Dawn Wind by Rosemary Sutcliff Page A

that it was hard to get her to eat, even when he picked the meat off the little bones and fed her as though she were a fledgling. She laughed about that, and then caught her breath and said that laughing hurt her. He ate the rest himself since there was nothing to be gained by wasting food, but he didn’t taste much of it. Then he made her lie down on the floor of brown needles right at the back of their shelter as far under the branches as she could get, and spread the cloak over her. He sat up for a while with Dog propped against him, scratching the old scar on his arm and staring sometimes into the fire and sometimes at Regina. She had coughed a little when she first lay down, and now that she was asleep she still made little painful sounds in her breathing, and kept pushing the cloak down as though she was too hot, so that he had to be constantly on the watch to pull it up again. He wondered whether she was wrapped round in the same bright fog that blurred all his memories of the road north from Aquae Sulis when the wound in his arm was new. And he wondered very much, his head on his knees, what he should do if she was going to be really ill.
    In the morning she seemed better, though she coughed again, and still said it hurt her to breathe; and they pushed on again, very slowly, getting what shelter they could from the rain squalls, and following the forest down-valley. It seemed a very old forest, this that they had come to; a spiny forest of ancient hawthorn trees for the most part, mingled with black thickets of yew and holly, such a forest as might have come into being if a mighty host of twisted dwarf magicians of some elder race had been overcome and turned by a greater magician into trees. And Owain tried to think that it was only the strange dark atmosphere of the place, and Regina’s own fear of a world beyond city walls, when she said in a small fretful voice, ‘I don’t like the trees; they’re pulling faces at me!’ But he knew in his inmost heart, that it was not.
    Soon after that she stumbled and would have fallen, and he put his arm round her to help her along, but she went on stumbling, more and more often, as though her feet did not belong to her at all. And when they came to a place where the bank of a forest stream had been torn away in the rains of some past winter, making a kind of dell among the thorn roots, he seized on it thankfully as a place to camp, though the day was not yet much past noon. He made Regina lie down as far under the cover as she could get, and wrapped the cloak round her. She heard the stream and said, ‘Thirsty,’ and he managed to get her some water in a big dock leaf, going back again and again. He gathered wood for the fire, but he did not go hunting. It was clear that whatever he killed, Regina could not eat it, and he had no heart to hunt for himself. Besides, he did not want to leave her. If only he could get some milk … He almost laughed at the ludicrous idea of milk in the forest, seeing himself trapping a roe-doe and milking her while her fawn stood bleating by.
    If only he could get some milk—if only he could do something to ease that little dry cough. Honey was good for a cough, but there didn’t seem to be a bees’ nest handy at the moment, any more than there was a roe-doe. Then his head went up, his eyes brightening with an idea, but it was not an idea so much as a memory, something that belonged to his very young days, perhaps even to the time before his mother died, for it seemed to be connected with a woman’s voice, young and laughing, saying, ‘Suck! There, can you taste the honey?’ Just above their refuge, where the forest opened out a little, he had noticed a young hazel smothered in trailing honeysuckle just breaking into flower. He went and tore away great ropes of it, and brought it back with him; and squatting beside Regina while she watched with eyes that were at once bright and clouded, plucked off one of the pink-tipped creamy horns