“You know anything about wild pigs, cleric?”

“I know they’re nothing like the tame pigs that people keep in pens,” Chih hazarded. “I know that after a certain size, only the nobility are allowed to hunt them, and that the tusks of the biggest wild pig on record frame the doors of the Savage Hawk Hunting Society in Anh…”

Khanh snorted, not unkindly.

“That’s not bad,” he said. “But wild pigs, well. They were big enough that they got to be gods in the old days. One thing that makes you a god is killing a lot of people, and they surely did that. When foxes turn a hundred, they give the moon a skull and turn into humans, but when wild pigs turn forty, they’re big enough that the only thing they want to eat is meat.”

Chapter Four

They called her Wild Pig Yi because she grew up wrestling wild pigs for fun. When she was a baby, her father quarreled with her mother, and to hurt her, he took Yi and abandoned her in the forest, assuming she’d be little more than a mouthful for some passing wild pig.

Her family thought she was dead for five years, and then on the sixth, she came back dressed in a pig skin with a lance made from a whole pine tree and a fat sow thrown over her shoulder.

She gave the sow to her mother to roast for her return dinner, and with her lance, she drove her father into the mountains to see if he would do better on the mountain than a baby. He didn’t, and he was eaten, and for a while Wild Pig Yi lived with her mother and her mother’s family in Chifeng.

She was always a wild one, though, and eventually her mother came to her and said that she wasn’t suited to life in the town of Chifeng.

“Well, then,” said Wild Pig Yi, who had never learned the trick of being hurt, “where do I belong instead?”

“You might go to the city and make your money in red shoes in the singsong districts,” said her mother. “Or you might put on this old coat from your dead father and join the army. Or perhaps there is some other place for you, but it is not here.”

That struck Wild Pig Yi as the most clever thing her mother had said in a while, and so with nothing more than that, she set out from the town, which had never struck her as any sort of prize anyway. By then, she was nineteen, and far more terrible than she had been at five. She marched away from Chifeng and never even thought of looking back.