Nothing, evidently: this was a practical person, not a poet. Without a word, Supaari sank into a bent-kneed crouch with a slight hitch in the movement that shouted news of his bad right leg. So, equally silent, Hlavin Kitheri stepped forward with conscious grace, ready to engage.

The instant the Paramount came within reach, Supaari threw his weight back on his left leg and tail; gripping Kitheri’s ankle, he heaved himself backward and pulled the other man to the ground in a startling move that brought the Paramount’s throat within reach. Kitheri twisted free and, in a single sweeping motion, he uncoiled from the ground and whirled head downward, bringing his own tail to bear. Half-standing, Supaari jerked away, but was not fast enough and took a staggering blow just below his ear—insufficient to bring him down but a solid hit—and he backed off for a few moments to recover.

Both more cautious now, the two men circled, arms bent and wide, their own loud breathing deafening them to shrieks and distant roaring. Without warning, Supaari pivoted on his stronger leg, but rather than a caudal attack to bash breath from the Paramount’s chest, he used the momentum to send his right heel down hard on the back of Kitheri’s knee. An excellent move and one that might have worked, had he kept his balance. He lost advantage when they both went down, grunting at the impact with the ground.

Grinning now, pleased that the fight was not such a mismatch as he had feared, the Paramount rolled upright, celestial violet eyes steady, body obedient to his will. "You’re better than I expected," he told his dead sister’s widower, without a whiff of irony. "It won’t be good enough, but you will die well."

There was no answer except the sharp, instructive smell of rage, and the next attack was more effective. The Paramount worked to break the tail-launched pedal grip that pinned both his arms, but he failed, so he pushed hard with all the strength of his lower body, and they went down together, muscles violently strained, lungs bursting. The fall broke Supaari’s hold on him and Kitheri took that chance to twist, locking his arms around the other man’s body.

The delicate arteries of Supaari’s eyes could be seen with utter clarity, the short fine hairs of the muzzle coming into view as he threw his head back to get a grip on the Paramount’s throat. Enthralled, Hlavin Kitheri did not strain away from the teeth that sank into the thick skin at the base of his own neck, but rather closed his eyes, savoring with all his being this one last wholly experienced instant. He could smell Supaari’s panting breath now, knew subliminally what this man had eaten and drunk on his last day of life. Listening to the thudding of tails thrashing against the ground in search of leverage, Kitheri heard with a rapist’s intimacy the small, whining sounds of another’s body in extremity.

He bent then into a crescent. Jamming his feet against Supaari’s chest, Kitheri straightened like a bow with a scream of release. He hardly noticed the pain as Supaari’s teeth ripped from his throat, but he was gallant enough to declare, gasping, as he struggled to his feet, "First blood to the challenger!"

The soft-footed circling resumed, and there were three more near encounters that left their chests heaving with a noisy, exhausted hunt for air; neither was young, and this match had been harder fought and longer than either had expected. Breaking the rhythm of the bout, close to the end of his own strength, Kitheri took the offense at last, turning his own shorter reach to advantage with the feint of a low turn. When this drew Supaari into a parry for a blow to his legs, Kitheri converted the motion into a lunge, throwing his shoulder into Supaari’s chest, past arms bent for defense. There was an instantaneous, reflexive response: Supaari locked his arms around the Paramount’s back—the fatal error.

Their eyes met once more in that lethal embrace; then, with a swift upward rip, Kitheri ended it, and stepped away. Arms flung wide in ecstasy, he sang out to the multitude on the hillside before him: "Behold the art of dying!"

SUPAARI DID NOT FALL IMMEDIATELY, NOR DID HE LOOK DOWN TO SEE what had happened to him. He simply turned away and took a few steps as his guts roiled out of the rent in his belly onto the spoiled ground. For one terrible moment, it seemed to Sofia that he would trip over them, but then his knees buckled. For uncounted seconds, she did not breathe, reluctant to fill her own lungs and allow life to go on, without him.

"He will kill me, Fia," he’d told her, his voice as cool as a breeze that carried the pure, transparent fragrance of mountain snow, and the promise of storms. "Kitheri has trained from childhood as a warrior, and he will kill me.

Supaari had sat across from Sofia on the ground that morning, surrounded by the Runa army they had helped Djalao to create, a force now swollen by VaInbrokari Runa who had seized their freedom and joined their people outside the walls. Sofia did not protest what he said, concentrating instead on feeling nothing at all. It was an old skill, one that had allowed her to survive the war that ended her childhood, and second nature now that war had become her whole world again. In some ways, Supaari had already left her. They had not seen each other much in the past years, fighting on different fronts. Once the children had gone, there was so little to speak of, except the war.

There was a strange sacred hollowness to Supaari, as though each advance for the Runa had carved out some new space in his own soul, each success and competence driving home to him the utter irrelevance of his own kind. "They don’t need us anymore," he’d said once, with a kind of ethereal joy. "Perhaps they never did."

So when Supaari announced that he would die, Sofia simply rose onto her knees and held out her arms to him. He leaned forward and rested his forehead against her body. "He will kill me," he said again, his voice so low that she could feel the sound in her own small chest, "but I will do the people honor."

Alone now, staring at his gutted body in the distance, Sofia said, "You fought well." Lifting a still face to the mountainous clouds, she heard the splat and spatter of the storm’s first drops, and then only felt them as their quiet song was drowned by the shrill screams of Runa soldiers giving voice to frustration and boredom, to grief, and to their rage at these stubborn djanada holdouts who still dared to defy Runa authority and power and justice.

Armored infantry thundered down the slope like a cataract, parting around Sofia as a river flows around a rock, flooding the Jana’ata field before smashing through the main gate. The meat defiant, the meat insurgent, the meat fighting, Sofia thought. The meat in full cry.

She stood a long time watching, but then began her own progress across the trodden, sloping ground, aware of the sharp fragrance of crushed vegetation broken by the charge; aware of intermittent explosions and shrieks of terror and triumph; aware of the wind’s roar, augmented now by the roaring of a fire too fierce to be rained out.

Supaari’s corpse and the Paramount’s were nearest to her, for their combat had taken place in the center of the field, in view of each side. Both bodies had been equally trampled and tumbled in the rush toward the gate: united in death.

She was too small to straighten Supaari’s limbs and could not bring herself to gather his belly’s contents, so she ignored all that. Sitting by his head, she ran her hand along the fine soft fur of his cheek, over and over, while his body cooled and she paid the awful debt of love.

"LET ME DIE," SUUKMEL SAID, DULLY INSISTENT, AS TAKSAYU PULLED HER along. "Let me die."

"No," her Runa friend told her, as often as she said this. "There are the children to think of."