I climbed on between great roots of pines where the litter lay in hummocks between the tracks of winter torrents, and Lianth had called twice before I bethought myself to answer him and claim a longer time. I lay down at last in a place where the scrub was a screen to me, and before I understood what had happened, the laboring breath of my climbing had burst into thick, choking sobs. I lay face down on the pine litter and was most terribly shaken with the grief of some dumb, wounded thing in me that did not know its hurt, but wrenched and cried a long time unrelievingly. It was so new a thing for me to cry and so strange, that though I knew this was what I had come there for, I did not know why I was torn so almost to the dividing of soul and spirit. The crying lasted a long time, and I was so exhausted by it that it was only by faint degrees I became aware of eyes upon me. I roused up hastily, afraid lest in the violence of my grief I had failed to answer some inquiry of Lianth’s and he had come to find me.
Instead, I met the curious, commiserating eyes of a woman fixed on me through the leafage of the scrub. As soon as she perceived that I saw her she parted the brush and came through, holding it still in her hands behind her, as though it were a door of exit to be kept open. I saw at once by her figure, which was slight and tall, by her dark hair and by her dress, that she was not one of the Outliers. Over her tunic she had wound a long cloak of dark stuff, concealing her limbs, and over that bound vines and wreathed the leaves in her hair, for adornment or concealment. As she stood in the shadow there was little to be discerned of her but the thin oval of her face and the long throat clasped by linked silver ornaments finely wrought.
“You are not of the Outliers?” she questioned, though I felt she was already sure of the fact.
“I am their prisoner.”
I thought she seemed pleased at that, more pleased if, with a swift searching of my swollen eyes, I could have answered yes to her next question.
“They do not treat you well? But no”—answering herself—“it is not so that captives cry. What is your name?”
“Mona.”
She said it over two or three times to fix it in her memory; and then, caution and curiosity struggling in her:
“You have just come from them? You know them?”
“Yes.”