“Keep with it as best you can,” Marak said, and rode into the village camp alone to ask whether any man had gone through.

“No,” they said, and this was the village of Kais Mar. “Someone rode by,” a child said, and pointed.

Marak turned Osan’s head and rode back to join Antag and his brothers along the outer edge.

“There’s still the gaps between camps he might use,” Antag said. Particularly in this stretch, the camps did not abut up against one another: the villages pitched their tents often in confusion, not in orderly fashion, and one would end up closer and another farther, and such trampled gaps existed. At every such gap there was the chance of losing the track.

And now there came a stir within the camps, as somewhere far forward the Keran must have started moving, and gotten on their way, and now that movement had spread backward through the line.

They came to a western encampment, the village of Dal Ternand, and there Marak called out a name: “Mora!” It was the lord of Dal Ternand he wanted, and when the old man came out from the shade of the tent, the last left as the young men packed up: “Mora, you know me. I’m looking for my father.”

“With no good intent,” Mora judged. “You’re the Ila’s man now.”

“I’m the guide for this caravan, the master of this caravan, and it’s my job to get it to safety, with all that’s in it. Tain killed my mother just now, and ran like a coward. I want him, Mora!”

“Killed Kaptai?”

“Killed her with a knife in the back, with no stomach to face me and not a damned care whether this caravan lives or dies… whether all the people in the world live or die. Where is he?”

“He went the length of the camp. That’s what I know.”

“Pass the word. Tain’s shed Haga blood, and from behind. They’re after him. And I am.”

“The Rhonan are after him,” Antag said, “for the Haga’s sake. And so are the Dashingar. Spread that word. This is a dead man.”

Marak sent Osan on, along the route Mora of Dal Ternand had pointed out, and so into the next and the next village camp.

In the next after that, he knew the lord lied, and there was a suspicious dearth of able men packing up the tents: it was Kais Vanduran, where his father had veterans, and where he had his own, men who ought to be here.

“Where’s Duran?” he asked old Munas, the lord of the village. “Where’s Kura?” That was a man who had ridden with him, no older than he.

There was no answer, only a troubled look from Munas.