The sky, with the sun no longer overhead but sending shadows now into the Field of Leaving from the trees and thorn bushes at its edge, told her that it was long past midday. In her uncertainty she had lingered here too long. Carefully she gathered the skins on which she had slept these four nights guarding her mother's spirit. Her fire was cold ashes, a blackened smudge. Her water container was empty and she had no more food.
Slowly, using her stick, she limped toward the path that led back to the village, holding on to a small hope that she might still be welcome there.
Tykes played at the edge of the clearing, scampering about on the moss-covered ground. Pine needles stuck to their naked bodies and in their hair. She smiled. She recognized each little one. There was the yellow-haired son of her mother's friend; she remembered his birth two mid-summers ago. And the girl whose twin had died; she was younger than the yellow-haired one, just toddling, but she giggled and shrieked with the others, playing catch-me-while-I'm-running. Tussling, the toddlers slapped and kicked at each other, grabbing toy-sticks, flailing with their small fists. Kira remembered watching her childhood companions at such play, preparing for the real scramble of adult life. Unable to participate because of her flawed leg, she had watched from the sidelines with envy.
An older child, a dirty-faced boy of eight or nine years, still too young for puberty and the two-syllable name that he would receive, looked over at her from the place where he was clearing underbrush and sorting the twigs into bundles for firestarting. Kira smiled. It was Matt, who had always been her friend. She liked Matt. He lived in the swampy, disagreeable Fen, probably the child of a dragger or digger. But he ran freely through the village with his disorderly friends, his dog always at his heels. Often he stopped, as now, to do some chore or small job in return for a few coins or a sweet. Kira called a greeting to the boy. The dog's bent tail, matted with twigs and leaves, thumped on the ground, and the boy grinned in reply.
"So you be back from the Field," he said. "What's it like there? Scared, was you? Did creatures come in the night?"
Kira shook her head and smiled at him. Younger, one-syllable tykes were not allowed in the Field, so it was natural that Matt would be curious and a little in awe. "No creatures," she reassured him. "I had fire, and it kept them away."
"So Katrina be gone now from her body?" he asked in his dialect. People from the Fen were oddly different. Always identifiable by their strange speech and crude manners, they were looked down upon by most people. But not by Kira. She was very fond of Matt.
She nodded. "My mother's spirit has gone," she acknowledged. "I watched it leave her body. It was like mist. It drifted away."
Matt came over to her, still carrying an armful of twigs. He squinted at her ruefully and wrinkled his nose. "Your cott is horrid burnt," he told her.
Kira nodded. She knew that her home had been destroyed, though secretly she had hoped she was mistaken. "Yes," she sighed. "And everything in it? My frame? Did they burn my threading frame?"
Matt frowned. "I tried to save things but it's mostly all burnt. Just your cott, Kira. Not like when there's a big sickness. This time it just be your mum.