Ettook took his hand off my bowed head, and I rose.

“The blind woman must bind your hurt,” he said, jolly as a grinning death’s-head. “First blood from your own people. That’s something. I only let so many come at you because I knew you could beat them.” I barely kept from laughing myself at that. “The seer shall make the warrior-marks on you freshly,” he said.

“No,” I said, “that carrion has put his hands on me too often. I must be the Unmarked Warrior of the krarl.” We were still speaking loudly for the benefit of the crowd, even some shireens were stealing out now, and a woman had begun mewing for dead Jork; not Seel-Na, I noted. I glared at the warriors and said, “Let my deeds speak for me. When I go to battle I shall paint the tribe’s colors on my skin, and if any man takes exception, let him tell me so; he shall be answered, as I have answered here.”

The woman crying made my spine crawl. I had been thinking of my life and not Jork’s death when I slew him. I went to her and lifted her up and hit her in the face, not very hard.

“Don’t wail for him in front of me,” I said, and she shut her mouth. “I will pay you Blood-Price for him,” and I turned to Ettook.

“Yes,” he said, “I will see Tuvek gives the Blood-Price for your man. But my son shall also come to my tent and pick out treasure for himself.”

When I went to my mother’s tent, the news was there ahead of me.

Her face was whiter than Ettook’s, and she, too, was smiling, but hers was a smile of victory, though old fear and a confused eternal rancor were mixed in it. When I stooped under the doormouth, she rose and almost ran at me, then stopped, holding herself back. I went to her and put my arm around her, and then she wept.

“Did you suppose I should fail?” I asked her. “I thought their sly needles in the dark might injure me, but never their half-wit’s knives. Did you hear all of it?”

“All,” she sobbed. Her breath scalded my neck, and she clenched her hands on the conquest she symbolized for herself in my flesh. “How you broke Distik’s ribs, and let the life from Jork, and that Urm and Tooni will not go hunting again until the moon has thinned to a bow.”

It made me glad to hear her fierceness speak out like this, she was so much more than the other women who could only whine or screech.

“It seems Tathra would defeat the braves of the krarl herself.”

She gazed up at me, her eyes shining.

“Tathra has made a son who can.”

She put her hand on mine and so she encountered what I had brought in. She had not seen it before, being intent only on me. Now she snatched her fingers away and the brightness in her dulled over.