Nira laughed at that, a quick, brittle sound like sticks snapping. “Seems to me it’s you ought’a be worrying about risk, girl. Ya just pestered two of the most hated people in the long history of this rotten world to join your cause.” She laughed again. “Two leaches. Two crazy leaches.”

Adare shot a glance at Oshi, lowering her voice. “Only one of you is crazy.”

Nira grinned a wide, yellow-toothed grin. “Call it one and a half.”

23

Long Fist—priest and shaman, the only chief to unite the Urghul tribes in a land and history littered with ambitious, bellicose chiefs—was the tallest man Valyn had ever seen: at least a couple inches taller than Jack Pole back on the Islands, who was a head taller than Valyn himself. Unlike most extremely tall men, however, who tended to move in a series of gangly lurches, as though all their ligaments had gone slack, Long Fist carried himself with the languid grace of a cat, every motion of his approach a coiling or uncoiling, as though the deliberation with which he moved were a soft pelt sliding over sinew.

Valyn had yet to see a chair among the Urghul. Instead, the chief seated himself upon a modified travois, thick buffalo hide stretched between a wooden frame, each end of the thing borne on the bare backs of two kneeling Urghul, a man and a woman, their elbows and palms planted in the earth, faces inches from the dirt. They seemed, at first glance, to be balancing it; then Valyn noticed the blood on their backs, weeping from beneath the travois, and realized with a sick lurch that the frame was barbed, held in place by the steel hooks driven into their pale flesh. The shaman was not a small man, and the pain of those hooks must have been excruciating, but neither the man nor the woman moved. Valyn could not see their downturned faces.

For all the attention Long Fist paid his bearers, he might have been perched on a ledge of stone or a wooden stool. Instead, he was speaking in a voice too low for Valyn to make out, addressing a knot of older warriors, gesturing with a carefully extended finger toward something in the sprawling camp and shaking his head in the slow, menacing cadence of displeasure. Only after those warriors had been dismissed, jogging down the low slope toward whatever errand awaited, did the chieftain turn his eyes to Valyn. They were predatory, those eyes, deep bleak blue and patient as the sky. Valyn felt himself being measured, weighed, and judged, and he tried to meet Long Fist’s scrutiny with his own.