“Get them!” Hati shouted at someone, and immediately a hand came under his head and an arm tried to lift him.

“It’s a baby,” someone said. “It’s shot, too, right through the leg.”

He was shocked, and angry, and tried to see the damage the bullet had done, but he could not get his head up. He would not let go of Lelie. He had held her, he had protected her, and he went on doing it until Hati pried his hand off the baby. Her, he trusted. Norit, he would trust.

If he was shot, it was his father’s doing. There was no one else. They were all in danger.

“Get him,” he tried to tell Hati. “Get under cover. Someone get him.”

“The captain’s men are going after him,” Hati said. She understood him. Someone was trying to press a cloth against his side, where Lelie was lying, and wanted to pick her up. “Let go,” Hati said. “Marak. Let go. Let them take her.”

“It’s Norit’s baby,” he said. “It’s that Lelie she asked for. Her baby.” But he was not at all sure Hati heard. He had no idea where anyone was, and that was unusual, as regarded his wives. His voices failed him. His whole sense of the world was fading. Their sense of presence had faded. He was sinking, and they tried to turn him over, which further confused his sense of the world.

“It went out his back,” Tofi’s voice said. “That’s good.”

“It could have carried threads into him. Heat some oil.”

Lelie had been shot, an innocent, if the world had one. The bullet had gone through her before it reached him. He had meant to save her, Lelie’s father had failed her, and his father had meant to kill him, and this was the way it all came together. It was his own father who had done all this mischief, his father who had won the throw. He had no doubt of it. His father had been more clever, still more clever, after all these years. His father had won, at least the contest between them, and he might die. Not dying was the only way to spite Tain. He told himself that.

Men were still shouting and running around him. The beshti complained, that noise which had underlain half his life. He heard a cry, a thin, desperate kind of baby cry, absolute indignation, it seemed to him, and justified, if ever a cry was justified in the world. “How bad is the baby?” he asked Hati, when she leaned close.

“She’s shot, too,” Hati said. “Norit. Norit, take her, damn it. Don’t stand and stare like a fool!”

The baby still cried, more distantly. Pieces of his recollection scattered, like coins across a floor.