At first he thought to keep Mal and send Modh to the barracks. But though Mal was charming, with a plump little body and big, long-lashed eyes, she was only five years old. He did not want sex with a baby, as some men did. Modh was eleven, still a child, but not for long. She was not beautiful, but vivid. Her courage in following her sister had impressed him. He brought both sisters to the hanan of the Belen house and asked his sister, his sister-in-law, and his mother to see that they were properly brought up.

It was strange to the girls to hear Nata Belenda speak words of their language, for to them she seemed a creature of another order-as did Hehum Belenda, the mother of Bela and Alo, and Tudju Belen, the sister. All three women were tall and clean and soft-skinned, with soft hands and long lustrous hair. They wore garments of cobweb colored like spring flowers, like sunset clouds. They were surely goddesses. But Nata Belenda smiled and was gentle and tried to talk to the children in their own tongue, though she remembered little of it. Hehum was grave and stern-looking, but quite soon she took Mal onto her lap to play with Nata's baby boy. Tudju was the one who most amazed them. She was not much older than Modh, but a head taller, and Modh thought she was wearing moonlight-her robes were cloth of silver, which only Crown women could wear. A heavy silver belt slanted from her waist to her hip, with a marvelously worked silver sheath hanging from it. The sheath was empty, but she pretended to draw a sword from it, and flourished the sword of air, and lunged with it, and laughed to see little Mal still looking for the sword. But she showed the girls that they must not touch her; she was sacred, that day. They understood that.

Living with these women in the great house of the Belens, they began to understand many more things. One was the language of the City. It was not so different from theirs as it seemed at first, and within a few weeks they were babbling along in it.