“Kill them, Kerrick, kill them as they have killed us all.”

Kerrick turned and fled with Inlènu* stumbling after, away from the hunter and his voice, away from the memories that flooded through him. But these he could not escape. He pushed past the armed fargi to the top of a grassy slope that led down to the sea, dropped to the ground, sat clutching his legs, staring out at the ocean yet not seeing it.

Seeing Amahast, his father, instead. And his sammad. Unclearly at first, but fleshed out in greater detail as memory returned. The memory was still there, buried and long forgotten, but hiding there still. His eyes filled with a child’s tears, tears that he had never shed as a child, that welled out and ran down his cheeks as he saw his sammad being destroyed, slaughtered just as the sammad of Herilak had been destroyed this day. The two scenes blurred in his mind and were one. To survive all those years with the Yilanè all of this he had to forget. He had survived, he had forgotten.

But now he remembered, and in remembering he was two people, the ustuzou who spoke like a Yilanè; the boy who was Tanu.

Boy? He stared at his hands, arched his fingers. He was no longer a boy. In those long years his body had grown. He was a man yet knew nothing of being a man. The realization came that his father, the other hunters, so large in memory—why, he must be their size now.

Springing to his feet, Kerrick roared aloud with defiance and anger. What was he? Who was he? What was happening to him? Through the crash of his emotions he was aware of a movement at his neck, a pulling. He turned about, blinking, to discover that Inlènu* was tugging gently at their connecting lead. Her eyes were wide, her shivering motions expressing worry and fear at his strange actions.

He wanted to kill her, half raised the weapon still clutched in his hand. Marag, he cried, “marag.” But the anger drained away as quickly as it had come and he lowered the weapon shamefacedly. There was no harm in this simple creature, more of a prisoner than he was.

“Be of peace, Inlènu*,” he said. “There is nothing wrong. Be of peace.”

Reassured, Inlènu* sat back on her tail and blinked comfortably in the evening sun. Kerrick looked past her to the glade behind the trees where Herilak waited.

Waited for what? An answer, of course. To a question that Kerrick could not answer, although the question was all too clear.