The water came to Idrin’s knee, and he did not move from the place where it had found him. He stood on the last dry flag of the walk with his lamp held out over the cistern and the Hollowed commander standing across the water from him, and he asked the question he had come down the stair to ask.
“Who are your people?”
Sefra did not answer at once. She stood with her own lamp lowered until its flame lay on the black surface, and the reflection of it trembled there between them. Her face in that light was not the face of a kitchen-woman, or of a grey thing in a Corvanne cloak, or of any of the shapes the Hold’s Watch had described to him in the siege’s first week. It was a face of perhaps thirty years, narrow and watchful, with a long mouth that looked as though it had been bitten often and had decided not to mind. Her hair was dark and cut short against her ears. It was the only thing about her that did not seem borrowed.
“My people were the people of Hasp,” she said.
“Tell me about Hasp.”
“It is a valley.” She said it in the Hold’s own speech, slowly, like a woman laying out tools on a bench in the order she would need them. “It is green in the spring and green in the autumn, and the water in its river is so clear you can count…
