from the hunted—animals all. He would fall victim eventually, prey to some sharp-eyed predator. His death would be a lonely one, so lonely she suspected he would welcome it.
Even the will of the wolves in their hundreds of thousands could barely brush the immensity of the lost Hold’s power.
She huddled against the cold and the ache in her head.
The rain arrived with the rage of hornets.
Whipped by the wind and lashed by the rain, Cafal reached the edge of the encampment. Hearth-fires flared and dipped beneath the deluge, but even in the fitful light he could see huddled crowds and the smaller makeshift camps of the Barahn clustered round the edges. Figures hurried between the rows, hunched against the weather. He could see pickets here and there, haphazardly arranged with some of the posts abandoned.
When lightning lit the scene it seemed to seethe before his eyes.
Somewhere in there was his sister. Being used again and again. Warriors he had known all his life were pushing bloody paths into her, eager to join in the breaking of this once proud, beautiful and powerful woman. Cafal and Tool had spoken often of outlawing the tradition of hobbling, but too many resisted the casting away of traditions, even those as vicious as this one.
He could not change what had happened, all the damage already done, but he could steal her away, he could save her the months, even years, of horror that awaited her.
Cafal crouched, studying the Barghast camp.
Swathed in furs, Balamit made her way back to her yurt. Such a night! Too many years bowing to that bitch, too many years stepping from her path, eyes downcast as was demanded by Hetan’s position as wife to the Warleader. Well, the whore was paying the soul’s coin for that now, wasn’t she?
Balamit ran through her mind once more the fateful moment when Hega’s hatchet descended. The way Hetan’s whole body contorted in pain and shock, the deafening shriek cutting like a knife in the air. Some people lived as if privilege was something they were born to, as if everyone else was a lesser being, as if their domination was a natural truth. Well, there were other truths in nature, weren’t there? The gathering of the pack could bring down the fiercest wolf.
Balamit grinned as the rain spat icy against her face. Not just a pack, but a thousand of her kind! The pushed-down, the murky shapes that made up the common crowd, the ignored subjects of contempt. No, this was a worldly lesson, was it not? And, sweetest truth of all, we are far from finished.
Maral Eb was a fool, just another one of those superior bastards who thought their damned farts could buy a crown. Bakal was a much better choice—a Senan for one, and the Barahn were no match for her tribe—to think they could just step into the stirrup, when they’d not even had a hand in killing Onos Toolan, why, it was—
A huge shape stepped out from between two tarp-covered dung-piles, bulled into her hard enough to make her stagger. The figure reached out to right her even as she hissed a curse, and then the hand clutched tighter and snatched her close. A knife-blade sank between her ribs, the point slicing her heart in half.
Blinking in the sudden darkness, Balamit’s legs gave out beneath her, and she fell to the mud.
Her killer left her there without a backward glance.
Jayviss finally rose from her place close to the fire, as the flames had at last guttered out beneath the rain. Her bones ached terribly when the weather turned cold, and the injustice of that galled her. She was barely into her fifth decade, after all—but now that she was among the powerful, she could demand a ritual of healing to scour clean the rot in her joints, and she would have to pay nothing, nothing at all.
Sekara had promised. And Sekara knew the importance of favouring her allies.
Life would be good once again, as it had been in her youth. She could take as many men as she wanted. She could take for herself the finest furs to stay warm at night. She might even buy a D’ras slave or two, to work oils into her skin and make her supple once more. She’d heard they could take away stretch marks and make sagging breasts taut. They could smooth the wrinkles from her face, even the deep bird-track between her brows, where had gathered a lifetime of injustice