I nodded. “Perhaps Lau men accept such arrangements easily, regarding a woman and regarding children. I have never truly understood this. Now I need to understand it.”
“It’s not that easy,” Lalani said. She had taken my arm and drew me on to walk a little farther, walking close to me. She said, her tone thoughtful, “Making it work is my job, and Esau’s, since he’s file leader. Well, and Laraut, just because he’s got the right attitude to get everybody else to settle down. But if the men didn’t depend on each other in battle, it would be impossible. I don’t know exactly how it works for Ugaro women. It seems strange to me when your people say a woman chooses whom to invite to her tent. A Lau woman who marries one man, a jewel wife, won’t ever lie down with a man who isn’t her husband. Or if she does, she had better not be caught!”
I thought about her words. “A woman should respect her husband’s pride. If she suggests to another man that he might come to her tent, she should speak quietly, and only at a time when her husband is not in the camp. Perhaps that is a little the same.”
“Respect his pride,” Lalani repeated. “Well, you might say that’s the same, in a way. I mean for soldiers and talon wives, a woman had better be able to able to make every man believe she likes him, or there’ll definitely be trouble. It’s best when she does like every man. You don’t doubt that Darra cares for you. Do your people ever—does a woman ever say she loves a man? Does a man ever say he loves a woman? I can’t exactly get I love you to work in taksu.” She was frowning in puzzlement. “I never realized that before.”
“One does not say it that way,” I told her. “To hold someone in high regard is like that phrase. But perhaps different. I do not—”
I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, or I would have died at that moment. I ducked to the side, crouching and spinning, throwing up one arm and pushing Lalani hard away with my other hand, so the knife cut along my forearm rather than taking me low in the back. I threw myself down, rolling, and came up again, and a second thrown knife struck me in the chest, fortunately at an angle so that my ribs turned the blade. I jerked the knife from my flesh and threw it back, making my enemy duck, slowing him enough that I made it back to my feet.
My own knife was in my hand now, but the weapon that cut at me was a sword, not a knife. I blocked the stroke, but the force of the blow sent my knife flying out of my hand. Now weaponless and badly off balance, I threw myself down and away, rolling again with all the desperate speed I could manage, barely evading a second stroke—I heard the sword cut into the earth a fingerbreadth behind me. I found a rock beneath my hand and threw that, but it was small, and Yaro inTasiyo ignored it. He was so fast, faster than I was, and he had a sword and I had nothing. If I could get inside his guard and grab his sword hand—but he was so fast, and even if I managed it, I knew even from our one exchange of blows that he was very much stronger than I was.
Lalani was screaming—people would be coming, but we were so far from the camps, no one could possibly come in time—I backed away and he followed me; he feinted, and I shifted my weight to make him think I believed the feint real and draw him into a real attack, and he began the real blow, and I threw myself out of the way, but that had also been a feint—my own move had been a mistake and I could not compensate fast enough—he kicked me hard in the face. I sprawled, expecting at any instant to take the blow that killed me. I was angry, so angry. That was what I knew at that moment. That I could not evade his blow, and that I was so blindingly furious I was not at all afraid. I did not want to die, I was sick at the thought of dying, of losing all the life that a heartbeat earlier had been laid out before me.
The blow did not fall. I was on my feet, and not dead. Blood ran down my chest and my forearm, and my cheekbone might be cracked, but those injuries were nothing. I had no weapon, but that did not matter. Yaro inTasiyo stood perfectly still, his arms at his sides and his sword abandoned on the ground at his feet. His muscles were tight, his jaw clenched, his eyes wide. He was not moving at all.
I understood at once. But at least five heartbeats passed before I could bring myself to acknowledge that I knew what had happened. Then I turned my back to Yaro and looked away from the lake, toward the inGara tents.
Many people were running toward me, toward us, still too far to see who they were. But I recognized Aras at once; his dark, thin height and his straight stance. He was not running. He was standing still, at the top of the hill, at the edge of the inGara camp. I had known he would be there. Even across all that distance, I knew he was not looking at Yaro inTasiyo. He was looking at me.
Yaro stood exactly where he was, his will very plainly stolen from him by sorcery. Many of the people running toward us probably knew that already. Everyone who had not already realized would understand in a handful of breaths.
“Ryo—”
