Hush had run for half a day and an entire night, with his eleven braves behind him, trying to keep pace with him. He was the “Son of War,” “Crow Feeder,” “Enemy” of the Pushing River warriors. He was too young to be a legend, and it had gone to his head. He was, though, what he was: the man that all said was the very image of Grandfather, the killer they had called DeathSong who, once, in the time of Grandfathers, had come from beyond the sunset to feed the crows.

Moccasin-clad feet crunched snow. Ragged breaths rent the crisp morning air. Mother Earth lay frozen, and he, Hush, would scatter warm gore across Her cold breast, soon, all too soon.

Hush drifted in and out of half-sleep as he jogged on through the heavy snow-pack. Images of him sitting on Grandfather’s knee, after he had come from Sunset to rub out the Spanish Dogs, flitted across his hyperactive mind’s eye. It had been at that one meeting with Grandfather, that evening when the children had been asked by the terrible slayer to pleasure him with their childhood stories, that Hush had earned his name. For Hush was the word Grandfather kept saying to him when he interrupted his sisters in their foolish talk of maize-planting and blanket-making, to tell of some important trick he had played on an elder, or a particularly fine bird he had shot on the wing.

The world is shadows and fog, boy. They are all gone and Grandfather only comes once every couple of life times. You shall not see him again. It is you, and you alone who must run the enemy to ground and save your people—push on, foolish boy!

And so Hush pulled himself once again from his childhood reveries and the half-sleep of the ambushed to pick up the pace and renew his brave’s urgency to close in on the enemy. Those they tracked had but one destination: Winter-beech Camp, where the young and old and women were protected by only Father, now lame, and SixSong with his great bow.

Damn these legs!

With that thought he picked up the pace and his men moaned.

We are an hour to camp and the sign is a half hour old. We shall be too late to save the people.

With that emotion bursting in his ears, he picked up the pace again and heard old Trace gasp and fall out—his most loyal and experienced warrior, dead in their wake from a burst heart. He had no room for pity in his raging mind, and he pushed the harder, now even discarding his bow and arrows to lighten his load and quicken his step. He retained only SoulDrinker, the great elder blade that Grandfather had brought from Sunset to drink the souls of men in battle.

I hope you are thirsty, old friend!

He now broke from cover and came out above the great ridge that ran the length of The World, “Mother Earth’s collarbone,” Father had called it. He pounded across the open woodland in the tracks of the forty Pushing River braves who he had been hunting for days—not knowing that they had been baiting him along like a simple-minded cub as they hunted his people—and now pursued with a maniacal fury, heedless of danger, wanting only to close with the enemy and cut them down!

His rage was boundless—knowing himself already to be a failure as a war chief. Hush sank into a dark, murderous fury, and ground his teeth audibly as he tore through the ice-glazed drifts.

And there he saw them again, the big, booted tracks, of feet nearly as big as those belonging to the Hairy Forest Men of the stories, sunk deep as a horse track, marking even the hard ground beneath the crunching density of the ice pack. The Pushing River dogs had a white among them, a white as heavy as two men on his right side and as heavy as two men and a child on his left side, a big, long-striding man, who he somehow felt was behind this change in Pushing River spirit, from one of womanly defense to wolfish offense.

A quarter white himself, Hush’s mixed blood rose to pound in his ears at the thought of a white man come against the Sons of Fierce Woman, the woman who mounted a wounded demon on a battlefield and begat a tribe that—though diminished from the long years of war—had never lost a battle.

Somehow he managed to pick up more speed and gave the hand signal to divide. This meant that his three fastest men would follow him along an oblique route to the camp while the others pushed straight in behind the enemy. He heard a crow take wing from the top of a fine beech above him and his chest glowed with pride.

I am coming, Father, and the crows know it. Stand and fight. I will be there!