Abruptly I was outside. The daylight seemed too strong, and I did not see who might be lingering there; it was like trying to gaze through milk. I did not seek my tent or Demizdor. I walked away across the hill, past where the white stones ran, under the face of the low-burning autumn sun.

I came back at sunset, not because of any interest or reasoning in me, but because it was some road to take, some destination to achieve.

It was the night before Sihharn, and the watch-fires were being built through all the krarls across all the green-brown slopes in the dusk. But from Ettook’s tenting there came a dismal low ululation, the noise the shireens made at the death of a chief’s woman. I thought how they wailed, and how they must be smiling as they did it. Seel’s daughter, who would lead the chant for Tathra at moonrise, would barely keep from laughing as she tossed the autumn flowers on my mother’s body.

I did not want to meet any of them, Ettook least of all. I climbed in, therefore, like a thief over the stockade, avoiding the central cook-fire, and reached Kotta’s tent in the first thick shadows of night.

I called her name, and she replied immediately, bidding me enter.

The tent was much changed, different rugs on the ground, the brazier bright with fire, and the lamp burning, which Kotta lighted for others, not needing it herself. I glanced everywhere before I could stop myself, searching for my mother, but she had been taken to her own place.

“Sit, warrior,” Kotta said.

Having no more tempting pastime, I sat and waited.

“What I am to tell you,” Kotta said, “Tathra, the wife of Ettook, has charged me to say. Kotta has known these things some while, Tathra, too, in the dark of her heart. Now. Shall Kotta speak straight out to the warrior, or would he rather she went slowly to the matter?”

“What matter? Speak as you wish,” I said.

Kotta said, “Tathra was not your mother, Ettook not your father, the krarl of blue tents not your krarl, the Dagkta not your people.”

It was like a sword-flash in my brain; my lethargy ran away. I stared at her and said, too surprised to feel it yet, “Is this some riddle you are making?”

“No riddle. Do you remember I spoke of the Eshkir, the white-haired, white-eyed woman who was brought as a slave into the camp, and fled when her child was born?”

“I remember it.”

“Tathra also bore that dawn, a male, but it was sickly. I could gauge from my craft it would be dead within the day. When I left the warriors and came in the tent again, I found this: Tathra sleeping, the Eshkiri woman gone, and in the birth basket a child, as strong and sound as bronze.” Kotta leaned toward me. The brazier shone in her veiled face. Her hair was bound in a blue and scarlet cloth, and her sightless eyes, catching the glow, gleamed dully the same blue, the same scarlet from the flames. “Kotta is blind,” she said, “but Kotta sees, in her own fashion. The child in the basket might pass for Tathra’s child. A son, and healthy; it would bring her honor. But it was not Tathra’s child. Her boy was gone; the Eshkir took it. I think it died when I was from the tent. The Eshkir left her living baby and stole the dead; it was her gift to Tathra, the fruit of her own womb, which she did not want. You are that fruit. The Eshkir was your mother. Any might see it now. You have her beauty in you, and the man’s beauty of your father, too, that your mother loved and hated and slew.”