Free Brother Cadfael 07: The Sanctuary Sparrow by Ellis Peters

branches as they came to the place where Liliwin had settled down sadly to sleep before leaving this unfriendly town. And it was a nest indeed, rounded and coiled into the slope of thick new grass, and so small, like the haunt of a dormouse.
    'He started up in alarm, in one leap clear of his form, like a flushed hare,' said Hugh soberly. 'There are young shoots broken here - do you see? - where he crashed through. This is unquestionably the place.' He looked round curiously, for Cadfael was casting about among the bushes, which grew thickly here for cover. 'What are you seeking?'
    'He had his rebec in a linen bag on his shoulder,' said Cadfael. 'In the dark a branch caught the string and jerked it away, and he dared not stop to grope after it. So he told me, like a man bereaved. I am sure that was truth. I wonder what became of it?'
    He found the answer that same evening, but not until he had parted from Hugh and was on his way back to the gatehouse. It was a luminous evening and Cadfael was in no hurry to go in, and had plenty of time before Compline. He stood to watch the leisurely evening walk of the Foregate worthies, and the prolonged games of the urchins of the parish of Holy Cross reluctant to go home to their beds, just as he was. A dozen or so of them swept by in a flurry of yelling and laughter, shrill as starlings, some still half-naked from the river, but not yet so cold that they must make for the home hearth. They were kicking a shapeless rag ball among them, and some of them swiping at it with sticks, and one with something broader and shorter. Cadfael heard the impact of hollow wood, and the thrumming reverberation of one surviving string. A lamentable sound, like a cry for help with little expectation that the plea would be heard.
    The imp with this weapon loitered, dragging his implement in the dust. Cadfael pursued, and drew alongside like a companion ship keeping station rather than a pirate boarding. The brat looked up and grinned, knowing him. He had but a short way to go home, and was tired of his plaything.
    'Now what in the world have you found there?' said Cadfael amicably. 'And where did you happen on such an odd thing?'
    The child waved a hand airily back towards the trees that screened the Gaye. 'It was lying in there, in a cloth bag, but I lost that down by the water. I don't know what it is. I never saw a thing like it. But it's no use that I can see.'
    'Did you find,' asked Cadfael, eyeing the wreckage, 'a stick, with fine hairs stretched along it, that went with this queer thing?'
    The child yawned, halted, and abandoned his hold on his toy, letting it drop into the dust. 'I hit Davey with that when he tripped me in the water, but it broke. I threw it away.' So he would, having proved its uselessness, just as he walked away from this discarded weapon, leaving it lying, and went off scrubbing at sleepy eyes with the knuckles of a grimy fist.
    Brother Cadfael picked up the sorry remnant and examined ruefully its stove-in ribs and trailing, tangled strings. No help for it, this was all that remained of the lost rebec. He took it back with him, only too well aware of the grief he was about to cause its luckless owner. Say that Liliwin came alive in the end out of his present trouble, still he must emerge penniless, and deprived now even of his chief means of livelihood. But there was more in it even than that. He knew it even before he presented the broken instrument to Liliwin's appalled hands, and watched the anguish and despair mantle like bleak twilight over his face. The boy took the ruin in his hands and fondled it, rocked it in his arms, bowed his head to its splintered frame, and burst into tears. It was not the loss of a possession so much as the death of a sweetheart.
    Cadfael sat down apart, in the nearest carrel of the scriptorium, and kept decently silent until the storm passed, and Liliwin sat drained and motionless, hugging his broken darling, his thin shoulders hunched against the