“What are you doing here?” demanded Nallo.

He shut his mouth, ceased talking, and flushed.

Arda smirked. “Heard we’d tracked Tumna, did you, Volias?” She looked at Nallo. “He’s been flying in and out of Argent Hall for weeks now, riding messages down from Clan Hall. He has become a pest, always asking if there’s been any news of you and is anyone looking, like he thinks we’re cursed fools who can’t do a thing right. You followed me here!”

“I can’t help worrying,” muttered Volias without looking up. “Just like Joss to use too tight a rein. He must be honest in the very wrong way when maybe it would be better to let a person work things through with a bit of—I don’t know—”

“A bit of dishonesty?” asked Arda with a laugh.

Nallo didn’t know who to warm to, and who to snap at. “You knew, didn’t you?” she said to Arda. “That once I flew, I would want to fly again.”

Volias let out a whistle of breath. “So that’s how you did it.”

Arda said, “It does happen that way, often enough. How do you suppose I feel, Nallo? I’d have given anything to be chosen by an eagle. It’s all I ever wanted. But it never happened. So I’ve dedicated my life to training those lucky enough to be jessed.”

“To be slaves?”

She raised her hands, palms out, in the exact gesture she’d used to signal Tumna to lift. “I’m not treading that path, girl. Don’t even try me.”

Volias poured the last of the cordial into the cup and shoved it in front of Nallo. “You refuse to become a reeve because you say it’s like being forced to sell your labor as a slave. And yet you go ahead, so I hear, and sell your labor as a slave, working for the outlanders. So wouldn’t it make more sense to have remained a reeve, with autonomy, a hall filled with comrades, responsibility and authority?”

Nallo did not take the cup. “I myself chose to sell my labor. You at the hall—the marshal, everyone—made the choice for me.”

“We made no choice. The eagle made its choice.”

She shook her head. “Do you know how I got married? My father came up to me when I brought in the goats one afternoon and said, ‘Nallo, the clan has sealed a contract for you to marry a ropemaker in a village on the West Track. About ten days’ walk from here. You’ll leave tomorrow.’ ”

Arda shrugged. “A story heard a hundred times. How are you different from most other lads and lasses married out to benefit the clan?”

Volias picked up the cup, thought better of drinking, and set it back down, turning it halfway and leaving his hands cupped around its curve. “I can see you may have felt roped—heh—into a bad situation. But Arda is right, as much as I hate to admit it.” Arda rolled her eyes. “That’s how contracts are arranged between clans.”