Her hair was tangled and she had no comb, but it was cleaner than it had been before. Her stomach growled, and she willed away a flash of dizziness as the wind shifted to spill the fat smell of meat past them.
“Leave your old clothing,” he said. “I’ll see that it is cared for.”
“I thank you.”
She was aware of the camp as a scene unfolding beyond her reach. When they reached the wagon, she mounted the steps and touched the latch tentatively.
“Go on,” said Breschius gently. “Don’t set your foot on the threshold.”
She slid open the door and stepped over the threshold, ducking so as not to hit her head. The Kerayit were either much shorter than Wendish folk, or they disdained to waste space simply to accommodate height.
She stumbled as she entered the interior, assaulted by its disproportion. The inside was larger than it had any right to be. She felt dizzy, but the fit passed as she pushed the door closed behind her and straightened up into a spacious, circular chamber richly furnished and eerily quiet. It had a round, felt roof, although definitely the wagon had conveyed no such thing on the outside. A central pole pierced the smoke hole, and the heavens, seen through that hole, shone with a silvery sheen shot through with flashes of light that might be distant lightning or sparks from a nearby fire.
“What manner of place is this?”
“This is where I live, Hanna. Be welcome here.”
Sorgatani stepped out from the shadows. She was as beautiful as Hanna remembered from her dreams, if features molded so differently from those known in Wendish lands could be called beautiful. Hanna thought they could. She had not forgotten Bulkezu.
Sorgatani’s black hair was braided and pinned up against her head, and she wore as a crown a net of delicate golden chains that fell past her shoulders to brush her robe of golden silk. The simple beauty of that fabric put the gaudy embroidery of Hanna’s tunic to shame, and she had a sudden uncomfortable insight that what had seemed a rich garment to her inexperienced gaze might not be one in truth when compared to the fineness of Sorgatani’s garb.
Hanna advanced cautiously to the central pole. There Sorgatani met her and extended both hands, palms up and open. She did not touch her. She kept a hand’s breadth of distance between them, air that felt alive to Hanna’s skin, as if it had the same breath and soul that animated all living things.