“The daimone,” he said. “I should have killed it with the knife. Then it would have been free of the mortal body and able to go home to the heavens. Wouldn’t that have been a better trade?”
Anna shook her head. “I don’t think any human can kill a daimone. They aren’t like us, they don’t have our blood, and maybe they don’t have blood at all the way we do. You would just have made it mad.”
He sighed. “Maybe so. But I pity that poor soul. If it has a soul.”
She hesitated, but then she asked, “Do Eika have souls?”
“Of course not!”
“But that one—it saw us, and it let us go. It wore a Circle, Matthias. If it wore a Circle, isn’t it kin of ours because it also believes in God?”
“It just stole it from a body and wears it as a trophy. I don’t know why it let us go. Maybe St. Kristine watched over us and blinded its eyes.” He turned his back on the city and began to climb back down the hill. “Come, Anna. I don’t know how far we’ll have to walk before we find people.”
But St. Kristine, while surely saving them, had not blinded the Eika’s eyes. Anna knew that. It had seen her touch her Circle, and it had copied her movement. It had let them go, knowingly, deliberately. Just as every human slave in the city had conspired to set them free, which was only what they would have done for their own kin.
It was a beautiful summer’s day and they walked free through bright woods and drank from free-flowing streams and ate, carefully, a few moist berries. At dusk Matthias saw a campfire. The astonished woodsmen—set here in the forest to hunt and to keep an eye out for Eika incursions—gladly traded them food for one of the extra knives, and let them sleep huddled by the coals. In the morning one woodsman escorted the children to the nearest village.
“Let me give you some advice,” said the woodsman, who was small and wiry and cheerful, and who had lost one finger on his left hand. “There’s little room in Steleshame these days, with all the refugees. But you’ve value in the news you bring, so don’t sell it cheap, and you might get to stay there. Ask for an apprenticeship, lad, and something to keep your sister busy with and cared for until she’s old enough to marry. Lady’s Blood! It is a miracle. We never thought to see any other folk walk alive out of the city. How did you survive? How did you get free?”