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     he thought bitterly, but by the spirit of my first ancestor, I’m not going alone.
    Dimly he was aware of them all around him. The fold of a cloak crumpled down over his arm, and someone set a light bow in the grass nearby. A hand touched his shoulder and turned him over.
    Like a snake striking, he grabbed at the dark form bent over him, catching the nape of the neck with his left hand and driving the sword upward toward the chest with his right. Then he saw the face in the starlight and jerked his motion to a halt as the blade pricked the skin and his victim gave a tiny gasping cry. For a moment, he could only stare up into the face of the amber-eyed girl from the tavern, the soft masses of her pale hair falling like silk over his gripping hand.
    Under his fingers, her neck was like a flower’s stem. He could feel her breath quivering beneath the point of his sword. I can’t kill her, he thought despairingly. Not a girl Fawnie’s age and frozen with terror.
    Then darkness and cold took him, and he slid to the ground. His last conscious memory was of someone jerking the sword out of his hand.

Chapter 3
    “Ari sent you away?” Starhawk looked sharply from Little Thurg to Ari, who stood quietly at her side.
    Thurg nodded, puzzlement stamped into every line of his round, rather bland-looking countenance. “I thought it funny myself, sir,” he said, and the bright blue eyes shifted over to Ari. “But I asked you about it then, and you told me . . . ”
    “I was never there,” Ari objected quietly. “I was never in Kedwyr at all.” He looked over at Starhawk, as if for confirmation. They had spent the night with half of Sun Wolf’s other lieutenants, playing poker in Penpusher’s tent, waiting for word to come back from their chief. “You know . . . ”
    Starhawk nodded. “I know,” she said and looked back at Thurg, who was clearly shaken and more than a little frightened.
    “You can ask the others, sir,” he said, and a pleading note crept into his voice. “We all saw him, plain as daylight. And after the Chief had gone off with that woman, I thought he met and spoke with Ari. May God strike me blind if that isn’t the truth.”
    Starhawk reflected to herself that being struck blind by God was an exceedingly mild fate compared with what any man who had deserted his captain in the middle of an enemy city was likely to get. The fact that they were in the pay of the Council of Kedwyr did not make that city friendly territory—quite the contrary, in fact. You can dishonor a man’s wife, kill his cattle, steal his goods, Sun Wolf had often said, and he will become your friend quicker than any ruling body that owes you money for something you’ve done for them.
    She settled back in the folding camp chair that was set under the marquee outside Sun Wolf’s tent and studied the man in front of her. The sea wind riffled her pale, flyaway hair and made the awning crack above her head. The wind had turned in the night, blowing hard and steady toward the east. The racing scud of the clouds threw an uneasy alternation of brightness and shadow over the dry, wolf-colored hills that surrounded Melplith’s stove-in walls on three sides and formed a backdrop of worried calculations, like a half-heard noise, to all her thoughts.
    Her silence was salt to Thurg’s already flayed nerves. “I swear it was Ari I saw,” he insisted. “I don’t know how it came about, but you know I’d never have left the Chief. I’ve been with him for years.”
    She knew that this was true. She also knew that women, more than once, mistaking her for a man in her armor, had offered to sell her their young daughters for concubines, and the knowledge that there was literally nothing that human beings would not sell for ready cash must have been in her eyes. The little man in front of her began to sweat, his glance flickering in hopeless anguish from her face to Ari’s. Starhawk’s coldbloodedness was more feared than Sun