“I have sent for the wife and daughter of Tain Trin Tain, and spared Tain his fate. Write it!”

What would they cry through the holy city and through the market? Marak Trin is the Ila’s man?

His father would hear it, sooner or later. His father would be appalled, outraged, and, yes, shamed a second time.

But could he refuse to yield up to the Ila’s demand his cast-off wife and daughter, where he had sent his son?

And could his son have done otherwise, when Tain Trin Tain had once bowed to the Ila and signed their armistice?

In that sense it was not his decision. It became the Ila’s. And Tain would have known, when he threw down the damnation against his wife, that he had cleaved the two of them one from the other and thrown conscience after, a casual piece of baggage. He only hoped the Ila’s men reached Kais Tain in time for his mother’s safety.

Love of his father? Loyalty? He no longer knew where to find that in himself. In the Ila’s promise, he had lost one direction and found another. He did not resent the pain of the Ila’s blow: lords struck when offended. It was an element, like heat, like thirst, to be endured. She had met the price, and he was bought. Had his father done as much, for all his blows through the years?

He walked out with the captain, sure as he did so that here was a man, like his father, who had sooner see him dead. But the captain said not a word against the Ila’s wishes, took him directly to the armory and let him equip himself with good, serviceable weapons: a dagger, a boot-knife, even considering that rarest of weapons, a pistol, difficult to keep in desert dust, and hungry for metal.

“Sand will impair it,” the captain said, plainly not in favor of him having it. “And aim is a matter of training.”

“I have no time for that,” he said, and put aside that piece that, itself, could have hired a regiment.

A bow—there were numerous good ones—might give him both range and rapidity of fire, but nothing to defeat a mobbing among the vermin, and it was a lowland weapon. In the summer heat of the Lakht the laminations outright melted and gave way.

In the end he settled for the machai, a light, thin blade, as much tool as weapon, that he hung from his belt, and a good harness-knife.

The captain looked at him oddly, and honestly tried to press at least a spear on him.

“An encumbrance,” Marak said. It was the same reason he wished none of the Ila’s regiments, which encumbered themselves with all these things and baked in hardened leather besides, in the desert heat. “I want only this. For the rest of us, good boots. We’ll ride. We’ll all ride. But good boots. One never knows.”