She shrugged her bare shoulders, with the raw wounds on them where the hawk-lizards had clawed her. She had that exhausted, let-down look that comes after tremendous stress, and her eyes, even while she spoke to Trevor, followed Hugh as he worked at some task around the cave.
"I couldn't have done anything if they hadn't believed your story," she told him. "They questioned you when you were too far gone to lie." He had a very dim memory of that. "They didn't understand your answers but they knew they were true ones. Also they examined your clothes. No cloth like that is woven in the valley. And the things that hold them together—" he knew she meant the zippers "—are unknown to us. So you must have come from beyond the mountains. They want to know exactly how, and if you could get back the same way."
"No," said Trevor, and explained. "Am I free to move around, then—go where I want to?"
She studied him a moment before she spoke. "You're a stranger. You don't belong with us. You could betray us to the Korins just as easily as not."
"Why would I do that? They hunted me, too."
"For sun-stones, perhaps. You're a stranger. They would take you alive. Anyway, be careful. Be very careful what you do."
From outside came a cry. "Hawks! Take cover, hawks!"
III
Instantly everyone in the cave fell silent. They watched the places in the cave wall where the sunlight came in, the little cracks in the cliff face. Trevor thought of the hawk-creatures, and how they would be wheeling and slipping along the ravine, searching.