Mariya rolled up the blankets they had shared while Kirya saddled the gelding and the piebald mare. The tribe lay a day’s ride behind them, and she wasn’t surprised it had taken Mariya this long to reveal even to her beloved cousin the gift a Vidrini boy had given her, since as a stranger and a male he ought not to be giving her gifts at all. It had been at least six nights back that the two tribes had happened to share temporary grazing lands by a watering hole on their way to the summer’s confluence on the Targit River.

Kirya scanned the landscape: The long slopes, never quite hills, were scantly covered with yellowing grass or brown scrub growing low to the ground. A hawk circled above. More crucially, a pair of vultures glided over the land toward the southeast, where Kirya guessed the two hunters would find the herd of fleet-footed gar-deer she had spotted yesterday. Such deer didn’t venture into the dry eastern grasslands often, and these had looked plump and juicy.

“At least demons didn’t eat us last night.” Mariya tossed a rolled-up blanket to Kirya, then tied her own gear onto the back of the mare’s saddle. “I thought they would. Did you hear them howling?”

The gelding was surly this morning, as always. He gave a halfhearted nip at Kirya, who shoved him with her shoulder to remind him who was boss. “That was the wind.”

“You can’t be sure! I don’t know how you can be so brave!”

Although their mothers were sisters, they looked nothing alike: Mariya had thick black hair, a pretty face, and the darker complexion that was rare among the tribes, while Kirya had the bland white-blond hair and round face common especially in the northern-roaming tribes of their people. Their looks were not the only way in which they differed.

“Mari, I will never understand you,” she said finally with loving exasperation. “You’re the best archer in our tents. Even at night, you would pierce any demon that tried to get close.”

“Demons can’t be killed,” said Mariya ominously. “Arrows would just go right through it. Then it would devour us.”

“That’s why we have the two arrows the Singer blessed. Those are proof against demons. Or we can capture their hearts in our mirrors. Then they would flee.”

Lips pressed tight, Mari surveyed the land. Despite being a child of the plains, she felt most at ease among the tents.

“I don’t want to miss that herd,” Kirya added. “I want something to bring to the confluence so we won’t be shamed in front of the other tribes.”

“Do you think he’ll be there?” Mari asked. “He said his aunt would talk to my mother.”

“Maybe. Don’t you want a good haunch of meat to offer when folk come to call?”

Kirya set a brisk pace in the direction of the circling vultures. The hawk moved away toward the north, but the vultures hung steady. The wind was hot and dry, blowing out of the eastern deadlands, but posed no threat to their hunting, as it would blow their scent and the noise of their approach into the west. The skin of the earth had a sandy color, bleached like the cloudless sky, and the summer heat had turned the green of spring grass to a brittle gold-brown. They’d had decent rains this spring, enough to keep their usual watering holes usable all summer. Twin lambs, both female, offered hope that they might begin to increase the tribe’s paltry herd. Now she had in her sights this unforeseen herd of deer, strayed out of their usual territories like a portent of prosperity glimpsed and pursued.