"With his right hand holding the whip the Ice Queen had given him and brandishing Toshiro with the other"— Toshiro was the name of Mifoon's magical sword, awarded him for valor by General Kerensky, who had ordered him to rid the land of the new villainy—"Mifoon screamed the falcon cry and rushed down the boulevard toward his antagonists who, in turn, were speeding toward him." (Glynn also gave Mifoon characteristics suggesting he was a precursor of the Jade Falcons, and therefore someone extra special.)

"First he faced the wicked merchant Canfield, who directed the barrel of a laser pistol toward Mifoon, his finger closing on the trigger. Quickly Mifoon released Toshiro. The sword, true to its mark, sailed toward Canfield. The merchant could not get out of the way and Toshiro sailed into his chest, sending blood flying out and along its blade." (The children oohed and aahed, as they always did when the hero disposed of a villain. They also thrilled at the kinetic movement with which Glynn punctuated her stories, holding a hand to her chest to "feel" the sword implanted there, flying with her arm on its return to Mifoon.)

"Canfield fell and the sword returned to Mifoon's hand, the blood on it magically dissolving. Mifoon, out of the corner of his eye, saw the yojimbo Pablo rushing at him, his eyes filled with rage at how Mifoon had killed his lover Susan in the moonlight raid on Brender Camp." (Glynn's eyes suddenly duplicated her hero's fearsome rage.) "Mifoon knew he could not bring his sword around to be used effectively on Pablo, so he flicked the Ice Queen's whip, with its heat-guidance tip, at the on-rushing adversary. Of course it caught Pablo in the neck, first bouncing off it, then wrapping itself tightly around his neck and choking him to death." (Glynn's eyes bulged at the feel of an imaginary whip on her own neck; she seemed to expire as the whip tightened, then her eyes shot open, sending some of the children reeling backward in fright.) "Stepping over the body of Pablo, jerking the whip off the dead man's neck, Mifoon now turned to greet the attack of the evil—"

"Glynn!" It was the voice of sibparent group leader Gonn, who often destroyed her stories with his uncanny ability to find the secret place where they had gathered, then interrupting at an especially crucial part. "Telling your lies again?"

Suddenly the formidable Glynn seemed to shrink, her shoulders sliding in as if on runners, her good posture turning into a postulant's supplication. "They are not lies," she said in a small voice. "They are stories."

Gonn scoffed. "Stories are lies. It is demonstrable, you know that. If you fill the sponges in their heads with unsubstantiated legends about roving malcontents, they could become malcontents themselves. That is not the way of the sibko, quiaff?"

"Aff," she responded weakly. "Not the sibko's way."

"Or the way of the Clan, quiaff?"

"Aff. Not the Clan."

"Truth unites us, quiaff?"

"Aff. United by truth. Truth the binder of belief."

"Very good. Belief the underpinnings of truth, the destroyer of pallid myth."

As they went through their ritual, Aidan—and perhaps the others—grew restless. He wanted more story. He wanted to know what had happened to Mifoon. That might not be the way of the sibko, or the way of the Clan, but it was the way of Aidan. . . .

4

Dermot, who read poetry in a halting voice that tended to obscure the import of the words, was now reciting a long segment from The Remembrance,the wonderful saga whose verses, simple on the page but resounding when recited by one who could convey the epic sweep of it (anybody but Dermot), described the founding of the Clans, how Nicholas Kerensky had restructured society after planets had been ravaged by those who thought land equated with power.

Nicholas Kerensky took over his newly won dominion armed with a plan to forge a new society out of the disparate populations that made up the Exodus survivors. By mining the resources of its own diversity and channeling the energies of its warlike inclinations, the reborn society would unify his people into a force capable of achieving his greatest dream—a return to the inner Sphere to reestablish the Star League, the form of government that had once existed there. Everything directly connected to the Inner Sphere was suddenly banned, while nationalistic ties to the past were discouraged.

The Clans themselves had their origins earlier, during Nicholas' exile on Strana Mechty, when he had reorganized his armies into twenty groups, or clans, of forty warriors each. Within each clan, Nicholas decreed smaller units, what another age would have called platoons. Each of these sub-units was composed of five warriors and was eventually termed a "Star," the image presumably based on the conventional five points in the usual star symbol. Later, when the Clans had grown to their present massive proportions, the star imagery was continued and much of the organization was still based on quintuple segments.

The reorganization of society involved resettling outsiders into the various clans, a move that tended to further destroy nationalistic leanings. (Dermot's voice was itself resettling down into its deepest, most boring register, the voice whose vibrations Aidan seemed to feel so deeply through his body that they gave him back pain).

As the class recited the names of the Clans in unison and in precisely clipped words, Aidan's thoughts drifted off again, even as he stayed right in rhythm with his classmates . . .

* * *

Only a few days before the sibko had left for the training cycle, Aidan and Marthe had gone grave visiting. First, they went to the grave of Warhawk, whom Aidan had buried just outside the cemetery fence, then marked with a stanchion so that he could always find the site again. Warhawk's death had been unfortunate, the result of a malicious member of another sibko who thought he could bring honor to his own group by flinging a stone at the falcon. If Warhawk had not lost the sight in her right eye in a brutal skirmish with a renegade hawk, she might have seen the stone coming and executed one of her incredibly beautiful swooping arcs away from it. But the shot had been true, and Aidan watched her seem to come to an abrupt stop in the air, then drop to the ground like a lead weight. When he found her, her body still, her neck twisted and seemingly stretched, he had gone into a rage, found Warhawk's murderer, and nearly sent him to his own grave. For a while, an unpleasant feeling between the two sibkos led to many skirmishes (which Aidan's sibko usually won, led by his fierce charges, his punishing blows), but the conflict ended abruptly when the boy who had killed Warhawk was himself slain in a fight within his own sibko.

Now, he found, it was difficult to tell exactly where Warhawk lay beneath the ground. The mark was still on the stanchion, but it seemed to Aidan that something about the ground had changed, that in some way its configurations had shifted or that the way he remembered them had altered. Now there was grass where none had previously been, and that complicated his search even more. He wanted to place his feet along the sides of the burial site, a silly ritual that he always performed during each visit to Warhawk, but this time it was impossible. As he stared at the spot where the grave might be, he fingered the edge of his leather vest at the place where Warhawk had often bit and nibbled. Bite marks were still there, rough and frayed to Aidan's touch.

"Do not be sad," Marthe advised. "We are leaving here soon and may never come back. If we do, the fence may even be gone or rearranged to suit new dimensions of the graveyard. We lose boundaries all the time, quiaff?"