The western villages clear to the edge of the Lakht had gone to war. They had engaged the sympathy of no few of the tribes, who themselves had disdained the Ila’s law. Tain had had close and friendly relations with the Haga, and won a Haga wife.

Now they would chase him to the ends of the earth.

Now Tain had lost all virtue in tribal law. He had struck at the woman who had run his household and shared his bed for thirty years, at the woman who had borne his children and bandaged his wounds… struck at her because the war failed, because even then there were cracks in the structure of alliances Tain had built.

Struck at her because Tain could not be the source of the madness and Tain could not be at fault for losing a war.

So Tain stole up on a peaceful, allied camp and called a woman out, not to reconcile and beg her pardon as he ought by rights to do, as Kaptai had every right to hope he might intend—but to murder her and then run like the felon he had become, challenging every tribe to kill him.

There was no forgiveness. There was no one left to ask it for Tain.

Antag’s two brothers overtook them, calling out as they took shape out of the haze, to be sure of identities. The warning was given. The tribes knew, and sent out messengers and hunters of their own.

They asked at every camp they passed: “Has a man ridden through?” and at five camps the answer was the same, but at the sixth there was confusion and an instant’s hesitation.

“I’m Marak Trin Tain,” Marak said. “Where is my father?”

The people of that village, a village from the rim of the west, stayed unmoving, so many statues staring up at him with frightened eyes. Tain was known to take bloody vengeance on betrayers. Did he not know that?

But one old woman pointed to the side of the camp.

“You said nothing,” Marak said to her. And to the rest: “It’s your mistake if you pity him. The tribes are against him. The Ila is guiding you to water, out from under the star-fall. His own son guides this caravan. Do you want to die?”

For an answer, they only stared, so many wind-rocked images, and he and the four Rhonandin turned off where the old woman had pointed.

There were faint tracks. Tain had crossed back to the same side he had ridden before, and now they followed tracks rapidly growing dim in the blowing dust, then merging with others along the side of the camp, where the feet of men and beasts had made a complex record.

No track went out from it: Trin’s course lay within that trampled ground, on to the next camp, but all the camp was ringed and crossed by that kind of track.