, a small grey shape hopped down from the lower shelf of the partitioned laundry shelter.
It was the original field mouse from the first autumn—considerably greyer around the muzzle now, plump from a summer of stolen oat groats, and still carrying its stiff left hind leg at a slight sideways hitch where the old marsh-owl talon had scarred its flank.
The mouse did not pay the slightest respect to a creature that had once carried the crown of an ancient war-god across three mountain ranges. It trotted briskly across the warm bricks, stood up on its one good hind foot against the rim of Pip’s shallow red earthenware food dish, and fished out a prime roasted barley grain that had rolled in from Kettle’s morning mash, stuffing the seed straight into its cheek beside a clean flake of potter’s clay.
Pip turned its head, saw the mouse’s tail balanced on its dish rim, and clicked its sideways jaw in sharp annoyance.
“Mine... old,” Pip rasped.
The two short words scraped roughly over the white storm-crow scar on its tongue, slow and gravelly as ever. The scar would never smooth out, and speaking would always take a little work. The mouse did not even twitch an ear; it hopped down with the barley grain in its mouth and limped cheerfully back under the laundry board to eat it in peace.
