“Then I’ll take her to her mother,” Marak said, and opened his robe and snugged the infant into that warm shelter. The baby fought him. He hugged her tightly, preventing her struggles. He feared even so that he had robbed the father, but if what the father said was so, maybe he had saved the child a warfare with a new wife, one that wanted no reminders of a marriage the father had not willingly left, a villager that would never reach such an accommodation as he and Hati had with Norit. “I’ll take care of her,” he said. “Shall I say anything to Norit?”

“She’s dead,” was all the husband would say, as Agi said, as everyone in the village might say.

“Antag!” Marak called out, gathering his companions, and rode forward with the storm at his back, on across the gap at which Tarsa lagged behind the next village. He felt obliged to explain himself; but he had no explanation that would make sense to strangers.

“We were looking for this baby,” he said, feeling that life squirm against him. The wind drowned its outcries and its fear. He was holding it too tightly, and eased his grip, and patted it inside his coat, trying to still its crying. Her crying. Lelie had ceased to be an abstract question, and became a living distraction, a personal folly.

If he had been alone, he might have said to himself Tarsa was not all he wanted to find. Tarsa was not what he had looked for. But he had found Tarsa, all the same, and he had pursued a question which was not his question, and met a man he had never wanted to meet, and acquired an answer that had already cost a life.

And now if he did anything but go back to the Ila he risked more than himself, and he risked these men, and more. The squirming bundle against his side, trying to kick him, told him how much he had risked already, and reminded him there were other concerns besides his blood debt, and his mother, and his grief. He wanted no part of these concerns… if he had his own way he would hand the baby to Antag and keep going; and he could do that.

But thinking once meant thinking twice, and thinking twice told him that if it had been rash to come out here, it was increasingly his father’s territory, back here among the villages, among men whose loyalties were in question. His loss might lose all the rest, and he had something to live for… he had two women, and a young man, and even the Ila’s captain, who had trusted him with all he personally cared about.