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Instead, he summoned a wry smile for his uncle. “I’m no marvel, but I suppose I have seen some marvelous things in my travels,” he said. “I’ll try not to disappoint them.”
    Three

12 Ches, the Year of the Ageless One
    Two hours before sunset, the ore-hold began to stir. Warriors rose from their pallets, stretching and yawning, heavy canines gleaming yellow in the dim light. Females stoked the cookfires, fed the livestock, and began their long round of drudgery and toil. The young scurried about underfoot, fetching water and firewood, emptying chamberpots, and tending to the scraggly goats, sheep, and fowl penned within the crudely built fortress. Ores disliked the brightest hours of the day, and therefore the hold took its rest from shortly after sunrise to the late afternoon. Only the scouts, the sentries, and those young given the job of minding the herds in the fields nearby stayed awake through the bright hours of morning and midday.
    The warchief Mhurren roused himself from his sleeping-furs and his women and pulled a short hauberk of heavy steel rings over his thick, well-muscled torso. He usually rose before most of his warriors, since he had a strong streak of human blood in him, and he found the daylight less bothersome than most of his tribe did. Among the Bloody Skulls, a warrior was judged by his strength, his fierceness, and his wits. Human ancestry was no blemish against a warrior—provided he was every bit as strong, enduring, and bloodthirsty as his full-blooded kin. Half-ores who were weaker than their ore comrades didn’t last long among the Bloody Skulls or any
    other ore tribe for that matter. But it was often true that a bit of human blood gave a warrior just the right mix of cunning, ambition, and self-discipline to go far indeed, as Mhurren had. He was master of a tribe that could muster two thousand spears, and the strongest chief in Thar.
    Yevelda sat up when he threw off the furs. She was his favorite wife, a tigress with more human than ore in her, much like himself. Slender as a switch of willow by the standards of most of the tribe’s women, she made up for her small size and clean features with catlike reflexes and pure, fierce intensity. With a knife in her hand, she was more deadly than many male warriors twice her weight. Even when he took her to the sleeping-furs, Mhurren never really let his guard down around her. She cuffed his two lesser wives, Sutha and Kansif, awake.
    “Rise, you two,” Yevelda said. “See to the kitchens and make sure our guests are looked after. They judge our husband by the table you set. Do not disappoint me.”
    The junior wives scrambled quickly out of the furs. Yevelda had shown more than once that she was quick to beat one, the other, or both if she had to repeat herself. Kansif was a young, full-blooded girl who was thoroughly cowed by the half-ore woman and desperate to please her. Sutha, on the other hand … Sutha was an older and far more cunning woman, the first of the three to have shared Mhurren’s furs and a strong-willed priestess in her own right. She was a strong, fit mixed-blood who was not at all happy about having been supplanted by Yevelda as Mhurren’s favorite. The chieftain guessed that Sutha was well along in several plots against Yevelda, but it wouldn’t do to intervene. If the favorite couldn’t keep the lesser wives in their place, then she wasn’t fit to be the favorite, was she? As she left, Sutha brushed by him with a sly smile and let her hand trail over the thick mail of his broad chest, moving just quickly enough to deprive Yevelda of a reason to chastise her.
    Mhurren grinned in appreciation as he watched his lesser wives dress themselves and hurry from his chambers. Then
    he moved over to the slitlike window and brushed the heavy curtain out of the way. The day was bright, and faint hints of green growth speckled the gray hills and moorlands surrounding Bloodskull Hold. Thar was a hard land, barely suitable for