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Kai El
     wondered how they knew what to do. He wondered if they understood what they were doing.
    “Look how they work together,” he said, shaking his head with disbelief.
    “Not like Tlikit,” Elia said.
    Kai El didn’t know if this was like Shahala people or not—he hadn’t been with them long enough to know them. Little ones had
     been warned to expect trouble when the tribes met. But this working together didn’t look like trouble.
    Kai El explained it the only way he could: “Amah used magic to bring spirits here.”
    Elia nodded, but his face showed he doubted such a thing.
    * * *
    The Tlikit woman Tsilka had been watching the strange ritual as if she were dreaming. Now her eyes were drawn down. Sunlight
     danced on a nearby rock—not big, but important-looking—made of sparkly bits of silver crushed together. She knelt and pried
     it loose. It was warm in her hand. As she carried the powerful rock that seemed more than a rock, warmth spread up her arm
     and spilled into her chest.
    Tsilka placed her offering with the others. She stepped back to join the people of the two tribes, who stood mingled, gazing
     at what they had made.
    The medicine circle around the Moonkeeper was finished. The chanting fell away. And everything changed. Kai El thought it
     was as if the invisible bubble enclosing the riverbank had burst, and the friendly magic called by his mother escaped.
    People blinked, looked around, found themselves mixed up with others of a different tribe. With suspicion and fear on their
     faces, they moved away, seeking their own, joining into bigger and bigger clumps, separating—the Shahala on the upriver side
     of the medicine circle—the strangers on the downriver side.
    Whispering, muttering, the strangers looked like they might attack the Shahala.
    Fools!
Kai El thought.
They won’t have a chance!
    But what about Amah, lying helpless on the ground? She’d be trampled if people started fighting. What was wrong with Adah?
     Why didn’t he get up and do something?
    “Elia,” Kai El whined, “they’re going to fight.”
    “I know. I the only one who can stop.”
    Elia was just thirteen summers, barely old enough to hunt. But he—once Tlikit, now Shahala—was the only connection between
     the tribes. Kai El understood the older boy’s fear, but thought he looked very brave as he stepped from hiding and walked
     toward his old tribe, arms raised, shouting words Kai El didn’t understand because they were in that other language.
    The Tlikit people stopped muttering, and gaped at the boy they hadn’t seen in three turnings of the seasons.
    One came forward, a female with layers of drooping fat.Kai El wrinkled his nose and stuck out his tongue—why didn’t they cover their bodies? He couldn’t stop staring at her nakedness,
     though disgust tried to turn his eyes away.
    “Chimnik!” the mean-faced woman spat.
    Could
that
be Elia’s mother?
    Elia-who-used-to-be-Chimnik cowered before the fat, ugly creature. Looming over the boy who suddenly looked much smaller than
     his age, she yelled—loud, fast, clackety—then struck him.
    Kai El could not believe it! Wouldn’t a mother be glad to see her missing son?
    When the beast started beating his friend with a stick—without thinking of the trouble he was making for himself—Kai El ran
     at her.
    She looked down at him. She was
huge.
She spat on Kai El, and resumed beating Elia.
    Kai El grabbed Elia’s arm to pull him away, and the woman hit
him!
The Shahala boy had never in his life been struck! He hollered, more from shock than pain.
    “Adahhh!”

CHAPTER 7
    T OR BELIEVED THAT A SHAN WOULD USE HIM TO FIND her way back from the world of spirits. He didn’t understand how, but he was not going to fail her. Their minds, their very
     souls, were connected as she journeyed among the stars—so connected that he missed all that had happened since he laid her
     on the riverbank in the gray light of dawn.
    His mind was gone when Tenka