for the stick' he called.
Her head turned toward him. He could see the motion, but nothing else in the fading light. 'I don't understand.'
'For the stick my return favor.' He tried to enunciate clearly.
'Stick,' she said. 'Favor.' She was beginning to pick up his clumsy words, but not his meaning. Her teeth chattered as she spoke.
'The warmth of my body, tonight.'
'Warm? Night?' She remained perplexed.
Var got up abruptly and crossed over to her. He lay down on his side, took hold of her, and pulled her to him. 'Sleep warm,' he said as clearly as he could.
For a moment her body was tense, and her hands flew to his neck in a gesture he recognized from demonstrations the Nameless One had made. She knew weaponless combat! Then she relaxed.
'Oh you mean to share warmth! Oh, thank you, Val'
And she turned about, curled up, and lay with her shivering back nestled against his front, his arms and legs falling about her. His chin, sprouting its sparse beard, came to nestle in her fluffy hair. His forearm settled on her folded thigh, his hand clasped her knee to gain the purchase necessary to keep them close together.
Var remembered the first time he had held a woman, not so many months before. But of course this was not the same. Sola had been buxom and hot, while this child was bony and cold. And the relationship was entirely different.
Yet he found this chaste camaraderie against the cold to be as meaningful as that prior sexual connection. To stand even on the favors that was part of the circle code, as he understood it, and there was no shame in it.
Yet in the morning they would do battle again.
'Who are you?' he asked now. For once the words came out succinctly.
'Soil. My father is sol of all weapons.'
Sol of All Weapons! The former master of the empire, and the man who had built it up from nothing. No wonder she was so proficient!
Then a terrible thought struck him. 'Your mother, who is your mother?'
'Oh, my mother knows even more about fighting than Sol does but she does it without weapons. She's very small hardly bigger than I am, and I'm not full grown but any man who comes at her lands on his head!' She tittered. 'It's funny.'
Relief, until something else occurred to him. 'She your mother brown curly hair, very good figure, smock'
'Yes, that's her! But how could you know? She's never been out of the underworld not since I've been there.'
Once again Var found himself at a loss to explain. Certainly he did not want to tell her he had tried to kill her mother.
'Of course Sosa isn't my natural mother,' Soil remarked. 'I was born outside. My father brought me in, when I was small.'
Var's earlier shock returned. 'You're you're Sola's dead daughter?'
'Well, we're not really dead in the underworld. We just let the nomads think that, because I don't know exactly why. Sol was married to Sola outside, though, and I'm their child. They say Sola married the Nameless One, after that.'
'Yes. But she kept her name.'
'Sosa kept her name, too. That's funny.'
But Var was remembering Sola's charge to him: 'Kill the man who harms my child.'
Var the Stick was that man, for he was pledged to save the empire by killing the mountain's champion.
