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sent the waybread round, parched loaves rich with nuts and dry, tough grains that would not spoil so long as they were kept dry—through Annaya. She could be as stubborn as him, sometimes. He wished she would come out to bid him farewell and was angry and resentful over her refusal to see the truth, as well as Scaja's.
    He pinched Annaya's cheek a last time. She was nearly as tall as him now. "I like your Shansi," he said.
    She gave him a secretive smile. "So do I."
    His eyebrows went up and he grinned. He tapped her nose.
    "Behave yourself while I'm gone."
    Annaya snorted and tossed her glossy hair over her shoulder. "Take your own advice before handing it to me."
    He left them reluctantly and started on the road that led through the village and up the mountain pass, where the perilous Kasiri and their Wolf-chief were encamped.
    40
    Scarlet and the White Wolf--Book One
    by Kirby Crow
    2.
    Lia
    Liall, the White Wolf of Omara, strove always for an atmosphere of calm to reign during his robberies. To meet an enemy in the dark is one thing, to challenge folk in the open, under the blue sky in the melting snow is quite another.
    There is a trick to keeping order on a highway: keep the road open and paying while preventing the rough and naturally-disorderly Kasiri from running wild through the women and the goods, spreading terror and mayhem. The woman who set up a strident screaming in the early afternoon threatened the fragile peace of the prosperous toll road, and that warranted Liall's attention.
    He looked over his shoulder to check on Peysho's progress with the short line of journeyers waiting to take the well-tended pass through Nerit Mountain. Peysho Ar'sinu was his enforcer, a handsome, brawny bear of a man in his fortieth year or thereabouts. Whenever he approached, Liall invariably got the impression of a slow tide rolling toward him, but he was never fooled: Peysho had a mind like a precise clock, with never a detail forgotten or mislaid.
    Though he kept them hidden by a gaudy Kasiri jacket, Peysho bore on both of his beefy upper arms the red tattoos of Om-Ret: a serpent devouring her own tail. He had recently shaved his hair down to dark brown stubble on his head, and Liall thought this vanity, since Peysho's hair had lately begun to turn gray from his years of living hard and fast in outlaw 41
    Scarlet and the White Wolf--Book One
    by Kirby Crow
    camps. His skin was the color of pale bronze and his one undamaged eye was a mirthful hazel.
    Peysho's name suited him, as it meant red-eye . He had a small red star in his left eye from a Minh mace that had crushed his cheekbone twenty years ago, and the eye had filled with blood and never fully healed. He seemed to see well enough with it. On occasion, Liall wondered how he looked to Peysho through such an organ; if his amber skin and white hair was colored with a mist of bloody crimson when he gazed at him. It seemed fitting.
    Peysho's one constant companion was his countryman, Kio, a fellow Morturii many years his younger, deceptively kind of face and slight of body, but an artist with a blade of any type. Kio had wide, tawny-gold eyes like a lion and wore his feathery chestnut hair to his shoulders. There was a scattering of beard on his cheeks that he refused to take off, believing it made him appear more masculine.
    Alas, Liall thought, his face is as sweet as a girl's, and that soft beard only makes him that much prettier. These facts caused Kio a great deal of embarrassment, for he was as much a soldier as rough Peysho, with whom he had roamed untold cities and camps together before landing in Liall's tribe of Kasiri five years ago. The Longspur krait had been home to them ever since.
    Like the Byzans, the Kasiri were a gaudy lot, but rather than show off their artistic inclinations in architecture and gardens, they expressed themselves through dress. Set against the stark landscape, they could blind one with their colors: purple and red and orange silks, black