Nada endured the close appraisal without self-consciousness. Finally she said: "You must be hungry. Come; sit here and eat."
Dylara obeyed without further urging. Nada watched her in silence until the girl's appetite had been dulled, then said: "How did they happen to get you?"
Dylara told her, briefly. For some obscure reason she could not bring herself to mention Tharn by name. Just the thought of him, falling beneath a Sepharian club, brought a sharp ache to her throat.
There was a far-away expression in Nada's eyes as Dylara finished her story. "I knew a warrior once—one very much like the young man who took you from your father's caves. He was a mighty chief—and my mate. Many summers ago I was captured near our caves as I walked at the jungle's edge. A war party from a strange tribe had crept close to our caves during the night, planning to raid us at dawn. They seized me; but my cries aroused my people, and the war party fled, taking me with them. They lost their way in the darkness, and after many weary marches stumbled across a hunting party from Sephar. In the fight that followed they killed almost all of us, sparing only three—and me. I have been here ever since."
Dylara caught the undercurrent of utter hopelessness in the woman's words, and she felt a sudden rush of sympathy well up within her.
"Tharn was a chief's son," she said. "Had he lived, I am sure he—" She stopped there, stricken into silence by the horror on Nada's face.
The slave woman rose unsteadily from the bed and seized Dylara's hands.
"Tharn—did you say Tharn?"
The girl, shocked by the pain and grief in the face of the woman, could only nod.