“Nothing,” he muttered. “Doesn’t mean anything. But traditions are, uhm, important things, Sula. They’re what holds the clan together.”

“You think I’m too young for you,” she wailed. “You’re going to pack me in, just like you did that Voronak bitch.”

“I’m not going to pack you in.”

“Yes, you are!”

And she dissolved in tears.

So then of course he had to go to her, had to hold her. He had to nuzzle at her neck and murmur in her ear as if she were a horse he hadn’t quite broken yet, had to tip back her chin with one hand and wipe away her tears with the other. Had to shelve the chilly, swelling sadness under his own ribs, had to force a grin as she stopped crying, had to tickle her and grope her through the red felt overshirt she’d appropriated from his clothing chest. Had, in fact, taken to wearing around the camp like a blazing fucking declaration of what she spent her time doing in the clanmaster’s yurt.

Have to talk to her about that.

At some point.

“Look,” he said finally. “It’s fucking freezing out there, right? Riding doesn’t keep you warm. That’s the real point. If I walk, I warm up. Chances are, that’s where the tradition comes from in the first place, right?”

She nodded doubtfully, sniffed, knuckled at one eye. He mashed his tongue hard into the back of his grin and wished she didn’t look so much like a fucking child when she did that.

How come they all start out hot-eyed temptress minxes and all end up crying into your shirt like babies?

Isn’t it enough I have to carry the weight of the whole fucking clan on my back? Urann’s aching balls, isn’t it enough that I came back, that I left Yhelteth and everything it held and rode home to be with my fucking people? Isn’t it enough that I’ll probably fucking die up here just like my father and never see Imrana’s face again?

No answer that he could hear.

You whine like a girl, Clanmaster. Worse than a girl—this girl wearing your shirt is at least weeping about the future, about something she might be able to change. She’s not the one moping around full of bitterness about a past you can’t do any fucking thing about.

Now get a grip.

He tilted her chin back again.

“Sula, listen. I’ll be back as soon after dawn as I can make it. You wait for me, you keep things warm.” He clowned it, raised brows, grabbed after a buttock and a breast again. “Know what I mean?”

He got a choked laugh out of her, and then a long, wet kiss. He got out pretty fast after that. Marnak had his horse saddled and waiting outside in the ruddy evening light, shield and lance and small ax slung, a bundle of blankets, firewood, and other provisions tied securely on. The older man stood a discreet distance off from the clanmaster’s yurt, beside his own horse and in grave conversation with a pair of camp guards. He glanced over as Egar pushed back the yurt door flap, left the other two men immediately to their own devices, and strode across. He surveyed his clanmaster without comment.

“All right?” he asked.

“Been better. You still want to ride along?”

“With you in that mood?” Marnak shrugged. “Sure, should be a bundle of fun.”

IN FACT, EGAR’S MOOD LIGHTENED SOMEWHAT AS THEY RODE OUT ACROSS the steppe and the camp fell behind. Slanting rays from the low winter sun turned the grassland a deceptively warm reddish gold, gave the sense that the evening might hold itself like this forever. The sky was clear and hollow blue, the band arched through it at a tilting angle, tinged a scintillating wash of ruddy shades to match the sunset. A keen wind came scything out of the north but the grease on their faces kept back its bite. The horses made an ambling pace, occasional clink or jingle from metal parts in the rig and the small iron talismans braided into their manes as they tossed their heads. Once or twice, a returning pair of herd minders would hail them as they passed, headed in for the evening meal.

It all felt a little like escape.

“You ever miss the south?” he asked Marnak eventually, when the quiet between the two of them had loosened to a wayfarer’s ease. “Ever think about going back?”

“Nope.”

He glanced across, surprised by the spike of vehemence. “Really? What, never? You don’t even miss the whores?”

“Got a wife now.” Marnak grinned in his beard. “And they got whores in Ishlin-ichan, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Even some Yhelteth girls there these days, if that’s your thing.”

Egar grunted. He knew that, too.

Marnak raised up a little in his saddle, gestured around at the steppe. “I mean, what’s not to be happy with here? Grazing that never ends, plenty of waterholes, slow-flowing rivers we don’t have to fight the Ishlinak for, plenty of space for everyone. Practically no raiding anymore, now the young guys all head off south instead. We don’t see the long runners much this far south and west, the wolves and steppe cats mostly leave us alone as well. We’ve got more meat on the hoof these days than we know what to do with. Got the clan, the people around us. What’s in Yhelteth to stack up against all that?”

Where’d you want me to start?

Views over the harbor, sunlight shimmering off endless ruffled blue to the horizon. Tall white towers at the headland, the slow spiral of a dozen big lizard raptors riding the thermals. The carping of gulls down on the wharf, the bang-bang on wood of fishermen repairing their boats.

Patios, sun-blasted and riotous with some flowering crimson creeper whose name you never did learn to pronounce right. Ornate ironwork on windows and doors, narrow white-walled streets that tricked away the sun’s assault. Cunningly crafted meeting nooks and warm stone benches set in deep pools of shade, the music of falling water somewhere beyond a screen.

Market stalls heaped high with brightly colored fruit you could smell at a dozen paces. Philosophers and verse-makers declaiming from their pitches in the less pricey corners of each square, teahouses spilling out with the noisy back-and-forth quarrel of voices disputing everything under the sun: the advisability of trade with the western lands, the existence or not of evil spirits, the urban horse tax.

Books—the warm, leather-skinned weight of them in your hands, the way they smelled when you lifted them close to your face. The unfeasibly heart-jolting shock once, as a tome fell heavily open at some much-visited page, divided itself neatly in two blocky halves along the spine—and you thought, guiltily, that you’d broken it.

The lines and lines and lines and lines of squiggling black text, and Imrana’s long-nailed finger leading him along them.

The stir and billow of translucent window drapes as a sea breeze wandered in from the balcony and carried away some of the midday heat, cooled some of the sweat on your skin and hers.

The ebbing bustle of the day, the cries of street sellers growing somehow ever more mournful as the light thickened and a yellow-glow sprinkle of windows lit up across the city.

The aching, dusk skyline lament of the call to prayer—and ignoring it in slim, dark, orange-blossom-perfumed arms.

The riding lights of fishercraft out on the evening swell.

“Yeah, well,” he said.

Marnak concentrated on the grasslands ahead for a while. Maybe he could feel some of what was smoking off Egar.

“In the south, they paid me to kill other men,” he said tonelessly. “That’s well and good when you’re young. It seasons you, and it wins honor for your name, for your forefathers in the Sky Home. It brings you to the Dwellers’ notice.”