Egar chuckled. “You make me suffer, bitch, you know I’m going to hand it straight back. I’ll have you yowling like a steppe fox.”

Sula lifted one hand from her work, made a flapping mouth with fingers and thumb. “Yeah, yeah—talk, talk. You’re all the fucking same, men. Clanmaster or herdboy, you tell me where’s the fucking difference.”

The clanmaster tipped a meaningful glance around the trappings of the yurt, the rich tapestries and rugs, the brazier in the corner.

“Bit cold to be sneaking out and tumbling herdboys in the grass this time of year, I’d say. That’s one big difference.”

A shadow crossed Sula’s face, a light, watchful tension, and her hands slackened a little in what they were doing. She didn’t know him well enough to read his moods yet, to know rough humor from genuine displeasure, a growl from a drawl. He had to force a smile, stick his tongue out at her and clown the moment away before she eased.

In the end, he had to remind himself. Tits and milkmaid’s fingers notwithstanding, this is just one more foulmouthed Skaranak herdgirl you’ve got here milking your cock for you, Clanmaster.

It made him unaccountably sad. Sula was gorgeous, supple, succulent in his mouth and hands, utterly joyous and abandoned in her fucking. But afterward, afterward . . .

Afterward, as they lay sweat-stuck together, the inescapable truth would seep back in. That Sula was less than half his age, had been nowhere, seen nothing, knew nothing beyond the big sky limits of the steppe—and was eminently content to stay that way. That she had nothing much to say about anything but herding or fucking or the current clan gossip or the endless fucking squabbles of her extended family.

That she could not even read. And—he’d broached the subject once—that she did not much want to learn.

Oh, you were hoping for book-learned pussy, perhaps? Some Yhelteth-bred courtesan with an astrolabe out on the balcony and an illustrated binding of Tales of the Man and the Woman on the table beside the bed?

You were hoping for Imrana, maybe?

Fuck it.

Yeah, fuck it. You can take Sula to Ishlin-ichan when the ceremonies are done. She’ll love that, marching into all those fabric places down Rib Whittle Row with a clanmaster’s purse at her disposal. You can bask in her reflected squealing joy as she buys everything in sight, and call it happiness.

And now she had him up in the near reaches of his own brief joy—the heat of orgasm pulsing and pooling in his groin, the strong-fingered strokes coming shorter and harder, his own grunts and gasps in his ears, his thoughts fading out in the clamor for ecstasy and release.

C’mon, how bad can it be, Clanmaster? As the feeling rushed him, stormed up the column of his prick and he exploded, splashed hot salt white into her hands, and she cackled and smeared it over her throat and breasts and belly with one hand, the other still pumping at him hard. How fucking bad can life be?

“YOU SEEM UNHAPPY, ERGUND.”

“Yeah, well . . .”

Poltar stifled a sigh. He didn’t much like Ergund, any more than he did any of the clanmaster’s other brothers. But they were influential and must be catered for, the more so given Egar’s demonstrated blasphemy and lack of regard for the traditions. And Ergund did at least show a modicum of respect. The shaman put aside his flensing knife, nodded at his acolyte to go on with the work, and wiped his hands clean on a rag. He indicated a curtained alcove at one side of the yurt.

“In here, then. I can spare a few minutes. But the ceremonies are almost upon us, I have to get ready. What is it you need?”

“I, uh.” Ergund cleared his throat. “I had a dream. Last night.”

This time, Poltar could not entirely hold back the sigh. It was a major effort, in fact, not to roll his eyes. In a couple of hours, he had to go out into the chilling northern breezes and caper about dressed only in buffalo grease, his wolf-skin robe, and a Ynprpral mask that weighed as much as an ax. He had to squawk and screech himself hoarse, and be chased around by small children, and submit to being ceremonially driven out of the camp, where he’d have to squat for at least an hour in the cold until the celebrations got well under way, and everyone was too drunk to notice him slip back in.

In his father’s day, of course, the shaman stayed out on the steppe the whole night. But in his father’s day, there was respect. In his father’s day the self-same children who chased Ynprpral from the camp went out later with food and wine and blankets for the shaman’s vigil. Later still, the younger warriors might come and keep Olgan company, shyly ask him advice on how to garner or keep the attention of this girl or that, how to bid shrewdly for a horse or a sword, how to resolve tricky issues of honor and family and ritual.

But Olgan was long gone on the Sky Road, and there would be none of that old respect in these times. Stay out all night for vigil, the most Poltar was likely to get was some stumbling drunk herdboy come out to take a piss and driveling inebriated nonsense at him. Everyone else would be busy cavorting. Since Egar returned from the south, the old ways simply held no sway. There was no sense of honor or tradition now, no respect. Ishlin-ichan beckoned, the young men went there often, and the girls around camp acted like the whores they mostly were these days. No one felt the need to listen to the shaman anymore; they’d rather have cheap advice and tales of the south from those Skaranak who had been there and returned, as if riding a horse over the horizon and back was some kind of fucking achievement.

And this moping idiot wanted to talk about his dreams.

Poltar got them both seated in the alcove, pulled the curtain, and put on a show of patience he didn’t feel.

“Dreams are the path onto heights we may see afar from,” he intoned tiredly. “But the view can be uncertain. A rock may look like a horse and rider, a river like beads of glass. Tell me what you have seen.”

“It was outside the camp. At night.” Ergund was clearly uncomfortable with all this. He was, Poltar knew, a blunt, pragmatic man, a herdsman all his life and pretty much content to stay that way. “I think I’d gone out, you know, for a piss. But the weather was warm, like spring, maybe even summer. I was barefoot and I kept going, kept walking into the grass, trying to find a good spot.”

“A good spot to piss?”

“Well, that’s what it felt like, yeah. Then I turned around and the campfires were gone, there wasn’t even a glow on the sky where they’d been. It was cloudy, so there was no bandlight, or not much anyway. There’s this cold wind blowing, I can hear it in my ears all the time. And there’s something in the grass, and it’s watching me.”

“Watching you?”

“Yeah, I could feel its eyes on me. I wasn’t worried at first, you know, I had my knife. And I got the feeling this thing was a wolf, and they generally leave you alone unless it’s a bad winter.” Ergund stared at the ground, held up his hands. He seemed to be trying to frame his thoughts between the blades of his palms. “But then I see it. I see the eyes in the dark, and just like I thought, they’re wolf eyes, but they’re, like, way above the height of the grass. I mean, four or five feet off the fucking ground.”

He shivered a little. Tried on an unconvincing little smile.

“That’s got to be the biggest fucking wolf anybody’s ever seen, right?”

Poltar made a noncommittal sound. He’d heard sightings of every kind of monster out on the steppe in his time, from the long runners to spiders the size of horses. A gigantic wolf wasn’t all that original.

“So now I’m worried, right? I pull my knife, I stand there, and then this fucking thing just comes walking right out of the dark toward me.”