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and then came to me. She told me she had done her duty to her family, and now she wanted only to be with
me. I tried to argue her out of it, but she wanted to be with me forever, she told me. In the end, I gave in. She
said good-bye to her family, telling them she was going to live with a dear friend of hers. Her children begged
her to stay, but her daughter-in-law was happy enough to see her go. She didn't like not being mistress of her
home. I made Brynn wait until spring, knowing how hard it is to hunt in the winter, and then she came to me,
like a bride to her wedding bed."
"I tried to be gentle with her, but in the end, I think I gave her more pain. I didn't drain her when I made her,
and at first, she did not change at all. She remained human for years, although she never seemed to age. I
thought I had made a mistake in making her, and I had. It was a good time, but then she became ill and
eventually died. She was perhaps fifty years old then, but she looked at least ten years younger. I must confess,
I did not want to let her go, so though I made her a coffin and wrapped her in a shroud, I did not bury her. It
was a good thing too, for she woke about a week after her death, consumed with hunger. I took her hunting,
but she had not your self-control. She killed and killed and killed again. I tried to find evil men for her to prey
on: would-be rapists, and murderers, and thieves. We moved closer to a big city to have better access to such
prey, but each death took a piece of her soul with it, and she could never forgive herself for those first innocent
deaths."
"Finally, she did learn some control, and with my help, she could stop from killing. But it took too many years,
too many deaths. I thought she had found peace, but it gnawed at her. We moved back to her town because
she wanted to see how her children and grandchildren were doing. We had visited only a few times, but now
we had to come back as strangers. Twenty-five years had passed, and they thought her long dead. By then, she
was a great-grandmother. One thing that did delight her was seeing her children and her children's children.
For some years, we were happy again. And then things became very bad indeed."
"The year 1286 brought droughts like the country had not seen in living memory. Not even in my memory,
and it was much longer. People began to go hungry, but they were clever folk, and they had some things put
by, so few actually starved that year. I would hunt game, although it was illegal, and Brynn's children did not
scruple to take a deer or a brace of hare from the son of their old trader connection."
"The next year was much worse. The ground was so hard, the plows would break like potsherds. The rains,
when they did come, were floodwaters. The ground was too hard to absorb the rain, so the fields stood like
stagnant ponds halfway through the summer. The trees began to rot in the orchards because the air could not
reach their roots. Now people did die of starvation. I kept Brynn's children as well supplied as I could, but game
was scarce too. That winter was the hardest we had ever faced, or so we thought."
"The next year broke with promise. The rains came, and they were not too heavy, not too frequent, and the
crops seemed to spring from the seeds half grown already. It would be a good year. Everyone rejoiced. Once
the crops came in, all would be well."
Ryan sighed, looking into the fire for a long time. "They did not know how very weak they were from two
years of near starvation. When Brynn and I hunted, we had to be very careful, taking but a little from each
person. When people began to get sick, they fell in the fields and in the streets like they had been mowed down
with a scythe. Whole families fell sick in a single day, and three or four days later, they would all be dead. At
first, they tried to bury the dead, but in the end, they just burned the bodies with the houses, hoping the
contagion would be stopped that way." Ryan snorted ironically. "By the end of the summer, the crops stood tall
and healthy in the fields, but the people were too weak to harvest them. Half the town was dead or dying by
the end of that summer."
"Brynn's children fared better than most. They had been better fed and had more resistance, but they also had
more to do with traders, so the plague came to them as well. Brynn watched her children and her
grandchildren die one by one. She would go and nurse them each night, and they thought they were dead
already, seeing their mother as she had been thirty years before. All of them died but one of her great-
granddaughters. The villagers burned the house with them all together. They would have burned little Meg as
well, but I braved the flames to pull her out of the burning building. She was ill, but not dead, and we took her
back to my old cave to nurse her."
"The night Meg's fever broke and we knew she would live, Brynn asked me to promise that I would look after
her, that I would look after her and her children afterward. Of course, I agreed. I told her we both would. I
didn't know the depth of her despair. When I woke the next night, Brynn was gone. I searched for her and
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