Chapter One

Radiv pointed at a star low in the north. "North-eis looks bigger tonight. Almost like one of the moon's tail bones."

The moon had not yet risen, nor had the string of small broken pieces that always trailed after it up the sky.

"Since when," asked Juva, "do you look up?"

She sat on her rock at the edge of the water with her hood down and her long black hair loose over her shoulders. Even sitting, she was nearly his height, which was exactly why Radiv had stayed on his feet.

"I look up all the time," he said. "I can name more stars than you can count, you ugly lump."

"That's true." Juva tipped her head back and looked at the sky. "Anyone can name a star. They were named by idiots like you, and after idiots like you." She gave him a slow, sarcastic smile.

"Oh, yes," said Radiv. "Yes." He rubbed his chin with two fingers and frowned at the water, as though giving the matter serious thought. Juva glanced away downriver.

He punched her in the face.

A good punch, with eleven feet of Pila behind it: Juva went clean off the rock. She landed flat on her back on the bank, and the mud splashed.

"Who's the idiot now?" Radiv asked, and laughed.

Juva got up slowly, thirteen feet of her unfolding from the mud in a long rust-red robe that was somehow still clean. Dirt never stuck to Juva. Her face was round and weather-beaten, dark and sunburnt and lined, and it carried a royal glow. Every Pila gave off a faint light of their own, but nobody had ever seen one shine like Juva. She did not wipe her cheek. She walked up to him, her wooden soles slapping the wet ground, took a fistful of his hair and lifted him off his feet.

He tried to kick her, but she held him at arm's length and his boots swung short. He had bought the boots in foreign lands, along with the animal-skin trousers, and they were as thin as a second skin and impossible to tear. Above the trousers he wore nothing at all; his tattoos, he liked to say, were clothes enough. Dressed like that he did not look much like a Pila, and the foreigners who sold him the boots laughed out loud when he told them he was one.

Juva threw him.

He hit the boulder by the path shoulder first. The boulder split down the middle with a crack like ice breaking on the river, and Radiv lay between the two halves of it and stared at the sky.

Juva wiped her palm on her robe. "Does that answer your question?"

This was how Pilas settled an argument.

Radiv's scalp went hot. His hair rose along his skull like the hackles of an angry wolf, and he knew without looking that it had turned dark red. The hair was foreign work too. The Tandens had made it change colour with his feelings and had not thought to give him any say in the matter: brown when he was calm, red when he was angry, pale yellow when he was scared, and a blink of green, there and gone, whenever he told a lie. Everyone who knew him could read it at a glance, and most of them did.

His tattoos were moving too. They were Nevulos work, and they shifted their pattern by themselves, always at the worst moment: never into pictures of real things, only lines and curves that hinted at what he felt, or what he secretly wanted. The spirals on his left forearm had bunched into a hard little tangle of jagged lines, which looked very much the way his pride felt. He folded his arms over it before Juva could see.

They faced each other. Radiv watched her chin, because her chin always gave her away before the rest of her face did. It was trembling. She was trying not to laugh.

They burst out laughing together.