"Sounds yummy."

"Pray to your ancestors you never discover how yummy such fare can be." "We used to eat these things like rocks." Rudy hadn't heard Tir come up beside him. Small for his age and fragile looking, Tir had a silence that was partly shyness, partly a kind of instinctive fastidiousness. Partly, Rudy was sure, it was the result of the subconscious weight of adult memories, adult fears.

"They were hard like rocks until you cooked them, and then they got kind of soft. Mama- the other little boy's mama-used to mash them up with garlic."

The Icefalcon raised his brows. He knew about the heritable memories-an old shaman of his tribe, he had told Rudy once, had them-and he knew enough not to put in words or questions that might confuse the child.

Rudy said casually, "Sounds like..." He didn't know the word in the Wathe. "Sounds like what we call potatoes, Ace. Spuds. What'd that little boy call them?"

Tir frowned, fishing memories chasms deep. "Earth-apples." He spoke slowly, forming a word Rudy had never heard anyone say in the five years of his dwelling in this world. "But they raised them in water, down in the tanks in the crypt. Lots and lots of them, rooms full of them. They showed that little boy," he added, with a strange, distant look in his eyes.

"Who showed him, Ace?"

Melantrys, a curvy little blonde with a dire-wolf's heart, was offering odds on the likelihood of Graw finding a reason not to send up any of the hay that was part of the Settlements' tribute to the Keep come July-betting shirt-laces, a common currency around the watchroom, where they were always breaking-and there were shouts and jeers from that end of the room, so that Rudy had to pitch his voice soft, for Tir's hearing alone.