Eventually I opened my eyes with a mouth full of bone dust, my body like stones, and looked around. I was in the hut of sticks and mud near the boys’ tent where the sick ones went. It had been dark, but now a light had come close to me. Behind the light I made out a skinny shadow and recognized its smell as Seel.

By the trembling of the lamp I could tell he was in an ugly humor. He would sometimes froth at the lips and scream like a woman birthing, a thing that alarmed the warriors, who feared his magic. Seeing me conscious, he started gobbling out some curse over me, calling me worm’s dung and other tender things. Now and then a fleck of his tepid spittle hit my face. I remembered biting him.

“Greeting, Seel,” I said. “Was it your dirty needles that poisoned me, or your dirty flesh?”

He gave a squawk straight off, and some of the hot oil tipped out of the clay lamp onto my chest. I would not have been so forthright with him had I been quite well, I think, for he was a bad enemy and I had unfriends enough. But it seemed funny at the time.

Then I heard Kotta’s voice in the far corner of the hut.

“He speaks nonsense, seer, it’s only his fever. Take no heed. Such ravings are beneath you.”

Seel flung around and the lamp showed her. She was at some healer’s work, intent as if she could see all she did.

“He has no fever, woman,” Seel rasped. “It is the out-tribe blood in him. He does not bow to the ways of the red krarls. Tomorrow dawn he shall come to the painted tent and I shall judge him, and the One-Eyed.” And his gnarled hand crawled around the snake-carving on his breast.

“As you decide, seer,” Kotta rejoined politely, “but he is the chief’s son.”

Seel dashed down the lamp, and strode out like a thin evil wind.

“It is a clever boy,” said Kotta, “to enrage Seel.”

“Don’t lesson me, Kotta,” I said. “Tell me how long I’ve been here.”

“The afternoon of the Rite, the night following, the day just gone.”

This scared me a bit. It seemed a good while to lose from your life. I said, “Am I better?”

“Better or worse. You, and others, shall reckon it.”

“Women always speak in riddles,” I said. I sat up and my head rang a little, but quickly cleared. I felt near enough myself, and I was hungry. “Get me some food,” I told her.

“I will get you a mirror first,” she said, “then see if you still hunger.”

This irritated me, for mirrors were women’s toys. I did not blame Tathra that she might want to gaze in one, for there was something worth observing, but I hardly knew my own face. Still, Kotta brought me a bronze mirror and held it where I could take note. It was not my face she was showing me but my breast and arms, where the claws of the tattooing needles had patterned the sigils of tribe and krarl.