Madbond by Nancy Springer

now. Not tonight. Vigils are times of danger and ill omen. Ask me again in three days if you have not found your own way to truth before then.” His face looked bleak, reluctant. “Go in, now, before someone sees you here with me.”
    I got up and stood looking at him.
    â€œAnd try to sleep,” he added.
    â€œI cannot sleep,” I murmured. The terror lay too near the surface of my sleep. But he was right, what he had said some days before: remembering could not be much worse than what was happening to me meanwhile.
    I went and lay in my chamber, eyes open, and planned a means of finding my way to some truth while sparing him the telling of it to me.

Chapter Seven
    It was from the children that I found out.
    Not the tiny children, the ones who clutched at Kor’s knees, too small to understand, nor yet the striplings, old enough to be clever. I chose the children just old enough to spend some time off on their own, but not old enough to lie very readily, and I sat by Talu’s pen and watched them, aware of other watching eyes from the Hold—children sometimes unaccountably disappeared, seldom but often enough to chill the blood, and they were being guarded even when it seemed they were not.
    The second day I chose my moment. It was low tide, and the lot of them swarmed down to one of the pools left behind in the rocks by the sea, down below the cliff. Their elders could not see them from the lodges or the open spaces of the headland, and no coracles floated very near. I lazed down over the side of the headland in a different direction, then came around the base of it to where they were playing, picking my way as if at random down through the mossy rocks and those thick with lichens to where the limpets and barnacles clung between bunches of sea lettuce, down to where the red wrack and the dark purple carrageen grew. The rock pool lay just above the lowest level of low tide, that of the tangleweed, and it was rich with mussels. I sat amidst wet wrack and watched as the children tried to prod a crab from under a rock.
    They were, as I had said, no longer afraid of me, but they were not supposed to speak to me either. I hoped they would forget.
    â€œLook,” I remarked after a while, “a sea star.”
    They left the crab to pursue the starfish, then remembered they were supposed to shun me and stopped. To keep them near, I came over and clumsily started to gather mussels and the great sea snails called winkles. Sea asters shrank closed as my shadow fell on them.
    â€œIn the summer, are there prawns in this pool?”
    The youngsters would not answer me, though they stood clustered around me, watching what I was doing. I sighed.
    â€œWhy is it that you will not talk with me? What have I done?”
    They glanced sidelong at each other but stood silent. I spoke as if half to myself.
    â€œI dare say you do not even know why it is that you are not to speak to me.”
    â€œWe do so know!” It was a small girl, shouting out with a proud lift of her chin.
    â€œAlu, be quiet!” someone warned, perhaps an older brother or sister.
    â€œWhy should I? He thinks we don’t know, and we all know how he killed Rowalt.”
    The shock nearly toppled me. I dropped the mussels and clutched at the rocks, then slowly stood up, hearing a vast silence, more than the silence of the children, and then an odd buzzing in my ears, as if of poisonous insects. If they had said “You killed a man” it would have been bad enough, for I killed nothing lightly. But that it should have been Rowalt—
    Now I knew what it was that Istas had called me. Hrauth . Murderer.
    The children were suddenly afraid of me again, though I had not moved from the place where I stood. They ran, scattering like young quail. In a moment I also ran, plunging up the rocks toward Seal Hold.
    I knew the chamber where Kor spent portions of the days in council with those who helped him rule. I ran to it and in