Kirya knew better than to give her name to demons.

Mima smiled kindly. “Yah yah yah,” she added. She displayed a metal comb and mimed combing hair.

Behind, the other young women and girls hissed and hooted, or coughed and sneered. Several girls just sat there staring blindly at nothing, and one girl rocked obsessively side to side, but she sat away by herself, no one close by her. Yet none of them left. They wanted to watch as when, the only other time Kirya had seen a foreign person in the tribes, all the children had followed the foreign person around the entire time that person had walked within camp.

Kirya shrugged, to show acquiescence. Anyway, Mima’s pretty smile reminded her of Mariya. Was it so bad to want a person to be friendly with, even if it was a demon?

Hesitantly, Mima reached for Kirya’s hair, but withdrew her hand without touching it. The old woman snapped out words. Mima fixed a nervous smile on her face, and tapped the hair as if it might burn her. Her companions squealed, and giggled, and Kirya grinned, just a little, because they were so funny.

“Yah yah yah,” said Mima with a giggle. She began to work through the long tangles. As she worked, the place quieted while every soul there, except for the girl who rocked side to side, watched and exclaimed as if they expected the color to change with every stroke, only of course it did not.

They were dark, some like Mima handsome in the manner of Mariya and some demon-scratched like the Qin, while others had a clay-red complexion or a pleasing brown one, and one pair of girls had skin so black that Kirya wondered if the color had been painted on. But no one else was like her, a woman of the tribes with pale hair and pale skin.

A low clang shivered through the air. The old woman clapped her hands, and the girls and young women hurried away, some gabbling but most silent. Several girls lifted up and then pushed along the girl who had been rocking side to side; she was like a sleepwalker.

The attendants closed in on either side of Kirya, gripped her elbows. They steered her down a long narrow place fenced by high walls and a roof, and into a big place, like a headwoman’s spacious tent, only this tent with its unmoving walls had benches set on a raised platform and other places to sit heaped with pillows. Lamps hissed. A sharp perfume smoking up from piles of incense made her eyes water and her nostrils sting.

They sat her on a stool on the platform. An attendant tucked a startlingly beautiful white flower between Kirya’s hair and ear. In twos and fours, the other girls and young women filed into the room, some with eyes cast down and shoulders hunched and others with bold, hard laughter and snatches of song. So much bright silk dazzled Kirya. This was a rich tribe, indeed, that all its daughters and even a servant like herself were dressed in precious cloth.