Keeping her voice low, she sat tirelessly beside the sleeping rack where Habrunt lay prostrate, hovering attentively over his tormented form and watching over him with tender devotion.
The others, preoccupied with vastly more important concerns now, could not be bothered to deal with Si'Wren anymore for her imagined blasphemies.
As one made ritually invisible, as well as silent, and an outcast for life, Si'Wren was lost in a world of her own. Clearly, she had eyes for no one but Habrunt. She saw nothing besides this mighty man who, laid low, remained on the rack and languished perpetually before her.
They had done this to him, and behold; they were now dead whereas he,
Habrunt, still lived.
* * *
The compound's front gates boomed loudly as someone pounded at the door. In the drifting predawn mists of the interior yard, people cowered and watched from their doorways, peering fearfully across the compound, waiting for Old Maskron to go answer or at least send someone to see who it was.
Old Maskron finally came out to peer through the gray-white veil of dense fog with eyes reddened and pouched from lack of sleep and too many years of heavy drink and overmuch worry, his face a scowling mask.
At the side of Old Maskron, a nervous-looking, handsome young boy of perhaps ten appeared next, dressed in rich robes, his hair polled oddly in a manner which bespoke his noble birth.
Old Maskron clapped the boy on the back.
"Go! See!" Old Maskron growled the terse command.