“Infants need protection,” Long Fist replied patiently, “but men and women grown? To protect them, to force your protection upon them, to assume that they need or desire that protection, is to strip them of their own nobility. You call us savage. You say we are like beasts. I say it is you with your law and your prosperity that makes swine of men, makes cattle of women, reduces them to cowed conformity. Kwihna would raise their eyes once more, would ennoble their hearts.”

“I see how Kwihna ennobles,” Valyn said, gesturing to the kneeling figures, trying to hold on to his side of the argument. For all the chieftain’s scorn for words, he wielded them deftly as weapons, twisting meaning and changing context until Valyn found himself utterly wrong-footed, defending rather than attacking. “It looks great—as long as you’re the one sitting on the litter and not the one holding it up.”

“Surely,” the man replied, pulling open his tunic slowly to reveal his chest, “you do not believe that I would allow others to claim an honor that I myself refused.”

Valyn suppressed a shudder. Someone had carved a tangled web of jagged, puckered slashes into his white skin, scores of lines, hundreds of them, a cloak of glabrous, glistening scar laid over his flesh. On either side of his chest, toward the pits of his arms, large healed punctures, like old spear wounds, gouged the muscle. Following Valyn’s gaze, the shaman nodded. “It was here,” he said, pressing a fingertip into one of the shallow divots, “and here that they put the hooks. For one full moon I hung suspended by the steel while every morning the tribe gathered, every man and woman, even the children, gathered to drag their knives across my flesh, to participate in my sacrifice.”

Valyn tried to gauge the claim. It seemed almost physically impossible. Almost. If none of those knives had severed an artery, if someone had provided the shaman with water, if the wounds were smeared periodically with coagulant, a man could survive. Something had left the scars. Valyn imagined hanging from those hooks like a beast after a botched slaughter, skin peeling away in strips, flies in the wounds, tongue swollen so fat beneath the steppe sun that every breath was a struggle against strangulation.

“You didn’t die,” he pointed out.

“Of course not,” Long Fist replied, shrugging his tunic shut. “I made my sacrifice to Kwihna, not to Wakarii.”

“Wakarii?”

“The Coward’s God. The Lord of the Grave.”

It was the first time Valyn had heard Ananshael referred to as a god for cowards, but he wasn’t interested in debating theology. “What do you want?” he asked. “Why did your people tie us up and drag us halfway across the steppe?”