His body shivered at the sound of her voice, but he pressed on. She had pried into his mind. It was his turn to do the same.

“Tell me, Tessanna. What happened to them?”

She brought her gaze down from the sky. “You want to know? Fine. I didn’t kill my stepmother, but he thought so. He drank a lot because of it. I can’t blame him though, considering what he came home to.” As she talked, Qurrah watched as the angry girl seamlessly turned shy and quiet. “We lived in the King’s forest. Daddy owed lots of people money, so we hid out there in our tiny cabin. Daddy gambled. He came back here, though, said he was going to make lots of money. Lots and lots of money!”

“Well,” she continued, clutching her hands together and batting her eyelashes at him. “Daddy didn’t make enough, so bad people took him, made him work real hard. He couldn’t come home and see me and mommy! He needed to, because mommy got sick. I was still young, and she was too sick to leave and buy food for us. So she gave me this ring. She starved to death after a few weeks.”

She giggled.

“I didn’t have to eat often because of the ring, but when I did, I was famished. But we had nothing! So-” another giggle, “-I ate what I had to.”

The vision Tessanna had shown him, of a female arm in his lap, and the taste of blood on his lips, darted across Qurrah’s mind. He shuddered. It seemed he was not the only one who had been forced to eat the scraps of the dead.

“Daddy came home and saw me eating,” she said. “He thought I killed mommy. He was finally free, and he came home wanting mommy, but mommy was gone. He told me there was stuff I could do for him, though, stuff mommy used to do.”

Another image, the rough man tearing at his clothes, sank Qurrah’s stomach. Hatred burned in his heart.

“What happened to him?” he asked.

Tessanna crawled closer and whispered as if telling a great secret.