She held it to the light, and then brought it close to her eyes, examining it closely. I was surprised when she sniffed it, but tried not to show my disgust. I knew the tale. In a moment of youthful rage, Sergeant Duril had taken the ear as a trophy from the body of a warrior he’d killed. In the same fracas, he’d gained the scar that had severed part of his own ear.

He’d once told me that he was ashamed of cutting off the dead warrior’s ear, and would have undone the deed if he could. But he couldn’t return it to the body for decent burial, and he’d felt it would be wrong to discard it.

Perhaps he’d finally found a way to be rid of it. She held it in her hand, looking down at it with a contemplative air. Then she nodded decisively.

She rose and went to the tent door. She shouted something, a name, I guessed, and when the boy came, she spoke to him rapidly. He argued back, and she slapped him. That seemed to settle his disagreement. He looked past her at us.

“I’ll take you now,” he said in Jindobe. And that was all he said. By the time we were mounted, he was on a taldi stallion and riding out of the camp. We had to hurry the horses to catch up with him. He didn’t look back to see if we followed him, and never spoke another word to us.

Instead he rode inland, away from the camp and toward the broken lands where the plains gave way to the plateaus. He kneed his taldi into a gallop.

If he followed a trail or path, I could not see it, but he never hesitated as he led us on. As the shadows grew longer, I began to question the wisdom of what we were doing. “Where are we going?” I finally asked Sergeant Duril.

“To see Dewara,” he said curtly.

It hit me like one of Duril’s ambush rocks when I was a boy. “We can’t be.

My father did everything he could to find Dewara after he dragged me home. There was no sign of him, and the Kidona said they didn’t know where he went or what became of him.”

Sergeant Duril shrugged. “They lied. Back then, Dewara was something of a hero for what he’d done to your father’s son. But petty glory is faded, and Dewara has fallen on hard times. That woman back there believed me when I said I’d give her brother’s ear back to her if she’d give us Dewara.”

I rode for a time in shocked silence. Then, “How did you know it was her brother’s ear?”

“I don’t. But it could have been. I left it up to her to decide.” We followed the boy into a narrow, steep-sided canyon. It was a perfect site for an ambush, and I rode with a chilly spot on my back. The boy’s taldi still had a good lead on us. He started up a narrow path across a rock face and I had to rein Sirlofty back to follow Duril’s horse up the treacherous way. I was becoming more and more dubious of our mission. If the boy was leading us to another Kidona encampment, I didn’t like the odds. But Sergeant Duril appeared calm, if watchful. I tried to emulate him.