Wren had seen the sprig’s eyes before she saw the bolt, and that was the whole of her reason, afterward, when people asked her why she had done it. The thing had been looking for the Warden. Not for the road, and not for the reeds, and not for the men on the bank who had put their bows up and let fly at a creature that screamed. It had been looking up at the Warden’s hand with that one wide open eye, as a lost child looks up at the only grown face it has seen in a day, and she had thought, very clearly and without any fear at all, that somebody on the causeway ought to go and meet it.
So she went.
She did not remember stepping off the stone. She remembered the wet grey surface of the causeway under her boots, and the flat cold light off the water, and the net’s tarred cord dragging at her skirt, and then the bolt. It caught her above the collarbone and turned her round, as a hand turns a door on a hinge, and for an instant there was no pain at all, only a great blunt surprise, as if somebody had shouted her name in a room where she had been very quietly alone. Then the cold came. It came up from the shoulder into her neck and her jaw, and then the heat came after it, and the heat was far worse.
