In the front room, Khal and the others spoke in low voices. I heard bits and pieces, “Sephar,” “the rite,” “a clean hit.” Zhana pushed back the curtain, and Vrathgar looked up first, Khal's back to us in this doorway. Tyralk yelled “Hey, you look nice!” and Khal turned.
I was suddenly very conscious of the skirt ending at my knees, of every place the air touched my skin. The light played across bright patterns, red and blue and black, flowers across the fabric in bold shapes that splashed downwards. There were little wooden beads sewn firmly at my elbows, for some reason, in the shape of little birds. It was a bold thing. Khal’s Adam's apple bobbed.
Tyralk smacked his shoulder, and he hissed, “Tell her she looks nice!”
Khal swallowed again. “I…you look nice,” he said.
“Thank you.” It was foolish to feel so shy and too-aware here. What I looked like was the least of our concerns; the people who hated me would not be swayed by frippery. But he hadn't moved from where he sat.
Vrathgar rolled his eyes and raised his cup again. “You should get out of here,” he said.
Tyralk sputtered, “What? Why?”
“Because there's no more he can do by talking about it, so spending the day like a trapped rat will only waste his stamina. Besides.” He glowered at the fire. “He should be seen. The community needs to know he's not hiding, not ashamed.”
Khal cleared his throat, looked away. “That seems wise. If…if Rowena feels up to it.”
I quashed my impulse to immediately say yes, took a breath. “We won't be in danger?”
“No one will dare to harm us before the rite. We're safe till moonrise.”
“Then I'll go. I think…I'm strong enough.”
Vrathgar rolled his eyes again. “Take her through to the village center. Make an appearance. And then go ahead to someplace you can be alone. There's no need to stay so tense. And she hasn't seen anything. You should take her around.” He didn't look at either of us, that irritation still foremost on his face. For the first time I wondered if Vrathgar’s meanness was a kind of armor he wore, a way of trying to seem like he cared less.
“I will.” Khal said something long and fluid to Zhana. Her eyes were still tight with worry, but she smiled at him. “Hazanich varat,” she said, and Khal held a fist over his heart.
“Hazanikh varat.”
I blinked in the white of the sunlight, and Khal put out his arms again, like I was going to fall.
“What did it mean, what you said to each other? Hazanikh…”
“Hazanikh varat,” he said. “It’s a little hard to explain.”
We passed more of those earthen homes, many now decorated with shields hung above the doors. People waved at him, and he saluted or nodded back.
“It’s like…may you acquit yourself well. But the feeling…the connotation is warm. It’s like, may you be glad of how you fought.”
“‘Good fight’?”
“Something like that.” His eyes cut over to me. “It can be figurative.”
“But she thinks you’ll have to fight someone. They all do.”
He shrugged. “More or less.”
I didn’t want to be the person asking a million questions before he had to go do something hard. Vrathgar had said unwinding was what he needed. Grilling him wouldn’t help with that.
I wished I hadn’t used up my meager magic to understand his mother.
He kept a leisurely pace for me, strolling between the homes and courtyard walls that seemed to grow out of the rock and trees, a roof covered in tiny, perching black and white goats, a riot of chickens, a grizzled woman with long white hair and strong arms ladling from a cauldron. She raised her ladle in greeting, and he bowed a little in his nod.
“She’s the ale wife,” he said. “She brews, but she also cultivates much of our medicine. At least half of us younger ones were born under her care.”
She smiled as I craned my neck to glimpse her, a knowing grin. Almost none of her teeth were missing.
Hers was among the friendlier faces. Many stared in silence, did not return Khal’s greeting as we passed. A gaggle of children crossed our path, shrieking and giggling before they were shooed aside by a woman harangueing in Orcish.
