“What failure?” said Benroln explosively, but Seraph saw calculation in his eyes. He was playing to his audience. “A story nattered at by the elderly? It is only a story—and it was old before the Shadow’s Fall. It’s a myth, and no more accurate than the twaddle the solsenti spout about the gods. There are no gods and there was no lost city. There is no evil Stalker. We have paid and paid for a crime committed in an Owl’s tale. If we don’t wise up we’ll be nothing more than a solsenti minstrel’s tale ourselves, something told to frighten small children.”

“Wise up and do what?” asked Seraph.

“Survive,” he said. “We need to keep food in our mouths and clothes on our backs. We need to teach the solsenti to leave us alone—as you did to that solsenti bastard who tried to injure Hennea.” He paused, then said softly, “You taught that man and his sons to leave us be. If you had allowed your Eagle to teach them, the rest of the solsenti in that group would have taken the story to his village and they all would have trembled in fear.”

“Maybe someone did,” said Seraph coolly. “Maybe that’s why, instead of welcoming us and looking to us to help them when my brother took us into the village years ago, the villagers feared us so much that they burned my brother.”

“The solsenti already fear us, that is the problem,” said Hennea. “Fear leads to violence. The villagers who killed Seraph’s brother were very afraid and too ignorant to know that they had nothing to fear from a Traveler. Perhaps because, in the last few generations, we have taught them that they should fear us.”

“Rot,” said Benroln curtly before turning his attention back to Seraph. “You have lived among them for what?” He glanced at Jes and Lehr and came up with an accurate guess, “Twenty years or more? You are beginning to sound like one of them—or worse, one of the old ones who sit around the fire and say, ‘We are supposed to protect them.’ ” The anger in his voice was honest now. “Let them protect themselves. They have wizards.”

“Who are helpless against the evil we fight,” said Seraph.

Benroln’s lip curled. “When solsenti soldiers caught my father and our Hunter and Raven out alone, there was nothing we could do but bury them. Had my father not believed the old folktales, he could have taught that village what harming a Traveler might mean. When those villagers killed your brother—you could have saved him. Could have made them so afraid that the thought of harming one of us would never occur to them again. How many of us died because you didn’t teach them what you taught that man today? How many more will die because you didn’t loose the talons of your Eagle upon them instead of tricking them into thinking you’d set a spell on them?”

Part of Seraph agreed. Part of her had wanted to burn the village to the ground. She had spent most of that first night at Tier’s side wondering how long it would take her to get back to the village and avenge her brother.

She could have killed them all.

“Your father was killed?” said Hennea softly, taking Benroln’s arm in sympathy and distracting him from Seraph.

He nodded, his anger dissipating under Hennea’s attention. “Our Clan Guide took us to the Sept of Arvill’s keep. My father said that they’d never admit a whole clan, so he, who was Raven, took our other Raven—my cousin Kiris who was only fifteen—and our Hunter to see what was amiss. They didn’t even make it to the gate of the keep before they were shot from ambush.”

“Terrible,” agreed Seraph. “When I think about that village where my brother was killed, I think of how helpless they would have been against my power. I think of the children who lived there, and the mothers and fathers. More death never solves a crime, no matter how regrettable.” She tried to keep her tones conciliatory, but she could not agree with him.

Benroln met her gaze for a moment, then dropped his head in the respectful bow of a vanquished opponent. “And so I learn from your wisdom.”

Lehr, who’d come upon them as Seraph had been giving her last speech, snorted and then grinned at Benroln. “She knows better than that. That’s what she always said to Papa when she didn’t want to agree with him but he was winning the argument.”

Seraph smiled gently. “We can agree to disagree.”

The Travelers were a highly organized people—just like a well-trained army, and for the same reasons. Every person had an assigned role.

Seraph hadn’t realized, not really, how independent the life that they’d led in Redern had been. As long as the Sept’s tithes made it to him, they were left largely alone to do as they wanted. If she’d been married to another Rederni man, that might have meant that she would have been at his mercy. But Tier was Tier. He’d sought her advice, and she’d worked shoulder to shoulder with him both in the fields and in the kitchen. She’d grown used to the freedom of making her own decisions.

When Isfain had pointed to a place and told her to make camp there, she’d nearly told him where to take his orders. If she hadn’t caught Lehr watching her expectantly, Seraph would have done just that. Instead she’d just nodded and gotten to work.

At least they accorded Seraph some leeway for being Raven, and clan leader, if only just of her family plus Hennea. Lehr they treated like a green boy—Tier had never treated him so. She just hoped he was enough his father’s son to hold his peace until she’d had time to learn more about this clan: they might be a great help in retrieving Tier.

Seraph pitched in to help prepare the evening meal. Some of the men tended horses and goats, some set out to fish, and a smaller group set out into the forest to see what game they could find. Jes and Lehr joined the latter group. She’d had time to talk with Lehr, and Seraph knew he wouldn’t give himself away. He didn’t care for Benroln much either.

“My Kors told me that you married a solsenti,” said the woman on Seraph’s left, while her clever fingers and sharp knife were making short work of deboning one of the rabbit carcasses that were the basis for tonight’s meal.

There was such studied neutrality in the words that Seraph didn’t reply, pretending that skinning her own rabbit took up all of her attention.

“What was it like?” said the woman on the other side of her with hushed interest. “I’ve heard that solsenti men—”

She was quickly hushed by several of the other women who were giggling as they chided her.

“Would you look at this!” exclaimed a woman in gravelly tones. Seraph turned and saw a tiny, ancient crone approaching the tables set up to prepare food. Her hair was pale yellow and thin; it hung in a braid from the crown of her head to her hips. Her shoulders were stooped and bent, and her hand as knobby as the staff she balanced herself with. “You’d think you’d never had a man before the way you act here! She is a guest. Ah, you embarrass the clan.”

“Brewydd,” said the woman who had begun the conversation. “What brings you here?”

“Brewydd?” said Seraph, setting down the naked rabbit carcass and wiping her hands on the apron someone had given her. “Are you the Healer?” Even twenty years ago, Brewydd the Healer had been ancient.

The old woman nodded. “That I be,” she said. “I know you child—Isolda’s Raven. The one who survived.”

The woman on Seraph’s right put aside the food she was working with and hurried over to tuck her hand under Brewydd’s arm and lend support. “Come, grandmother. You need to get off your feet.” Scolding gently and prodding, the woman took Brewydd away toward a wagon built up on all four sides and roofed like a small house on wheels—a karis it was called for the kari, the Elders, who were the only Travelers who rode in them.

“Raven,” said the old woman, stopping for a moment to turn back and look at Seraph. “Not all shadows come from the evil one.”