There’s nothing rueful or sour in his words. It’s as if he’s stating that the sky above is blue.

Evie looks from the nameless Savage to Brio, questioning him with her eyes.

He shrugs, looking older and wearier than she’s ever imagined him. “If you’d asked me a year ago I might’ve offered an alternate explanation. Now…”

“It was the same before these wars,” another voice, as cold and hard as a gravestone, adds from farther down the line.

It belongs to a B’ors woman Evie has come to know as the de facto leader of the small contingent composed of several different tribes. From what Spud-Bar and the others had told her of the B’ors and their fiercely individual and independent nature, Evie expected to have to convince each of them individually to join their fleeing Savage band. She’d been surprised to find not only had they all come together as a unit, but they’d also elected their own captain and followed her unquestioningly.

She is called Yacatek. The others, all men, seem to readily defer to her despite the fact she’s neither the largest nor the strongest warrior among the small band (it occurs to Evie that’s another perception she created in her own mind about them). In fact, the only weapon she carries is a decorative stone dagger hung in a leather sheath around her neck. The B’ors refuse to wield the shoddy secondhand steel supplied to the Savage Legion. Valuing their fighting ability if nothing else, the Legion has allowed them to retain whatever weapons were in their possession upon capture, clubs crowned with knotted wooden fists hard enough to split skulls and short axes with heads of carved stone or the jawbones of stallions.

Evie’s conversation with Yacatek before they departed the razed Savage camp had been brief. Evie told Yacatek that they were stronger together than separated. She told Yacatek that they were the same, all condemned as Savages.

“We are not the same,” Yacatek had immediately corrected her in a voice that commanded Evie’s attention, “and I am not here to teach you the difference. You only need know we will band with you for our reasons, not yours. Those reasons may change as the wind does. You must be prepared.”

That sounded more than fair to Evie, not to mention that having been raised in the Crachian Capitol she’d learned to appreciate honesty as blunt as the head of a mace.