Kesh snorted. “Guardians! There’s a man who knows how to dance a fraud. The Guardians are gone. Vanished. Dead.”

“Kesh! Let him finish.” The teasing manner she’d had before had fled utterly. This was not a woman you wanted to cross.

“The man went on to say he was sorry if the treasure came into her hands in any manner which led her to believe she could own it.”

Kesh was really angry now, puffed up as certain animals fluff up fur or feathers to try to intimidate the beast that has cornered them. “I admit the girl’s coloring was odd, her skin as pale as a ghost’s and her eyes demon blue and her hair an unnatural gold-white color. But when has it ever been said that no one can own a slave? Except among the Silvers, I grant you. Heh! Did he claim that she was a Silver? None of us have ever seen the faces of their women, although the men don’t look anything like that.”

“The man claimed that the girl, like him, was a Guardian.”

“How can anyone have believed that?”

“The Hieros believed it. She let him take the girl.”

“To sell for a tidy profit elsewhere! I didn’t know that woman was a fool.”

“She’s no fool,” said Zubaidit.

Joss glanced at Scar, who watched the interaction with his usual uncanny alertness, ready for trouble. At the foot of the hills, the basin still sloped away, and from this vantage one could see the vista rolling into a heat haze. Clouds covered the sun, and the recent rains had softened the air and made it bearable, but it was still hot. A man still sweated, thinking of how much he did not understand about the world. “He came attended by two winged horses.”

“Winged horses!” blurted out the brother. “What kind of child’s nonsense is this?”

“So my eyes were not cheating me after all. I saw a winged horse in the camp of the army.”

“So you told me,” Joss said. “I didn’t believe you at the time.”

“No, you didn’t. What happened at Olossi?”

“Captain Anji and his troop, two flights of reeves from Clan Hall, and the newly elected council master of Olossi using the local militia combined forces to drive the northerners away.”

She nodded. “There are two of us, and only one of you,” she continued amiably enough, but Joss’s instinct for danger crawled like a prickling on his skin. Like a fine steel sword, she was a honed weapon. “Even with the eagle, you can’t force us to go with you. You can’t carry us both.”

He braced with the haft of his reeve’s staff fixed on the ground, ready to move with a mere tightening of his grip. “I can track you until the Qin soldiers who are hunting down the remnants of the army catch up to us.”

“Ah.” She nodded with a faint smile. “I concede this match.”

The brother fumed, and the glance he loosed at his sister betrayed other emotions struggling beneath the surface.