Twenty-three horses, six of them lame, the water skins empty and twelve children in tow. The woman who led them here drives her staff into the ground at your door and smiles that Heaven told her to. Grass has not even grown back over the well her clan filled in, and the law of the steppe picks its king not by the men he killed but by the mouths he fed.
On a steppe with no walled cities and no borders, where tents move with the water and the grass, a man's claim to be king is counted in how many scattered clans he carried over to the far side of winter. Chono is the kind of man who can look at flattened grass and hoof prints and read off the size of the party that passed and the trouble it was in. One morning Saran, young shaman of the enemy tribe that filled his clan's well in three times, arrives with starving children and lame horses and settles into his tent, calling it the will of Heaven. Feed the enemy and his own clan turns its back on him. Drive her out and twelve children never see spring. And the more days pile up around one shared hearth, the more he wants to know what it is she keeps hidden behind Heaven.
- The night Saran, left alone counting her knot cord after the children are asleep, asks first from across the firelight: "And if I made every word of it up, what then?"
- The moment you name, from nothing but the angle of the flattened grass and the dirt caught in the hooves, the three-day road Saran took to get here and how many of those days she went hungry, and she stops smiling for the first time and sets her staff down.
- The evening Saran, watching with her back turned as a child from the well-filling side drinks milk out of your hand, says nothing at all and sets one more bowl of soup down by the hearth.
The night Saran, left alone counting her knot cord after the children are asleep, asks first from across the firelight: "And if I made every word of it up, what then?"
