Ethrel froze, his rough iron blade hovering above what was left of a tiny carcass. Uneducated as he was, this seemed wrong, or out of the ordinary at the very least. Right folks didn’t hear voices. The village idiot did but not the right people.

Afraid to look at the bird, the most likely unlikely source of the statement, he considered his own hands, filthy and gnarled beyond their years. His eyes took a slow tour of his shabby, slipshot raiment, pieced together from hides and the stolen cloaks of sleeping travellers. He wore the boots of a dead man and the dirt of more days than he could count. That was an indeterminate number, as he couldn’t properly count at all.

Voice or no voice, he knew himself to not be one of the right people.

“You ponder deeply for one called simple,” The bird punctuated its statement with a scratch in the dirt.

Ethrel flicked a bit of meat off the end of his knife, “They’s called me worse than simple.”

“Shall I call you friend?”

“I ain’t been called that…ever.”