“What is that thing?”

“The gift of your husband, my mother, the chief’s bounty given to his new warrior. He took me into his tent and opened up the chest there, and told me choose what I had a mind to.”

“Why this, of all the treasure?”

“Why not this?”

She turned from me and went away across the tent and sat down where she had been before. She picked up the shireen that lay there and covered herself with it. Although it was the custom, I felt it like the cold.

“You are a warrior,” she said, seeing me frowning, “I must hide my face.”

“I was a warrior when I entered, but you were unveiled then. Is it this you’re hiding from?” And I lifted up the token I had carried here from Ettook’s chest of spoils, and held it out at her.

He had taken me into the tent and pushed open the wooden box with its turmoil of glitter inside. There lay the looting of several hundred raids and battles; as much as give me a gift, he had wanted to show me how many men had had their necks beneath his heel. I put my hand in the heap, and he came up beside me and spilled out quantities on the floor so I should see better what he had garnered. There were cups of bronze circled in bright gold, spear hafts of gray hard iron, brazen bucklers set with water-green gems and arm rings of yellow and white metal, handfuls of stones like fires or blood, and collars of ivory strung with blue carbuncles. I had not guessed him so wealthy, and hesitated, wanting the prize of his collection and not certain what it might be. Then my firsts and his had cleared a path, and I found it.

It was a mask, made for a woman for it was small, all pure scintillant silver: the face of a lynx.

My dream came back to me at once—the black wolf mating with the white lynx. I moved my hand and touched the mask, and a shock went through my palm clear up into my shoulder joint. It was like grasping lightning. But I did not shift, and the sensation dwindled and was gone. I lifted the mask and showed it to Ettook.

“I will have this, if my chief permits.”

He nodded, sullen as a child whose toy has been stolen. I had got the best from him as I had hoped to. The mask was of value, besides its curious beauty, and obviously it had come from the workshops of the ruined cities. At the back, long yellow cords hung down to decorate the hair, and on the end of each was a little perfect flower of translucent yellow amber. It pleased me and set the crown on my combat, for I was still a boy. I had some notion that I might give it to Tathra to wear in place of the shireen, and let the women chew on that.