A last he took a deep breath and started haltingly forward. The faint moonlight made the last hundred yards easy going. Finally he reached a vantage where he could look down through the wet leaves onto the arena of stone.
The sky was sheeted with mist and the moon was an indistinct pearl in the haze. The sea was misty. People were already gathered at the edge. The boy looked at the priest and then ran his eye around the circle of people. One of them was Quorl!
He leaned forward as far as he could. The priest sounded the shell again and the prisoners came out of the temple: first three boys, then an older girl, then a man. The next one ... Tloto! It was marble-white under the blurred moon. Its clubbed feet shuffled on the rock. Its blind head ducked right and left with bewilderment.
As the priest raised the long three-pronged knife, the boy's hands went tight around the crutches. He passed from one prisoner to the next. Tloto cringed, and the boy sucked in a breath as the knife went down, feeling his own flesh part under the blades. Then the murmur died, the prisoners were unbound, and the people filed from the rock back into the forest.
The boy waited to see which way Quorl headed before he started through moon-dusted bushes as fast as his crutches would let him. There were many people on the webbing of paths that came from the temple rock. There was Quorl!
When he caught up, Quorl saw him and slowed down. Quorl didn't look at him, though. Finally the giant said, "You don't understand. I had to catch him. I had to give him to the old one to be marked. But you don't understand." The boy hardly looked at all where they were going, but stared up at the giant.
"You don't understand," Quorl said again. Then he looked at the boy and was quiet for a minute. "No, you don't," he repeated. "Come." They turned off the main path now, going slower. "It's a ... custom. An important custom. Yes, I know it hurt him. I know he was afraid. But it had to be. Tloto is one of those who—." (The word was some inflection of the verb to know.) Quorl was silent for a moment. "Let me try to tell you why I had to hurt your friend. Yes, I know he is your friend, now. But once I said that Tloto was malika. I was wrong. Tloto is more than malika—he and the others that were marked. Somehow these people know things. That was how Tloto survived. That's how he knew where you were, when you were hurt. He knew inside your head, he heard inside your head. Many are born like that, more of them each year. As soon as we find out, we mark them. Many try to hide it, and some succeed for a long time. Can you understand? Do you? When Tloto showed me where you were, he knew that I would know, that he would be caught and marked. Do you understand?"
Again he paused and looked at the boy. The eyes still showed puzzled hurt. "You want to know why. I ... we.... Long ago we killed them when we found out. We don't any more. The mark reminds them that they are different, and yet the same as we. Perhaps it is wrong. It doesn't hurt that much, and it heals. Anyway, we don't kill them any more. We know they're important...." Suddenly, having gone all through it with this strange boy, it seemed twisted to the giant, incorrect. Then he gave the boy what the boy had been sent to the forest to get, what the Duchess had found and knew was necessary. "I was wrong," Quorl said. "I'm sorry. I will speak to the priest tomorrow."
They walked until the dawn lightened the sky behind the trees. Once Quorl looked around and said, "I want to show you something. We are very near, and the weather is right."
They walked a few minutes more till Quorl pointed to a wall of leaves, and said, "Go through there."