I had discovered the sweet sharp joy of slaughter. I had not properly known it before. Learning the lesson, I would have fought all year round, season to season. As it was I had killed upward of thirty men by the time we reached the eastern pastures and the summer camping, and got a name among the krarls with whom we had warred. The Dark Warrior of the Red Dagkta, the Unmarked One. It was good to see unease and terror replace the sneers and winks. My own krarl feared me most but, like Ettook, began boasting of me. I would paint myself black and scarlet and white in the stead of tattoos, and ride out like a devil in the morning. I wore my hair loose too, it would never keep in plaits for long; let a man catch me by it if he had a mind, and see how I gifted him for his trouble.

In the final battle before the tenting, a blade went in my thigh and broke off there, and when they came to cut it free, the flesh had closed around it, tight as secrets. The seer showed his teeth about the krarl and told Ettook his son would perish of a diseased wound, but it healed clean, to both their sorrows.

Since the Boys’ Rite, Seel had given me his distance, and his words came secondhand. And at the war dance his daughter never offered me her flesh, at which, of course, I broke my heart.

That summer I took a wife. Now that I was a man and out of the boys’ tent, I had some need of one to see to my gear. I knew Tathra did not like this. She foresaw girls of the krarl she thought I should value more than her, but presently she and they came to understand there would be no great changes.

Chula’s father Finnuk stepped in the painted tent in the marriage month and said she was big with my child and would I acknowledge her. Soon Ettook called for me, and the girl was brought. She looked much altered from the last time we had had dealings, her eyes cast down and the lids painted green, and her shireen embroidered with butterflies of blue silk. Finnuk had loaded her with the family jewels to show me the dowry I could expect, gold and silver and one large emerald of which they were justly proud.

“See,” he said, tapping her ripe belly, “this is your planting, Tuvek Nar-Ettook.”

“Is it?” I said. “How am I to know that?”

“Chula was unbroken till she lay down for you last fall of leaf.”

“I don’t deny I had her, but maybe others have been visiting since then.”

At that her eyes flashed up, fierce as the emerald, though not as green. I had never seen her unveiled, but there are ways of telling something about a woman’s face, even through cloth, and she looked fair enough in the tribal fashion. Her body was pleasing, and her teeth excellent, as I had reason to remember.