Instantly the mother, who was barefoot, stepped back and jerked herself clear just before the boy would have touched her. With a loathsome leer, the mother froze just out of reach, totally silent, watching her own son as he continued to stagger in the same direction he had initially chosen, until his own footsteps had carried him away from her.
Without a word, the mother turned on her heel and continued on her way but did not look back either at her bleating son, nor did she notice Si'Wren watching open-mouthed.
Eventually after they had almost all cleared out, all that could be heard was the broken, muffled sobbing of the woman whose daughter had been sacrificed.
Si'Wren watched as a couple of naive young slave-girls walked past the grieving mother and one of them cursed her for her lack of loyalty to the House of Rababull.
"Fool!" cried the girl. "What is your one daughter's life, to the loss of all our water? She has died for the glory of the House of Rababull! It was only a girl anyway! Why do you cry like that?!!"
The girl and her friends walked on, puffed up with their borrowed sense of self-importance, all worked-up into a feverish blood-frenzy at the spectacle of yet another gory victory for the family name.
Si'Wren looked long upon the girls' departing backs, desiring to tell them the truth, to tell them all that it was they who were the fools, and to scold them for their senselessness. Then she noticed that one of them was an especially vengeful member of Sorpiala's inner clique, and fearfully, Si'Wren turned and faced away from them.
What could she have said to them, anyway?
Deeply disturbed by all that she had seen, and still pondering the madness of it, Si'Wren hesitantly approached the sobbing mother. How could she have been so blind as to embrace such evil before, to copy and mimic such horror?
What a curious thing it was, that it took an Invisible God to open the formerly blind eyes of a seeing person such as herself, to the evil that lay right under all their noses, and still none could see this but Si'Wren.