I let Moka shave my face with the bronze razor, for she had a steady hand.

She was already swelling big, another duet of boys probably. The sight of it gnawed on me, reminding me of Tathra. Feeling my powerlessness in that quarter, I had tried to put it from my mind.

I had few enough horses to choose from in my pen; we had eaten most of them in the lean winter. I mounted up and soon rode off with my wives’ kin, as was traditional, for marriage was a bond on the man’s side too. I knew I could trust Asua’s Doki, and Finnuk—Chula’s father—as little as any, and Moka’s eldest brother was Urm, the man I had thrown in my proving fight as a warrior. I had broken his leg and it had never healed straight, so he had no great cause to bless my name.

We reached the valley of the gathering at noon, when the sun stood like a golden shield directly above the columns of black pines at the track’s summit. The chiefs of the krarls would cursorily meet here, clasp hands, exchange tokens. Families would pay off Blood-Prices, and fresh feuds begin. Presently the warriors would get drunk and stab each other in the guts as they were making water up against the trees.

Down by the fires the chiefs’ sons were finding their usual preliminary ways to vie and compete, breaking stallions bareback, hurling spears in a mark, or simply matching cup for cup till they fell prone, or got out knives and fell dead. I did not join the drinking, not being able to hold more than a cupful down. But my pride led me into the other things. Each year they hooted for me to try my bow or spear or this horse or that horse, praying to their demons the while that I should make a fool of myself, but I disappointed and beat them every time. They would never learn. Soon I had won off them a set of fine peeled white-wood arrows with scarlet fletches, ten bronze rings, and someone’s wolfskin cloak.

There was nothing in the land or in my mind to tell me how my life should alter through that day, to warn me of the hunter with his shaft aimed at my back.

There was a rill of white water up the slope, where I took my horse to water him, near sunfall. While he was drinking, I stood among the trees, looking first down on the valley, which had become a dish of smoke from the fires, then out over the ridge to the mountain wilderness, west and north.

The pines, like the posts of a dark loom, were weaving the deepening sunset between them. It was the sort of light to catch the heart, red, dying light, yet pure as crystal. The mountains stood upon it in clots of shadow and crests of flame, each like a huge crumbling coal on the hearth of the sun.