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softly. “We carry it with us, in our bodies, our innermost selves. We have no need of chants and charms and lucky colors.” He touched her head lightly with cupped hands, turned her by the shoulders and gently traced the line of her spine, caressed her thin shoulder blades, sending a tingling joy and wonder through her. He would not have done so had he known she was a girl and not merely a boy younger than himself. For her girl’s heart was touched, and body magic is the most binding of magics. Kyrem was yet a virgin, but when the time came that he would lie with a woman, that one would be his mate for life, such was the power within him.
    With a final gentle touch he left her and went to his men. “Now you four,” he said to the soldiers, “help each other.”
    They did not have gift for the magic such as Kyrem’s. But, watching them, Seda began to understand something of the bond between the Devans and their horses. That constant touch throughout the day, gentle squeezing of knees and guidance of hand on the crest of the neck—no wonder, with the magic, that man and beast became nearly as one, the man’s will guiding the steed, the steed warm and generous in its submission. Did something of the steed’s strength come through to the man, she wondered? Did the magic work two ways? She knew what Kyrem had given to her—but what, if anything, had she given to Kyrem?
    â€œPeckernose!” a cursing creature shrieked with passionate abandon from the darkness just beyond their camp fire. “Prince peckernose!”
    Kyrem swung like a bear where he stood, and for a moment rage darkened his face; Seda thought he would go after the horse-bird with one of his useless charges. But the next moment his face cleared and he threw back his head and laughed, a wild, free, ringing laugh, the beggar’s laugh that mocks any adversity.
    â€œPeckernose yourself!” he shouted back at the bird with no beak, and all around the camp fire men smiled.
    â€œWhat makes you think it means you, lord?” a soldier joked quietly.
    Kyrem grinned and answered not the jester but Seda’s inquiring glance. “My name,” he told her. “It means ‘phallus’ in the language of the Old Ones. No dishonor intended, only that I am called after the emblem of love and fertility. My father’s name means ‘lion.’ So I am the phallus out of the lion, do you see?”
    Seda felt her heart go hot and spoke before the feeling could reach her face. “Who are the Old Ones?” she asked. The question had been with her for days, waiting.
    Kyrem’s grin faded. “I scarcely know. Those who lived in Deva before us. All that is left of them is their sacred language and their saying that souls go up as birds. They worshiped birds, their great god was the simurgh. Folk say that their horses were as yellow as our yellow clay, tarpans, and that they themselves were colored as if arisen from earth itself, dun of skin and hair. They might well have returned to earth, for all I know.”
    â€œIt is said also that someday their great king who lies asleep under the mountains will arise and smite us all,” a man added.
    â€œAnd folk say as well that it is unlucky to speak of them overmuch,” the captain warned.
    â€œLet us have no more talk of luck,” Kyrem said, though quietly. “That is not fitting for Devans.” And they all fell silent, for they knew two who had once said that Seda had brought them bad luck, two who no longer lived, and now they wondered whether to feel foolish or afraid. But for the time, their magic ran strong in them. They smiled and slept that night with no thought for noise or luck or curses.
    The next day the first one of their remaining number met his fate.
    It was one of the demon things that did it to him, the one that whinnied out, “Devan dogs!” The soldiers were beginning to be able to tell them apart, almost