She sighed, seeing that she must speak although she knew it would do no good. “So soon you will press past the White Road? It is better to rebuild our own cities and till our own fields until our feet are firmly planted in the roots of this Earth.”

Kansi-a-lari shrugged. “Human slaves can plant and build for us. With their labor, we leave more of our own people free to fight. So it was done in the days before.”

“In the days before,” said Feather Cloak, knowing her words clipped and short and irritated and knowing as well that to show annoyance was to weaken her own argument, “we made enemies who worked in concert to cast us out of Earth entirely! Have we learned nothing from the past?”

“Yes!” Kansi had that jaguar’s grin that made men wonder and sweat. “They hate us. They fear us. But we have to learned to strike while they are weakened so they cannot attack us again! It is time to leave the ways of exile behind and embrace what is ours, this world we were sundered from for so long!”

“No. It is too soon. Let the young ones grow. Let us rebuild and make ourselves strong first.”

Kansi turned in a circle, marking each person standing in the council chamber: the elders and the younger leaders, the warriors and the craftsmen, those born in exile and those so recently returned from the limbo of the shadows. The blood knives watched her hungrily.

“I have walked among humankind, those who live in these days, not the ones you remember from the past. I was born in exile, but I have not waited in exile and lost my spirit and my anger.”

Eldest Uncle tugged on an ear, perhaps only to hide his irritation with his only child.

“Do you insult us, who have endured exile with you?” demanded White Feather.

“I say what I have to say. Listen! I have seen that humankind cannot be trusted. Especially not those who call themselves the mathematici. They are the ones who know the secret of the crowns. They are the ones who could harm us again. Therefore: strike now! If she who sits as Feather Cloak will not lead us, then I will.”

Among the warriors came a general stamping of feet and pounding of spear butts on the ground, but Feather Cloak shushed this rumble by raising a hand.

White Feather stepped forward. They had prepared for this.

“I say what I have to say!” White Feather displayed Feather Cloak’s twin daughters, one in each arm. Their black hair peeped out of the striped cloth wrapped around those plump baby bodies. The little ones were alert, watchful, quiet. “Those of you who walked in the shadows do not truly understand what became of this land in exile. We endured a great drought. Of water. Of life. We died! The carcasses of our mothers and aunts and fathers and uncles littered the land because none had the strength to send them to the gods!”