Anji went on. “I am thinking it is time for me to ride a circuit of the countryside to survey possible settlement sites for us and the men.”

Anxiety fluttered within her chest. So might a bird react, finding itself caged. Anything might happen. It already had. But Mai knew from long practice how to quiet her fears. She put on her market face. “Ride west, and survey the estate of the House of the Embers Moon. They also own this compound.”

Anji looked closely at her, rocked back on his heels, and forward again. “You are interested in renting from the House of the Embers Moon?”

“No. We should acquire the entire house, which has no living adult members, and its assets. I’ll have to look through their accounts first. Their specialty trade was in oil. Their primary olive estate lies on West Spur. That road gives access to the trade route for oil of naya.”

“King’s oil. Very good, Mai. King’s oil saved us.”

“So I was thinking. If we mean to establish ourselves in this country, then it seems to me we should make sure we always have king’s oil in our possession.” She frowned.

“What troubles you, plum blossom?”

“West and south lies the empire. I thought today—even Chief Tuvi thought it—what if the Red Hounds follow us here?”

He did not often touch her in public, but he did so now, a delicate touch as light as a bird’s as he brushed her hand. He did not smile to placate or reassure her. He never played that dishonest game. He knew the risks, as did she.

“Sometimes you have to fight where you stand,” he said, reminding her of her own words to him. He lifted his hand to show the wolf-sigil ring he had taken from her hand as a sign of the gamble they had mutually agreed on the night they had decided to make that stand, to build a new life in the Hundred. “We can prepare our ground, so any fight we enter is under circumstances and in the place of our choosing.”

17

The Barrens were a dry and brutal place, thoroughly unpleasant. Keshad winced as he walked down to the shore of the Olo’o Sea. The air stank, and his eyes watered, but the tears came mostly because of the stabbing pains in his buttocks and thighs.

“You’re not accustomed to riding.” Captain Anji halted on a slick shelf of rock lapped by oily water.

“I was a slave,” said Kesh irritably. “Slaves walk, or at least they do in the Hundred.”

“Yet you walked south over the Kandaran Pass many times in order to trade, and returned safely each time. That suggests you are hardier than you act, and smarter than your sulks and dagger’s tongue make you appear.”

Kesh eyed the Qin captain in the last light of the day, with the sun pouring light across the calm salt sea. Anji was a man of medium height, with the coloring and broad cheekbones common to his Qin tribesmen but a sharp-hooked nose more usually seen among the Sirniakans of the empire. He intimidated Kesh far more than his old master, Feden, ever had, because while Feden had been a tyrant, a man of pouts and rages, he was also a man whose pouting and raging made him vulnerable. As he had been in the end, for the price he had paid for selling out Olossi to the northern army was his own life.