The next day the seer was busy with Ettook’s body, painting it for cremation, and Ettook’s bastards, each hopeful and bright-eyed now that I was from the race, were dressing him, and Seel’s daughter plaiting his beard.

The warriors meanwhile stood death-guard around the tent, though occasionally some would seek me up the hill, or Demizdor in my tent. The unavoidable intervals between these visits apparently saved my life, and hers.

What went through her head as she lay there in my tent is all too clear. The men who used her were every one like a facet of myself, and she blamed me—that I had left her to them, that I had grown from their stock. She wanted to die, and expected death. She meant to cheat them if she could. Gradually her mental strivings concentrated only on this, how she might free her hands and steal the knife of some brave as he grunted and jerked inside her, or how she must snatch a blade when they came to take her out.

In the acid sunset of Sihharn she heard the shout as they pulled me down from the hill on the wooden pole. She was glad I should suffer, fiercely glad, yet she was chilled as if with death already.

There was some deal of noise, and no more braves came to pay her court. The sounds kept up for an hour or more.

Then there was a silence.

She lay in the silence, with the dark plastered over her eyes so thick that she could not even see her own bruised limbs, or the dull wink of the iron pegs that held her bindings. Suddenly the tent flap was thrown open.

My wife’s heart lurched, and for an instant she was blinded by an insane weak confusion. When she could see again, she saw the unbelievable: her own people there in the doormouth, one of whom removed his silver skull-mask, showing her the face of her kinsman, Orek.

The skull-masks did not, despite their threat, raze the krarl or slay its women, or even the several warriors who had raped Demizdor.

Truth to tell, their party of reprisal had lost its strength during the months of searching, and was now thirty in number, and they had no cannon and were aware of the neighboring Dagkta campments across the slopes to east and north. Besides, they had me, the only warrior they actually yearned to harm, and they had got their lady back. And plainly, to her, all the faces of the braves who came in her had amalgamated into one face, and that one mine. I, the man who had forced her from her own life into his, and thereby brought the rest to pass on her.

She had lost no honor with her kin. More, they gave her back her honor and her pride in minutes. They dressed her in a yellow robe that the younger cousin, Orek, had carried with him all the way from the old city. It was rich, of silk, beaded with crystal. I was to note later that despite the apparently masculine qualities many city women possessed, they were generally treated as fragile and precious by their men. Next, the silver deer-mask was found for her—because it was her own. (I picture Chula, barely conscious with terror, despoiled of that last treasure by a skull-headed demon of Sihharn.)