“I know you will wed her.”

“Thus, you know.”

“Yes, and do you suppose it anything but a witching she has set on you, she a slave and you a warrior, to get you to marry her before the seer?”

“Enough of that!” I shouted. I had never met such foolishness from Tathra, nor such clammy ghost-chatterings. “You also, my mother, were an out-tribe prisoner garnered on a raid, a slave of the spear, Ettook’s whore, till he took you in the fire-ring and made you wife. Did you witch him, Mother? If you did, you made a poor choice. When I am husband to my Eshkiri slave, the women will not dare to slander her, or the men’s side to teach their sons to call her names, as all my life they have done with you. Your red pig praises you as a sow is praised, and tells how he mounts you before the whole tribe, and boasts that he ruts with others besides. Since I could walk, I have been fighting, boy and man, because I was your son, and he gave you no honor and therefore none to me. When Demizdor has sons by me, they shall not have to skin their knuckles to prove they are my heirs.” I broke off, breathing fast, having said too much, and cognizant of it.

She sat there, still straight, still masked. She said, very quietly, “You have punished me enough by ceasing to love me. You do not need to punish me with words as well.”

I was ashamed. The shame did not couple easily with the mood of gladness and victory I had had before. Of everything, it was hardest for me to forgive her that.

“I am sorry,” I said. I was stiff and ungenerous; even I could hear it. “We will say no more of this.”

“Too much has been said,” she answered. I expected her to cry, as once before. Then she had not, and she did not now. If she had wept I would have gone to her. She did not weep, and I did not go.

“There is a hunt at dawn,” I said. “I will bring you something.”

She thanked me and I left her.

After that inauspicious meeting, she was bland and almost dumb with me, which got me into a similar habit. I began to think back over the earlier times when she had been odd and difficult. I started to despise her, as I despised the other women who claimed me without my wanting their claim. Yet I did not truly understand that I despised her. She saw it better than I. I spent less hours with her than ever, more with my girl in Kotta’s tent. It no longer bothered me that Tathra kept on her shireen in my presence. I barely noticed. It was Demizdor’s face I hankered to see.

So my mother sat alone, swelling with Ettook’s seed, the fear which had once shown naked in her eyes now sunk to some cellar of her brain. Kotta brought her the medicines and haughtily she would drink them, without a word. Even her husband did not come to lie with her. He did not want her anymore. If she could give him another boy, then her security would spring up like a blossom, but if a girl or a sickly male, there would be nothing for her. Perhaps she saw her own self mirrored in Chula’s fate, and Tathra had no parent to take her in, no friend. As for me, the ties were rent.