He fell to his knees and gathered Kaptai up into his arms. He felt the life weak in her as he lifted her, immediately felt the moisture of blood on his hands, under her back. “Marak,” she said, just that, her eyes half-open. Then she went limp in his hands.

Just that. Only that. He had held the dead before. He knew that absolute shift in weight. She was gone.

Patya gave a great sob and tried to chafe life back into their mother’s hand. His, damp with blood, tested for pulse and breath, and he knew that Patya’s tears would bring nothing of their mother back, ever.

He let their mother slide to the ground and got up, conscious of all the witnesses around them, the Haga, and Menditak himself… conscious of rage, and grief, and a mind slipping toward unreason.

“It was Father,” Patya said. “He did it. He came into the tent while everyone was sleeping. He wanted Mother to come outside with him, and she did, and I did, I knew it wasn’t good, and she said run.”

Kaptai had known enough to leave her husband. But, prideful to the last, she had not known enough to cry out and wake her tribe to deal with Tain. No, she had gone out to deal with him herself, sending her daughter to safety, to get his help. As a consequence, she was dead, and Patya might have been.

Why? screamed inside his head. Why would she not turn the Haga on Tain? He had deserved it. He had entirely deserved the shame, and being driven out like intruding vermin.

For love? For love, even yet, had she gone out to meet with him, even knowing to send Patya to safety?

“We missed catching him,” Menditak said grimly. “We’ve sent men out, looking.”

“See to Patya!” Marak said to Hati, and turned and ran back to Tofi’s tents as fast as he had run getting to the Haga, blinded by dust that stuck to his face and collected about his eyes.

Inside his tent, he snatched up his aifad from where he had been sleeping and put that on. He put on his belt, and snatched up the machai and his waterskin, all the gear an abjori needed in the desert.

Tofi was awake and on his feet, staring at him in dismay. “Wake the captain,” Marak said, measuring his breaths and ordering his information as if he were back in the war, hiding and fighting among the dunes. “Tain’s killed my mother. Tell him!”

Tofi ran to do that.

The au’it had come back with him, and sat down on the sand, writing, writing all of it, in that heavy book. Hati and Norit came back, bringing Patya, who was convulsed in tears, but his began to dry, and his mind ordered matters in small, precise packets.