“I’ve become a prophet, uncle. And I tell you both the truth. Keep the peace, and be there, by the Besh Karat!”

He kept nothing from them. If he had resources, he poured them out to those that knew how to use them.

But he believed his own urging, and delayed no longer. “Hati!” he shouted. “Norit!” He gave Osan a whack of the quirt, trusting him to find its way down from the ridge, trusting the two feuding lords to find their way to their own tribes, Memnanan to find the Ila, and the two women with him to stay behind him.

But another rider barred his path. He saw his sister among the Haga riders, and his sister saw him, there at the very foot of the ridge.

“Patya!” In utter astonishment he reined Osan to a halt and dropped to the ground by the mounting loops. His sister slid down, her feet within knee height of the ground, but Patya, silly girl, failed to know it, and held on.

He simply swept her up in both his arms like a child, flung her rightwise about to look at her, and hugged her breathless.

“Marak!” His mother, Kaptai, dismounted beside them, a plummeting of brown veils and a clash of bracelets. He caught her, too, and swung them both around, veils flying. He pressed their faces against his, and he smelled the smells of home and hearth about them, everything that had kept him alive on the trek to Oburan.

“You’re safe,” he said. “The Ila kept her promise!”

“They said you were back,” Patya said, still hugging him. “No one believed you’d come back, but we believed.”

“I love you,” he said to her. “I love you,” to his mother. As far as he remembered he had never said that word to either of them, and least of all to his father, but now it had become a word he owned; and when he said it he knew he had forgotten Hati in a moment in which he was home again, before Hati, before everything had changed.

“You came back,” his mother said. “You said you would come back, and you did.”

What had he said? He had made a hundred promises when he left them, all lies; but unlikely as they were, he had kept them all, every one.

Hati had gotten down. He felt her familiar arm slip around him. He took her hand, and put it in his mother’s. “This is Hati,” he said in utter, untrammeled joy—then saw the dismay, the look from head to foot.

An’i Keran, tribal enemy under this foreign sky.

But his mother, of the Haga, hesitated only for a heartbeat, and gave her an embrace, his mother rattling with the wealth of a lord’s daughter, a lord’s wife: she had come away with everything, and Hati with only the bracelets he had given her.