The wind on the plains is a constant. A violent gust tore the cloth free. It billowed into her, choking her as it wrapped her body, pressing into her face until she could not breathe.

Theirs is not just a poor tribe but a dying tribe. No one will say so out loud, but the end will come soon. Estifio and Yara will ride off on their own with their boy; the Tomanyi cousins will eat their oath-bound words and seek the shelter once offered them by distant cousins in the west, hoping to make marriages for their young daughters. That will leave the cripple, the old uncle, and the orphan boy as their war band, the four young children, and three adult women, one of them gravely ill and one slow of mind . . .

The Vidrini boy will never be allowed to marry Mariya. Never. Their tribe is already dead, just twitching as animals sometimes do after the spirit has fled.

Gasping, she clawed herself free from the horrible thoughts. Her hands stung. Her lips smarted, and when she licked them, motes of skin flaked loose to dust her tongue. She slapped the cloth down with the knife, got it fixed under her knees. The wind died as suddenly as it had come up. With the mantle torn loose, the body lay uncovered.

The woman wore foreign clothing, spun from flimsy cloth that could not withstand winter’s piercing winds. One sleeve had torn and been mended with a darker thread. Her face was brown and her hair was black. Her hands, lying lifeless on her belly, were scarred with many tiny white lines as though repeatedly cut by a stone scraper. She looked as if she were sleeping, not dead, but her chest did not rise or fall, and when Kirya held her mirror in front of those lips, no breath misted the mirror’s surface.

Those without breath are without life. Yet she smelled no decay, nothing putrid. No bugs crawled. No vermin had begun to feast. And the vultures had vanished.

Air pulled in her lungs as she sucked in, then exhaled. Her own breath made mist smear the mirror’s surface. She was still living, then. She had not been devoured.

She scanned the heavens, but saw no birds, no messengers of any kind from the gods. The sun had shifted higher. Somehow it had become midmorning.

The cloth rippled under her knees as wind pressed through the grass. Both her hands hurt: Blisters bubbled on her skin. This was demon’s cloth, dangerous to mortal kind, and thus doubly valuable. They could actually hope to trade it for what they needed most: life for their tribe. Husbands. A tribe without women cannot be called a tribe: It loses its name and its heart and must be cast to the winds in the manner of a lost spirit. But likewise, in different manner, a tribe without brothers and uncles and sons and husbands cannot hang together; it will unravel, fabric that cannot keep its binding.