“Good luck to you too, Lord de Grimmond.”

“It is a good day to die,” Rick Mat’o Yamni—Three Bears—said solemnly, in a deep sonorous voice, with a broad gesture of one hand.

Rick was a young man, about Rudi Mackenzie’s age, with a hawk-nosed high-cheeked face and a complexion a little darker than a deep tan; his furbound braids were a very dark brown, and there were green flecks in his dark eyes. His mother’s name was Fox Woman, from the color of her hair; she’d been one of the many volunteers who’d ended up joining the Lakota nation, as it re-emerged from the Change. By now the Seven Council Fires dominated much of the northern High Plains; since last May they’d also been formally part of Montival, in exchange for complete internal autonomy and a pledge of help in defending their borders.

Rick’s father John Whapa Sa, Red Leaf, had negotiated it. He’d also sent his son and three hundred warriors along when Rudi came home to Montival, as a symbol.

“It is a day when the sun shines on the Hawk and on the quarry,” Rick went on, raising both hands in a hieratic gesture. “We shall take many horses, many scalps!”

Three Bears had white and black bars painted across his face, the eagle feathers that marked his deeds in his braids, and his steel helmet was topped by buffalo hair and horns. There was an ornamental vest of white bone tubes across his entirely functional shirt of riveted mail, and a string of perfectly genuine tufts of scalp-hair down the leather seams of his buffalocalf breeches. Tom Yallup was staring at him and his followers—some of whom were in full fig of eagle-feather bonnet—with a look halfway between fascination and suspicion.

Suddenly Rick grinned at him and burst into laughter, leaning his hands on the pommel of his saddle.

“Nah, I’m just fuckin’ with your head, dude.”

He turned to Ingolf. “OK, cousin, give us until”—his arm pointed accurately to where the sun would be at about three—“to get into position and start playing Cowboys and Indians. We want to make sure we get ’em all. Otherwise we’re blown and whoever’s following on will know where we are.”

“Right,” Ingolf said. “That would be a bad thing. Hey, tahunsa, remember we’re supposed to take ’em alive if we can.”

“Sure thing, Iron Bear,” he said, which was mildly impolite; his people didn’t use personal names when it could be avoided. “Shee! How could you possibly think we’d do anything else? Gentle as kittens, that’s us.”

Then he stood in the stirrups and waved his bow overhead. “Hokahe! Let’s go, Lakota!”

The Sioux poured away in a torrent, their horses moving like a wave of flowing water up the slope to the west and disappearing as if they were the passing of a dream.