“You are bending my words until I don’t even recognize them.” He hated when she talked to him as if all he wanted to do was be young and without responsibilities again. Of course, there was a secret part of him that sometimes wished for just that—but who did not have such a peevish, childlike voice inside them, urging them to throw off the coils of maturity? “And I am not speaking as the boy you once met, or even as your husband. I am speaking as the king of all the High Ward.”

“And I am speaking as the queen. And the queen says that the king cannot afford to go sailing off on an adventure in the midst of all that we have to deal with. Did you forget Hernystir and the tales of Hugh’s devil-worship? Did you not hear Pasevalles tell us Nabban is a boiling cauldron that could spill over at any moment?”

He kept his mouth closed a long time, waiting until he no longer felt like grinding his teeth together in frustration. “Then what should we do, Miriamele? I won’t simply wait for this woman to die and hope that Jiriki sends someone else.”

She turned her back to him, but stayed close enough to benefit from the heat of his body. “Send Eolair if you must send someone. He is Hand of the Throne. Such duties are his, and he knows the Sithi almost as well as we do.”

“Eolair is so worried about Hernystir he can barely keep his mind on what is in front of him.”

“All the more reason to send him. Give him something important to occupy him until we know better whether Hugh is truly becoming a problem. Send Eolair, or send someone else. But you are not going, Simon.”

He lay silently for a while, thinking.

“Miri?”

She didn’t answer immediately. “What?”

“Are you angry at me?”

“For suggesting you should go riding off to find the Sithi when there are a hundred things here that require your attention? Why should I be?”

“You’re angry.”

She rolled over, put her head upon his chest. “Yes, a bit. It will pass, though. It always does.”

28 Cradle Songs of Red Pig Lagoon

It was a long walk across the camp to the edge of the meadow where Unver and his stepfather kept their wagons, but several days had passed since Fremur had last seen the tall man. Everybody else was spreading the news, but he wondered if Unver had heard anything at all.

Fremur did not like walking, but when his horse had eventually wandered back after the raid on the stone-dweller settlement his brother Odrig had claimed it, saying, “Any man who cannot keep his horse does not deserve one.”

Everyone in the Crane Clan seemed to know about this, so there was no shortage of mockery as Fremur trudged between the wagons and out toward Birch Meadow. He kept his head down and bit his lip to prevent himself from shouting back. Odrig himself had made it clear that he approved of the insults: “Until you grow a man’s tough skin, you are useless to me or anyone else,” he had said only the previous night. “You are like a warrior made of cheese.” Odrig’s way of toughening a man’s skin seemed to be frequent beatings and humiliation in front of the other clansfolk.

Fremur did not think the skin of his body had toughened much since childhood, but there were times when he felt certain his heart had shrunken and hardened like wet leather left in the sun. He often thought of himself that way, as if his insides were a rawhide knot, something that would only grow tighter the harder it was pulled. He sensed something like that in Unver as well, although whatever was drawn tight inside Unver was under much greater strain, like the huge ropes used to tug the standing stones at the Clan Ground back upright after an earth tremor had felled them. The ropes had creaked with every pull against the stones’ unimaginable weight, until it seemed like the great cords and the muscles of the men who pulled on them were at war with the earth itself. Unver was like that, but his cords never slackened. The other men of the Crane Clan disliked him but they feared him too, his height and long arms and his hard, blank face, as unchanging as one of those stones, standing against all wind and weather.

He is too fierce, and he does not bend his neck to my brother. Someday Odrig will kill him or drive him out of the clan.

Nobody in the clan, except perhaps for the tall man’s stepfather Zhakar, could even remember Unver’s real name. When he had first come to the clan as a gangly boy, someone had asked him who he was. “Unver,” he had replied, staring at Odrig and the other boys like a bear surrounded by baying dogs—it meant “nobody”— and that was what the clan had called him ever since. Even Fremur’s sister Kulva still called him that, and she was one of the few folk who treated the tall man with kindness. To the rest, he was only a strange, unfriendly clansman who lived with his drunken stepfather on the outskirts of the camp—a good horseman and fierce fighter, but otherwise to be avoided.

As Fremur reached the edge of the meadow he saw old Zhakar sitting on the steps of his wagon, sharpening a knife with long, screeching strokes. Fremur wanted nothing to do with the sour old man, so he took a path through the trees, around behind Zhakar’s ill-maintained wagon and into the grove of birches where, as expected, he found Unver, who was using stones to smooth the wood of his unfinished wagon while his big, dark horse Deofol nipped listlessly at the grass. The green was thick on the plains at this time of the year, and all the horses were growing fat. It was a time of celebration, at least for most of the clan.

“Ho, rider,” Fremur called. “May your hooves always find the path.”

Unver looked up. “I can’t say the same for you. Where is your horse?”

Fremur didn’t really want to talk about it. Instead, he nodded toward Unver’s wagon, which looked as though it was nearly finished, an altogether finer piece of work than his stepfather Zhakar’s rickety cart. The wagon was not yet painted, but every joint showed careful attention, and every spoke of the wheels had been rubbed as smooth as glass. “How does it go?”

“Well enough.” Unver held out the wineskin.

“I would help you to finish, if you want,” Fremur said, taking a sip of the sour red stuff. “Your wagon, I mean, not your wine. Since I have no horse, there is little else for me to do.”

Unver raised an eyebrow but did not ask the obvious question. “There is more polishing to do before the paint. You could help with that—but the Grass Thunderer save you if you put a nick in the wood, Mouse.”

He did not know why he said what he said next, but he said it. “I have never liked that name.”

Unver watched him take a long swallow, then took the wine back and had a drink himself before wiping the residue from his long mustaches. He was not so dark as most of the clan, whose skin the sun and dust of the plains usually turned the color of cherry wood. Unver’s flesh was lighter, like the rounded tan stones in the bottom of riverbeds. His prominent nose was sharp and thin, his cheekbones high, but the strangest thing about him were his eyes, gray as rainclouds.

Fremur waited, but Unver did not ask him to explain what he had said about his nickname. Instead, the tall man watched as a pair of clansmen rode by on the far side of the meadow, a long bowshot away. The squinting, storm-colored eyes followed them until they were gone, as though Unver were a hunting animal and they were prey.