Each tribe had roped off the ground it claimed for its own, leaving wide strips of grass separating camps. They circled in spiral-wise, to get a good look at the banners and rugs and young men of the many tribes assembled so far. There were plenty of banners, and beautiful rugs, and attractive young men laughing and joking and embroidering and practicing with their sabers and whips. Showing off, as young men did in such company.

Of the Vidrini tribe they saw no trace.

Young men kept their eyes lowered as the two girls passed, but masculine gazes brushed them, and heads turned after they had gone by to track their passage. Mariya had that effect on men. Kirya smiled wryly, aware that she was like a stone point placed next to an iron-tipped arrow: serviceable enough, but not the first thing you would reach for.

Two Singers had traveled to this confluence, their presence marked by tall poles wound with streamers. They dared not approach the Sakhalin tribe, whose head-woman’s tent stood at the center of the huge encampment. The least of the Sakhalin servants might count herself higher than the Moroshya headwoman. But the Singer out of the Konomin tribe had a humbler station, and anyway they had made offerings to him before and gotten blessings from the holy man for two of their arrows. He was old, no longer in the full flush of his power, and because all of his sisters were dead, he lived in the tent of a niece, its awning visible from here.

They approached the gap in the rope where a pair of jaunty young men stood guard with sabers swinging casually at their side, and took a place at the end of the line already formed by folk fortunate enough to have less far to walk. Everyone carried offerings. A good-looking man wearing a beautifully embroidered shirt swaggered to the front of the line. After a muttered discussion with the guards, he and his armed followers were admitted into the camp.

“I like that,” said an old woman, bent and weary, who stood in front of them. “That’s the Vidrini for you, eh?”

The man strode up to the awning, made his courtesies, and was offered a pillow to sit on while his followers hung back with arms crossed. From this angle, Kirya could not see the Singer, but at least a dozen people stood or sat in attendance under the awning.

“Was that the war leader of the Vidrini tribe?” Mariya asked, a little too eagerly.

The old woman raised an eyebrow, looking over the two girls with a gaze that measured their worth and station. With a snort, she turned her back on them.

Mariya leaned into Kirya. “I told Mother I should wear jewelry. Then people wouldn’t treat us as they do.”

The haunch weighed too heavily on Kirya’s shoulders for her to shrug. “It doesn’t matter. Aunt means to marry you to Oliski.”

“I mean to put her off until I discover what’s become of the Vidrini,” muttered Mari with a black look. “I don’t want to marry an ugly old man!”