I would have made nothing of this except that Tathra stiffened into a curious immobile grayness.

“Why do you speak of her?” she presently said. “She was a slave the warriors stole, and she ran away. What more is there to know?”

“True,” Kotta said, “yet she saw him come,” nodding at me. “She kneeled behind you and held you, and you had torn her hands in pain. She was young and strong but she, too, had her child to shed. I wonder how it went with her in the wild.”

This was all obscure to me. It held me only because I could see the drawing of my mother’s face, like skin about a wound.

Then Kotta said to me, “You won’t die tomorrow, young buck. Never fear it. If you are sick, Kotta will see to you.”

She had put some sort of spell on me, too. The day’s troubles had altered as a shadow alters when the sun goes over the sky.

I went outside to clean my deer, and later, when the cloud roof on the mountains turned all the red, purple, yellow, and black of the warrior’s cloak my mother was weaving me, I secured a place by the fire and ate my last meal as a boy.

2

You sleep in a new and isolated place that night, alone with other boys who are to be made men the next day.

At dawn the krarl priest comes to wake you, his face freshly coated with black. He wears a robe tasseled with the tails of beasts and jinking from bronze disks and ivory teeth, the dentition of wild cats, wolves, bears, and men. I had not slept, and I heard him coming before he cuffed me. If he had crept in softly I should yet have known him from his stench.

Seel was the seer of Ettook’s krarl. His father had been seer before him, and had slunk in from the forests with only his sorcery to recommend him. Seel’s god was the one-eyed serpent, the Treacherous Beguiler, for whom the twists and turns of Snake’s Road had been named centuries out of mind. Sometime Seel had taken a wife and got a daughter on her. Shortly, the woman died, which did not surprise me. The daughter, meanwhile, grew up into a bitch. She was her father’s handmaid at his conjurings, the lay of half the tribe besides, but her status was mighty. Seel-Na—she had no other name than Seel’s daughter, this being the mark of her glory—was ever looking to be Ettook’s wife in Tathra’s stead. She had one son, a year younger than I, Fid, and she would have liked to claim him as Ettook’s, but did not dare. Red Fid had a squint in his left eye, and Jork was the only other krarl warrior who squinted; Ettook’s eyes were set straight. It must have rubbed her raw.

When Seel had roused us, we went into the open beyond the tent. Here we stripped and scrubbed our bodies over with snow. The place was far from the other tents under the tunnels, and there was no sound to be heard in all the valley but the sounds we made, shivering and balking at the cold. The shireens must hide and even the braves keep quiet at this hour of initiation.