She wept, and assured me that she would.

When she was quieter, she said. “It began between us, between Qwef and me, small as the first thread on the loom. Each day wove a little more. Now the garment is finished.”

I said, “You are his sister, Hwenit. This is why he will not.”

“Oh, the fool,” she said. “It would only make us closer. It is why we are bound. Flesh speaking to flesh, because the flesh is one.”

“Be thankful, girl, you are not a Dagkta woman. They would whip you for dreaming of it.”

“The red people are cruel and blind. Why should it be a whipping matter?”

“If for no other reason, because the children of two so near in blood will be sickly.”

“Are the beasts sickly? The animals of the hills and the fish of the sea, and the birds of the air? And often they mate, parent with young, and the infants of one womb together.”

“Well,” I said, “but we are men.”

“And the poorer for it. I never yet saw a man outrun a beast, outswim a fish, outfly a bird. If they fall ill, which is rarely, they need no healer to tell them what herbs they should eat in order to be well. They take no slaves and make no wars.”

I said, “There are plenty who would court you in your krarl. Leave Qwef be, and choose another.”

“I have tried. Two years I have tried. You see the result of it.”

“Think,” I said, “what it would mean to lie with him.”

“Trust me, I do, and frequently. Brother is a word; sister is a word. Do you feel a word? Do you suffer a word? Love you suffer, and desire and pain.” She put me from her with cold small hands, and oddly, I saw she was Uasti again, the calm, elder Uasti, deep as a dark well, and sad to the profundity of her depths. “Go sleep, warrior. Leave me my dreams at least, for which your Dagkta curs shall not beat me.”

I left her, but later I heard her rise and go out.

In the morning, I walked up onto the slate parasol of the island, and came on the black clinkers of a fire she had built there, and the tracks of her feet going around and around in the ashes of it. Some circle spell she had made to glamour Qwef.

2

That day, the third, was still and windless, the trees carved on the sky, and the sea tumbling on the beach in slow rushes, without hunger.

Noon came with a white sun; it was chill after the warm foretaste of spring we had been having. The quiet grew disturbing and I fancied foul weather was blowing up somewhere, gale or rain coming back to scourge the island, and wondered how high the tide would run in a storm and if I had best shift the tent.

There was apprehension in me, too, something I tried to shake off. I found myself going over again the details of that dream I had had, the dream of wings and vengeance that had made me swear my oath to the shade, or rather the memory, of my father. In the dream I had listed, in warrior fashion and very thoroughly, my deeds and possessions, even to the quantity of my wives and sons, even to the tribal expression of having slain forty men, which forty stood for uncountable and unlimited numbers. I had also prophesied my own death: an out-tribe spear between my ribs—three days from that night. Today.