“There,” said the captain, shouldering aside an onlooker—a hireling by the cut of his threadbare tunic—to give Joss room.

Joss did not have a great deal of experience of horses, but he had ridden them for about a year during his apprenticeship as a messenger to Ilu, the Herald. He had an idea that the stout Qin horses were the most phlegmatic, and toughest, equines known to humankind. But they were definitely scared of the big eagles.

The company of thirty men Anji had ridden in with had scattered to a safer distance, although all had bows at the ready, waiting for the command to shoot. One poor fellow had been thrown from his panicked horse and left on the road facing down a handsome female eagle. Joss had to admire the way the lad stood his ground, not sure whether to bolt or brazen it out, but sticking with the latter course of action in the face of the imposing head and wicked talons.

“What do you make of that?” Anji asked with the same admirable calm.

“Does anything shock you?” Joss asked him.

“It might, if I had noticed you were worried, but since you are not, then I assume you know what is going on. That’s one of my tailmen, Pil. What do you make of it?”

“The western shore of the Olo’o Sea is not all that far as the eagle flies, if she flies, as she can, from Olossi across the sea rather than being forced to walk roads and tracks the long way around the shore and through the wild lands. There are boats that usually ply the eastern shore, that could haul supplies to the west. I’ll argue before the council in favor of your claim, if you’ll help me build a temporary reeve hall in the Barrens for my flight of new reeves. Like that lad, there. What did you say his name was?”

Ha! Now he had surprised Anji.

“Pil? What are you saying, Marshal?”

“You live in the Hundred now. If you mean to make this your home, then you have to abide by our laws. That eagle has made her choice. She’s chosen one of your soldiers.”

29

The envoy of Ilu did his best to track the girl on her journeys around the Barrens without hounding her. Sometimes she hunted, or practiced her archery at a target she set up at the base of the hill, where the winds weren’t so strong. Sometimes she returned to the hidden valley, with its unseasonable harvest of fruits and nuts and the strange, glittering threads drifting in the air. Sometimes she scouted the outlanders’ building activity, and the nearby hills. He kept his eye on her from a distance, because he knew absolutely that to try to force her to accept what she had become would be the ruin of his hopes.

One day she returned in the late afternoon in the teeth of an unexpected cloudburst. This time of year, an unusual pressure of storms boomed out of the Spires, strong weather pushed over the mountains from foreign climes. Under the overhang, he coaxed the coals into a brisk fire, and after she had cared for the horses she sat down on a rock opposite him.