Her life had been a prison, Jennet tells me. The dull-eyed villagers, the tumbledown huts, the meagre allotments of farmland that gave up less sustenance every year. The empty hours of a lifetime had stretched out in front of her, and she had found herself drawn to the woods, again and again, the thrill of stepping from the path returning a little savour to an existence rendered bland by the overwhelming need for safety. And that was where she had met the father of her child. He was an Otherman, of course. Fairer than any human male, mounted and armoured as though he had stepped out of an
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