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Badger Tail makes a motion and two braves by the door stand you up and walk you outside the house of the Great Chief. There is a trembling, a sharp line, the cold seems brighter to you. Badger Tail follows you out. He takes his own breaths free of the smokey shackles of the house. He begins without looking.
<span class="mu-i">”You will leave at dawn. You will take our young shaman. You will take the young boy Kule. You will take two of Chief Stone Hoof’s sons. You will search for any trace of Owl and return her favor to the Maidu’wail. You will do this.”</span>
It is here that he turns to face you.
<span class="mu-i">”You will do this because if you do not you will be killed at dawn. You will do this because if you do you will be led down the mountain peacefully and allowed to leave our lands alive. You will do this because if you cannot find any trace of Owl in three days the Great Chief has decreed that we shall war with the Washoe. You will do this because there is no way for us to win that war.”</span>
You say nothing. He turns again, and begins to walk away. He stops suddenly, his neck craned up to the sky. He speaks again, his words hanging misty in the air.
<span class="mu-i">”On nights like this…I used to make my daughter count the stars until she fell asleep.”</span>
It lasts only a moment, then he is walking again. To some other place. You watch him for a while, until he is subsumed by distance and the dark, then you head back to your temporary lodging. You stop before you push aside the thick curtain covering the door to your house. The moon grasps you, and the stars. You feel drawn to look at them just for their own sake. They really are beautiful, you catch yourself counting them.
One figure stands at the end of the dirt street. He wears heavy clothes of black and tan. His hair is short, soot tattoos on his face. A knife sheathed on his belt, a tomahawk too. He raises a single solitary hand in your direction. You raise one back. He lowers his hand, and leaves.
The morning rushes forth without mercy. You’re dressed, provisioned, and at the ruined front gates of P’oilkat with but a treacherous three hours of sleep. Light-in-his-Eyes is the first to arrive. He carries a satchel much larger than yours, more of a burlap pack that jangles ferociously as he sets it down, panting. You try to help him with it but he waves you away. After some radical silence he attempts what you suspect might have been conversation. It takes a full minute of him speaking Maidu by himself to pick up on the fact that you do not. He somehow repeats his mistake ten minutes later.
You are saved from malicious banality by the arrival of two tall, strong young men. The sons of Chief Stone Hoof you presume. Each has a birthmark on his face; one red, one gray. Other than that they are the very image of each other, as obvious a pair of twins as you’ve ever seen. Their grimace is not subtle and they communicate their dislike just fine with eyes alone.
