A gust of wind rushed through the valley. Nazir's zikh snapped sharply behind him, his eyes fixed on an empty spot far away, giving the rest of them a sense that he was seeing something they couldn't. For a moment, he seemed to be here and not here at the same time, and Hasheem wondered if everyone else felt the way he did watching their khumar. They were all watching him though, quietly, anxiously, judging from the way their horses were beginning to fidget. Horses were damningly quick in sensing if their riders were about to piss themselves.

"Who's early?" He had to ask, being the only one who didn't understand the situation.

"The Kamara." It was Khali who replied, already gathering the rein and readying his mount. "They aren't supposed to be here until we're done."

The Kamara kha'gan was their rival in the north. They shared a border made up of the Djamahari mountain range. Territory disputes happened from time to time between neighboring kha'gans when it came to taxing travelers and caravans in the White Desert, but they were considered mild conflicts and hadn't happened as often in the past. With the salar's raiding parties pushing in more aggressively from the east, the kha'gans had less room to move. It, in turn, created more frequent conflicts around the borders that weren't always clearly defined in the desert. There had been as many as two incidents in the short time Hasheem had been there between the Visarya and the Kamara, and eight men had been injured in the process. They were about to face another that day, from the looks of it.

"Why are they here at all?" Hasheem asked. They were never supposed to be in the same place. Entering another kha'gan's territory required permission from the chiefs unless one came with an intention to invade. This didn't look like it fell into the first category.

"The hunting ground is always shared between kha'gans," Nazir explained. There was unmistakable tension in his voice now, and those usually relaxed shoulders had become obviously stiff. "But there are agreements on its usage controlled by Citara. We have the priority this Raviyani."

Before he could ask more questions, a new batch of riders and gazelles poured into the valley, and Hasheem understood immediately why Khali had cursed just now. They were about to merge into one—the two hunting parties and gazelles—and Hasheem didn't need to be told how many things could go wrong if such a thing were allowed to happen. Shooting someone's cousin by mistake could be considered funny, doing so at a member of one's rival kha'gan was not.

Nazir, for all his seemingly limitless ability to control his emotions, looked like he wanted to kill someone with his bare hands at that moment. Hasheem wondered if he would actually see the khumar losing it over this. That would have been a thing to remember for life.

It might also mean battle. Hasheem swallowed at the thought. Nazir had the authority to initiate it here if his patience were to reach its limit. He only had to shoot an arrow into the new hunting party to kill one man and all hell would break loose. He looked like he wanted to do just that, and the men around him knew it. They all seemed to have stopped breathing as they waited, just as anxiously as Hasheem did, for their khumar to decide their fate.

Or the entire desert's given how one thing could always lead to another.

A suffocating, toxic moment pressed down upon them as they stared at the tall figure in white. The silver of his hair glinted like a newly sharpened blade just before it bites into flesh. Nazir's breathing was slow, barely visible from the movements of his chest. It rose and fell. Once. Twice. And on the third time came to a stop, and the world seemed to have stopped with it.

Gripping the rein until his knuckles turned white, Nazir drew another long breath, closed his eyes, and then, releasing it with a heavy sigh, he turned to issue a command. "Tell Bhotsa to sound the retreat. The hunt is over."

Hasheem released his own breath at that, and the action was repeated by the men around him. Whatever it was that gave Nazir that kind of self-control needed to have a statue made in its image for men to worship for the next three hundred years.

Khali turned his mount immediately, then paused before he took off, having noticed something on the plain. "Zozi is still down there and so is Khodi," he said, more to offer information than as an objection. "They're not going to be happy."

Hasheem followed his gaze to the valley below, saw both men, and resisted the urge to curse the gods. Khali was right. They were both sons of their chiefs. One, a proud, ambitious gray-clad warrior who would be severely pissed to miss a chance to make his mark, and the other...

The other happened to be wearing white, whose younger, gray-clad brother had just been handpicked by the khumar to join his leading party without him. Hasheem hadn't noticed Khodi there until then. Zikh-clad warriors didn't usually come to the hunt, unless by invitation from the kha'a or the khumar. It was the Grays' playground and was considered beneath them from what he understood. That day, Nazir had indirectly forced him to attend by inviting the younger brother and not the older. Khodi was going to have to prove he could bring down more gazelles than Khali to assert his authority, and now he was about to be pulled out of the hunt before he could do so. It wasn't going to end well, no matter how he looked at it. Nazir had picked the wrong day to be playing a dangerous game.

"They just have to live with it," Nazir said crisply. "I'm not going to risk an open war over gazelles. Sound the retreat."

An open war on his first watch no less, Hasheem thought, shortening his own reins. "Does this ever happen?" He asked once Khali was out of earshot.

"Every once in a while, when there's a new kha'a or khumar."

"They knew you were leading the hunt," Hasheem said, anger rising in his chest. Things were becoming clearer to him now. It was why Nazir was wearing his most formal attire. There was a chance they might run into each other, and appearance was everything. "They're testing you."

Nazir nodded. "A test if it's the khumar leading that party and not the kha'a. I can't make out who it is yet, but be ready to ride back to deliver a message if it's the latter."

"Why the latter?"

Nazir sneered a little at that. "A kha'a can get away with a son going rogue from time to time. If he comes himself —"

"He's declaring war," Hasheem finished the sentence. He swore again inwardly at another understanding that suddenly dawned on him. "That's why you didn't bring Djari."

"It was her choice this time," Nazir said regretfully, "but no, I wouldn't have let her come, not on my first watch. Neither would the kha'a."

She probably knew it, Hasheem was certain. They all knew what might happen the first time Nazir was allowed to lead the hunt. Za'in izr Husari had sent his only son—their only oracle—out to be tried and tested, knowing what they stood to lose if things were to go wrong. It was why Djari had looked troubled that morning, seeing her brother in the stable. Luckily for them, Nazir's self-control had proven to be well beyond his age.

