There was not much to do in the summer beyond the hunting. The fruit swelled thick on the trees, and rogue orchards and fields, resown by the winds, spilled across the sloping land. None of these things provided man’s work, only tasks of agriculture for the women and children.

There were ruined places north of the pasturing, old towns with broken roofs of pink tile, arid broad streets choked by young trees. Each season the hungry forest reclaimed a little more. Here and there thin towers would pierce above the rest, looking high enough to stir the clouds. It made me wonder who could have built them. On the bald green hills the white stones ran like a giant’s fencing, but they did not look so tall to me as once, for every year they had sunk I had been growing.

Half the tribes avoided the towns. The Hinga and the Drogoi claimed you would die if you went that way by night, and the dark-haired krarls, Tathra’s people, never ventured this far to the east. In my infancy, Tathra had told me of fallen palaces where dragons were guarding treasures and ghosts rattling spears—tales any child will relish. But I had often hunted there since, alone with my dogs at moonrise, and met nothing bad except for a boar or two who offered some trouble for their meat. And once I glimpsed a big cat, as white as milk, which made me think of the dream in the fever, and the silver lynx-mask. I had taken plenty of plunder since then, but nothing finer than that. Even Chula’s emerald I valued less.

I would still go to my mother’s tent. I would take her a choice portion of my hunting, and sit to watch her at her loom. Yet there had come a sort of silence over us, dark as the veil she wore now always in my presence. I considered my marriage was to blame, but in my heart I knew it was the silver lynx that pushed between us, though she would not speak of it. At length this took away my patience, and after that we were less easy even than before.

On Sihharn Night, when the men of the red krarls mount the ghost guard and the women of the krarls crowd together for their own watch, Chula was sitting among the torches with the child at her breast, brooding that I had recently found another I liked as well, for she had thought she might tether me like a steer. All the women share Sihharn, and Tathra sat spinning by Kotta. Soon Chula rose and, carrying the boy at his drink, she crossed to Tathra and spoke to her. I do not know what words Chula used, but the substance of them was that I would rather lie on my mother than on my wife, and had done so many times.

The women were always ready to make Tathra’s road a stony one. Their ears must have pricked up gladly. Kotta said something to the effect that Chula’s sour mood would sour her milk too. But Tathra stood and went away to her own tent without a word.