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mountains.
    Danica was tall. Her mother had been, too. She had yellow hair and extremely light blue eyes. There was northern blood in the family. Her grandfather had had eyes like that. He’d been a scary figure when he came to Senjan, scarred and fierce, thick moustaches, a border hero of the old style, men said.
    She’d kissed him once, Danica. Just a few days ago, in fact. He’d been ashore south of the town walls with two casks of wine before dawn, thin blue moon setting. She and three others he knew had been waiting on the strand to buy from him. They’d used torches to signal from the beach.
    It happened he had learned something not long before and—on an impulse—he’d asked her to walk a little away from the others. There had been jokes, of course. Mirko didn’t mind, and she hadn’t looked as if she did. It was hard to read her and he wouldn’t claim to be good at understanding women, anyhow.
    He told her that three days earlier he’d been part of a group supplying the war galley in the northern channel. He’d overheard talk about sending a boat to fire the Senjani ones drawn up on the strand. Bored men on ships, especially mercenaries, could grow careless. He said if it were him doing it, he’d do it on a no-moons night.
Of course
, she said.
    He thought if she was the one he told she could reap the benefit of reporting the tidings to the raid captains and she’d be happy with him for that.
    Danica Gradek kissed really well, it turned out. Fiercely, even hungrily. She wasn’t quite as tall as he was. He wasn’t sure, rememberingthe moment, if it had been passion, or triumph, or the anger everyone said was in her, but he’d wanted more. Of the kiss, of her.
    â€œGood lad,” she said, stepping back.
    Lad?
That he didn’t like. “You’ll warn the captains?”
    â€œOf course,” she said.
    It never occurred to him she might be lying.
    â€”
    SHE WAS PROTE CTING the boy, she’d explained to her zadek. Mirko wasn’t a boy, but she thought of him that way. She thought of most of the men her age that way. A few were different—she could admire skill and bravery—but those often turned out to be the ones who most fiercely rejected the idea of a woman as a raider. They hated that she was better with her bow than them, but she wasn’t, ever, going to hide what she could do. She’d made that decision a long time ago.
    The heroes of Senjan, devoted equally to Jad and independence, also had a reputation for violence. That last, in the eyes of the world, included their women. There were horrified, wide-eyed stories told of Senjani women streaming down from hills or woods to a triumphant battlefield at day’s end—wild, like wolves—to lick and drink the blood from the wounds of slain foes, or even those not yet dead! Tearing or hacking limbs off and letting blood drip down gaping throats. Senjani women believed, the tale went, that if they drank blood their unborn sons would be stronger warriors.
    Foolish beyond words. But useful. It was a good thing to have people afraid of you if you lived in a dangerous part of the world.
    But Senjan didn’t think it good for a woman, not long out of girlhood, to believe—let alone seek to prove—she could equal a man, a
real
fighter. That, they didn’t like much, the heroes.
    At least she wasn’t strong with a sword. There was someone who had spied on her throwing daggers at targets outside the walls and,well, according to him she did that extremely well. She ran fast, could handle a boat, knew how to move silently, and . . .
    Some reckless, very brave man, the general view became, needed to marry the ice-cold, pale-eyed Gradek girl and get a baby into her. End this folly of a woman raiding. She might be the daughter of Vuk Gradek, who’d had renown in his day, inland, but she was a
daughter
of a hero, not a son.
    One of his sons had