Kirya would not have expected every onlooker to depart. After all, there might be a great deal of entertainment in watching them load their solitary wagon and lumber off shrouded in the tatters of their doomed pride. But the taint of demon’s breath rested heavily on the scene.

When the last of them was out of earshot, Mari shook herself, although she did not touch the mark on her cheek or the blood on her skin. “We have to get the children back.”

“How are we going to do that?” Kirya twisted her hands into her belt. She didn’t know whether to slap Mari, or embrace her.

“This is how we’re going to do it,” said Mari in a calm voice, just as if she were headwoman. “I have to remain separate from Orphan now anyway, and I’ve no tent to go into seclusion. You and I will ride after the raiders. We’ll take anything possible to ransom back the children. We’ll claim kin-right to the things they’ve stolen, like Feder’s winged kur.”

“We have no power to make them give anything back.”

“We’re going—you and I—and that’s all there is to it. Orphan will stay with Mother and Edina and the herd. They’ll travel to that swale where we hunted the gar-deer, and wait for us there. He knows how to survive, and he can do anything that Feder and Uncle Olig could do, maybe not as well, but he learned from them.”

Orphan was a clever youth, always learning, the hardest worker Kirya had ever met. That he was a good-looking boy always off-limits to her, and now married to her beloved cousin, must not cloud her judgment. She did not want to become a servant in another tribe where she would be assigned the most arduous or tedious tasks like churning and cleaning skins and smoking meat and hauling night pans out of tents every morning, given the worst cut of meat at mealtime and the last curdled ladle of milk, and left to sleep at the edge of camp under a wagon no matter the weather.

Reluctantly, Kirya nodded her agreement. “If we can get the children back, we can stay far from the other tribes. With Orphan’s skills and our hunting, we can survive until the children are grown. But I don’t know how our tribe can grow.”

“I do.” Mari’s gaze slid over to rest on Orphan. In Mari’s look Kirya saw a softening that abruptly spoke its secret: Mari had also long admired the handsome orphan the gods had tossed into their midst, but she had feared her mother’s anger too much to do anything about it.

Now she had him. And Kirya didn’t.

“Why shouldn’t we take in other orphans?” asked Mari.

“It’s bad luck to take in orphans.”

“Bad luck?” Mari gestured to the wreckage surrounding them. “What does that matter now?”

OUTRIDERS MET THEM before they came into sight of the Vidrini camp. That one was the youth who had gifted Mariya with the lapis-lazuli nets was evident from the way he jeered with more blustery force than his young comrades as they galloped in circles around the two girls but did not, of course, make any move to touch them.