“Who is Peyuan?”

“Peyuan is our chief, the father of Uasti. He wishes to know only if he may help you.”

“That is generous of your chief, but I must be on my way. He will help me best by letting me go swiftly.”

“Oh, but you may go at any hour you wish. There is no constraint.”

I did not intend to be ungracious to this pretty woman with the gentle manner. (I had changed somewhat already from my warrior attitudes, despite the cognomen Hwenit had given me.) Nor did I want bickering with their chief. I said I would wait and see him, though the nerves in my spine told me I should not linger here.

He was not long in coming, just long enough for me to eat—they were masters at such intuitive niceties.

“I am Peyuan,” he said, prefacing himself with no honorific.

I stood up, careful this time of the dried lizard, but he indicated I should sit, and sat himself.

Peyuan was between forty-five and fifty, his long hair graying, his hard body going to flint rather than flaccidity as he gained years, like a slim, aging tree. He had leaned on a spear, symbol more than weapon, and he laid it between us on the rugs, the staff pointing west in a sign of peace.

“My Hwenit brought you,” he said. “She imagines she magicked you from the ground. She has such fancies, but she is a shrewd healer for all that. She fancies, too, that you also have some magic power, but I shall not ask you this, for it is your burden, not mine. I will only inquire, since you are a wanderer, if we may be of service to you on your road?”

“My chief,” I said, “I am grateful for the help I have already received. I will say this, I am being hunted, and must make on before the hunt comes here and does harm to your krarl as well as to myself.”

“No harm will come to us,” he said calmly. “Will you tell me why they hunt you?”

“An ancient feud. Vengeance. They have a score to settle with my father, and the penalty has devolved on me.”

He looked down at the spear between us, then up into my face. His dark eyes—it was Hwenit’s mother who had had the blue ones—probed me with a solemn concentration, not discourteous but profound.

“I will recount something strange to you,” Peyuan said. “Reply or not, as you choose. You are strong and hard, you have been a fighter, yet you bear no scar. Something in you, the set of your eyes, reminds me of another I once saw, some twenty years ago. A woman. Let me describe this woman. White skin without a blemish, hair like ice.”

“And her face,” I said, before I could stop myself.

He said, “I never saw her face. She wore the shireen. Only her eyes, which were pale and very bright, still-water eyes. Yet, though I never saw her unmasked, she was lovely. This you could perceive in her every movement, the turn of her head, her limbs, her body. She would have owned great beauty.”