Chapter Seventeen
Aubranael was a child again.
He had gone to the aid of the sleeping girl because something in her hopeless, helpless posture had touched him deeply. As he approached he had noticed something odd about the thin brown arms that lay splayed across the table top: the sleeves of her dress barely extended past her elbows, and their cuffs were frayed to ribbons. The dress itself had once been white, he judged, with roses or some other bloom printed across it; now it was grey with age and dirt. In places, the fabric appeared to be rotting away.
As he had helped her to sit—instinctively lending her an arm of support when she wavered—he had found himself looking into large, sad golden eyes.
He had seen those eyes before.
At once, a flood of memory bore him away from the scene
