TWO HUNDRED FOUR: Herdcreatures II
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Alden stood by the bokabv’s haunch, glancing between Stuart and the girl who’d just appeared. He waited for an introduction that was taking a long time to come. She was still petting the animal’s snout, but whatever she’d been casting with her other hand seemed to have been completed. The spell had no results that were obvious to him, unless magic was the reason that Stuart’s posture and face had both gone so stiff.
He called herNoh-en. I remember that name.
Alden wouldn’t have known her by her face alone, but he had seen her before. Noh-en had been there during the vision of the death ceremony that he’d been shown before he’d decided to keep his authority sense. She was one of the two children Rel-art’h had sent away at the start of it.
Because she’d been crying.
She wasn’t now. Her smile was small but unflinching in the face of the ever-lengthening silence. A short, thick braid in a dusty shade of purple was draped over one of her shoulders. She had round cheeks compared to most Artonans Alden had met, and on one of them, six dots were tattooed in a curve below her dark eye. He looked for eye rings, since that would be confirmation that she wasn’t a knight. He didn’t see them. But that might be because they were the same color as her iris, or she could have a preference for something other than implants.
Her outfit offered no clues either. It wasn’t decorated with embroidery or studded with metal. A high-necked shirt was partially covered by a thick, wooly cape, and over her pants, she wore a long, skirt-like piece that split in the front from the belted waist all the way down to her ankles.