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that—that he didn’t go there looking for her? That he went there for another reason?”
    “It’s one of many possibilities I’ve been considering.”
    “What other reason could he have had?”
    Feather Dancer lifted a shoulder and stared at the flames dancing around the logs. The wet wood smoked badly. As though alive, blue-gray clouds rose from the fire hearth and
crawled across the roof, waiting to be sucked out through the smokehole.
    Softly, she replied, “Blessed gods, if he went there deliberately, it must have been to meet someone, and that means …” Her eyes narrowed.
    Feather Dancer finished the sentence: “The meeting had been arranged either before the attack, or in the confusion just after.”
    She sank down onto the log bench in front of the fire. “Blessed Ancestors, I’m beginning to fear that she’s smarter than I am. She’s outmaneuvered me at every turn.”
    Feather Dancer gave her a few moments before he said, “Matron, this is a very dangerous time. Please promise me that you will not leave your house again without a guard.”
    She lowered her face into her hands and nodded.

8

    RED RAVEN GLANCED AT THE TWO GUARDS POSTED ON EITHER side of the door, then looked around the large chamber. Thirty paces square and constructed of upright logs more than four times the height of a man, it was a beautiful place, a place that befitted the status of the matron of the Water Hickory Clan. Torches cast a flickering yellow gleam over the painted rawhide shields that hung along the walls, each representing a sacred event in the history of the clan.
    He wandered around looking into the crushed shell and jet eyes of the long-lost heroes depicted on the shields. There was Skyholder, the Creator, holding a water hickory sapling in his left hand and a rock in his right hand. The rock cast a long shadow across the painting, pointing westward. After he’d created the world, Skyholder had flown down from the stars to inspect it. There was no nighttime, because he hadn’t created it yet, so it was always dawn. He started in the far east, creating rivers, oceans, mountains, and planting trees as he went. His favorite tree was the water hickory—or that’s the version of
the story his clan told. However, if he’d happened to be in the Bald Cypress Clan’s Matron’s House she would have said it was the bald cypress tree. The two things no one argued about were that Skyholder’s favorite animal was the duck known as the shoveler, who helped him create the world, and that he was led across the land by the shadow of the rock, which always pointed due west. That’s how the four main clans of the Black Falcon Nation came to be named: Water Hickory Clan, Bald Cypress Clan, Shoveler Clan, and the Shadow Rock Clan. For as far back as anyone could remember the clans had bickered over which was Skyholder’s favorite clan. Personally, he thought …
    Red Raven jumped when the door curtain to the council chamber was drawn back.
    Sea Grass—matron of Water Hickory Clan—hobbled across the council chamber toward him, followed by her ever-present personal guards. The old woman had her white hair twisted into a bun on top of her head. Her thin face and beaked nose looked sallow, as though all the color had been leached out, but her clothing was extraordinary. She wore a deep blue dress decorated with several hundred small circlets of polished conch shell that flashed in the torchlight. Both guards wore plain brown knee-length shirts, but a variety of weapons adorned their belts: stilettos, knives, war clubs.
    “Matron,” he said, and bowed to her. “It is good to see you looking so well.”
    “Stop patronizing me and sit down,” she ordered.
    “Of—of course, Matron.” He sat on one of the four log benches that framed the central fire hearth.
    Sea Grass grunted as she eased down to the bench opposite him and held her hands out to the fire. Her fingers looked more like translucent claws than parts of a human