She said nothing, and I went out into the night.

It was the amber moon that follows the ripeness of the year, and the sky was cobalt blue about it, veiled at its horizons by the smoke of many hundred krarl fires. I stood on the somber earth, and I sensed him go from me, the man I had been, the warrior, the chief’s son, Tuvek Nar-Ettook. Even my bones and flesh seemed changing, and my brain rang.

I turned and walked toward the painted tent of Ettook. I, Vazkor’s son.

He was sitting among his elder warriors, and Seel was there in a corner, his eyes like spikes.

Ettook was mourning in his own way, not the death of his wife, but the death of his redheaded son.

“She was too old,” he said. “I was too amenable. I should have had done with the mare long since and taken a younger one who would not lose me sons. He was a fine boy, well made, but she killed him. They have little enough to do, these animals of women. Can they not even give us our sons alive?”

This putrid nonsense was volleying out of him like foul air as I opened the flap. When he saw me, he jumped, in the usual manner; then he analyzed me more closely, and he grew very nervous.

“Come, Tuvek,” he said. “Share the loss with me. She was a good wife for all that. She shall have a bangle or two to take with her into the earth. A good wife.”

The light of the lamps flickered over his face and over the yellow patterns on the blue walls.

I said, “Stand up, you bloody hog, and get on your feet. If you cannot live as a man, you shall at least die as one.”

The warriors sprang up instead, cursing. But they were like dogs without a master. My mind went back to how I had bested grown men when I was fourteen years, and I smiled.

Ettook sat quite motionless.

“What is this?” he said stupidly, sweating, knowing too well.

I had meant to knife him, to fight him and knife him if he rose to fight. Then I would cut down any others who came at me. I never dreamed I could not do it.

But, looking at him as he cringed there, showing his dirty teeth, his dirty mouth still sweet from his praise of Tathra, I knew there was another, better way to kill him.

I felt it come, like a slow wave, through my brain.

It was his, my father Vazkor’s, skill. He was guiding me as on the fortress rock.

I could kill a man by wanting him dead.

There was a pain in my skull, a splitting, slender, golden pain. And then a pale blotting of light over the painted tent.

The yellow patterns danced and united, the lamps guttered and smoked.

Ettook lunged from his cushions, impaled on a sword of slim lightning, screaming louder even than Tathra had screamed dying of his cockerel’s work. I let him sample it to the full.