We had reached the top of the Ledge overlooking the Far-Folk country. It was all rounded, grassy hills, stony, full of shallow hollows, with occasional depressed trees, lying in the thin, airy shadows that fall so singularly in high places. It was very still, two or three crows flying over, and far up under the blue a buzzard sailing.
“It’s no use looking out for them,” objected Lianth. “They’ll not show themselves while we are here.”
“Do you think they know?”
“Huh! Do rabbits know when coyotes hunt? If they know about the King’s Desire what wouldn’t they know?”
He was sitting on a heap of stones picking the moss out of the crannies and pitching it down below. His throat and chin were strained and tight as though no songs could come that way again.
“When I think of her hands,” he said, “and the parting of her hair, as white as a dove’s egg ... if she loved anybody she wouldn’t have thought of anything else.”
“Evidently she didn’t,” I insisted cruelly. “But why do you care so much? Even if she hadn’t run away with Ravenutzi it wouldn’t have been you she would have married, it would have been Mancha.”
To look at the boy you would have said his songs were not all dead, one of them rose and struggled to go the accustomed way, and it was a song of boy’s love and wounded trust. He bit it back at last.
“Mancha was the only one good enough for her,” he choked. He was done with the moss now, and was aiming small stones carefully at empty space. “I would have wanted her to have the best.”
“At any rate she took what she wanted.”