He tucked his chin like the eagles readying for sleep, and the gesture made him seem, for an instant, ashamed. “She was angry at me for giving away her position. In case any folk were nearby to spot me. She’d gone on the forest track to see if the village her sister married into had been hit.”

“Had it?”

“She hadn’t reached it yet.” He grinned. “I think, from certain words that slipped, that she left her own village’s hiding place because she’d gotten into an argument with her kin, or her husband, or the elders. Hard to say. She reminded me a little of you.”

She glared at him, and he laughed. Pil looked at them, and Nallo stalked to the fire and plopped down next to him, promptly soaking her rear as she sat in a hole hidden by a luxuriant growth of spring-beam.

Pil raised an eyebrow.

“You could have warned me!” she said, shifting away.

He shrugged, then dug into his sleeves and handed her a stick of dried meat.

“Thanks.” She chewed. He chewed. There was something about his silence that always got to her. She said, finally, “You’re awfully good with the eagle. Is it a lot like riding a horse?”

He tucked his chin in the gesture she’d come to learn meant no.

“I’ll tell you, I’m no good. I feel so clumsy up there, and thinking all the time how I’m going to fall, and then forgetting all that and just staring because it is so cursed amazing to see the land from the air. I just never knew!”

He chewed, watching the pot. He had exceptionally lovely thick straight black hair, which she had seen once when he let down his topknot to comb it out. Otherwise, as now, it was all gathered up tightly atop his head. He had a pleasant face once you got used to him looking so different, his eyes pulled at the corners and his cheeks broad and his nose a little flattened like someone had punched it down, only it wasn’t crooked as it would have been if it had been broken. Not a bad-looking man, really; just an outlander. Nallo had never met an outlander before; she could count on one hand the times she’d even seen Silver merchants on the road, them being outlanders still with their hidden god despite their people having lived here for almost a full cycle of years and colors according to the clerks at the temple of Sapanasu.

“What temples do your people have?” she asked. “I mean, did your gods come with you, or stay behind?”

At first she thought he would, as usual, say nothing, so she went back to chewing on the tough stick of meat. But after a while, he cleared his throat and forced out words.

“In the upper world,” he gestured toward the sky, “there are tribes. In the lower world there are tribes. They herd, and fish, and fight with each other. We walk the lands of the middle world and try to stay out of the way.”