Their horn sounded soon after, and Hasheem could see the hunters bringing their horses to a sudden stop down below. They seemed confused at first, then turned to see the other hunting party heading down the slope and promptly pulled their mounts to the side, swearing viciously as they did. From the distance he could see Zozi hesitate a little before deciding to loose his last arrow at a gazelle, killing it with the shot before riding back up the slope. It could be considered disrespectful, if Nazir had noticed the last arrow being shot after the retreat had been sounded. Luckily for Zozi, the khumar had been staring at the other chief's son. The one wearing white.

The same one who had two more arrows in his quiver, having just shot the third, and was now turning to look in their direction. From the distance, Khodi's gaze swept over the men on the slope, and came to a pause on Khali who'd just returned to Nazir's side. Time stood still in that moment, and everything around them seemed to have disappeared into the surroundings, leaving just the two figures, both wearing white, both with eyes fixed upon each other, judging, measuring, weighing the consequences of their decision or the one they were about to make.

Then he saw Khodi turn his horse, not to the nearby slope, but toward the new herd of gazelles.

"Oh brother, no," Khali, who had remained quiet until then mumbled under his breath as he watched his brother draw a new arrow out of the quiver. His gaze shifted back and forth between Nazir and Khodi, blood draining just as swiftly from his face.

An ordinary man might argue that there was only a minor difference between Zozi's last shot and one Khodi was about to make. From the eyes of a leader of thousands, or even one hundred on the plain below, the difference was the size of his entire territory. One might have been able to turn a blind eye and call it unintentional if the arrow had already been nocked and loosed at the time the retreat had been sounded. Khodi, for the love of Ravi, had just drawn out a new one after hearing the retreat issued by the khumar himself, and at the moment when the two herds had already collided.

And then loosed it.

The arrow, flying in a path as deliberate and determined as the man behind it, caught a gazelle easily in the throat, killing it instantly. Thrown forward by its own momentum as it collapsed, the dead gazelle slid across the ground a little to the right, and ended up under another rider's galloping horse. The horse reared up, throwing the rider off its back in the process and landed him in the path of another rider coming from the opposite direction. It left no time nor room for the second rider to pull back his mount or jump over the man on the ground. The horse ran over him, and somewhere in the middle of the swirling sand kicked up by its hooves, Hasheem could hear the sound of bone breaking from where he stood.

The sand settled. The first rider was on the ground, lying still on his back with his head turned to one side the way no head was supposed to. The dead rider's arrows, Hasheem noticed with a cold running down his spine, had been fitted with feathers of red and blue—the colors of the Kamara Kha'gan.

There was a gasp from Khali, whose face had turned as pale as a corpse's having just witnessed what he had. Next to him, Nazir, who had also been watching the whole thing in a bone-chilling silence, was wearing an expression that Hasheem thought might have been what it looked like when he lost it.

It could freeze the blood in your veins, give you nightmares for weeks afterwards, just watching him that day. Nazir's yellow eyes weren't glowing yellow as he thought they would. They were cooled, still, and almost white. White, like a thick layer of mist had just rolled over them. His expression was flat and unreadable—a picture of thin ice over a black, bottomless sea in winter. It felt to Hasheem that Nazir wasn't looking at the plain before him at all, but rather at something only he could see, something in a different place or at a different time.

The air around him had somehow turned colder, and Hasheem could see the white trails of his breaths as he exhaled. He looked around and realized he wasn't the only one. Every rider nearby was breathing the same cold air as they watched their khumar's every gesture, fear clearly written on their faces, waiting for it to pass.

They say the air turns cold when the door between the spirit and the living world opens. It occurred to Hasheem then, that what he was witnessing might not have been Nazir losing it, but that he was having one of his visions. After all, what were oracles if not someone with a link to somewhere in time no ordinary man could understand or enter? Perhaps even more than a link. Nazir, at that moment, didn't look like something of this world.

After a short time, the cold finally subsided. He saw Nazir's eyes returning slowly to their normal color and how those shoulders relaxed a little. The look on his face, however, hadn't changed.

"Take five men," he said to Khali without turning away from the plain, his voice thin and quiet enough to kill a man in his sleep. "Bring your brother in and meet me at that big rock by the tree."

Not Khali, Hasheem thought, squeezing his eyes shut at the way Nazir had chosen to strike. Anyone but Khali would have been kind. There was already enough conflict between the two brothers as it was, without adding more salt to the wound that way.

He opened his mouth to speak, but Khali had already turned away. To his surprise, the command had been followed promptly, without so much as a breath taken in between. Hasheem would have thought him heartless had he not seen the look on Khali's face before he'd turned. The boy had looked like someone who'd just been given a death sentence, as opposed to a person who was being sent to deliver it. Nazir hadn't looked at him once, or at anyone for that matter. He just stood there—a lone figure watching the scene below, holding the lives of two hundred people in that valley in his hands and trying to decide what to do with them.

Or perhaps it had already been decided, and he was just preparing himself for what was to come.

Down below, a Kamara rider shouted something back to the others as he dismounted to drag the dead man off to the side. Soon after, a small group withdrew from the field and rode back toward the slope from where they'd arrived. He saw Khali escorting his brother off the ground with the other five warriors with him—all wearing a zikh. The hunt went on, of course, for the Kamara. They couldn't stop or the gazelles would be gone.

"Come," Nazir said, turning his horse. The rest of his fourteen escorts turned theirs promptly. All but Nazir took out another quiver full of arrows from the saddle bag and replaced it with the empty ones. The arrows were unmarked this time. They weren't meant for the gazelles. There were no limits, no marks needed for identification, no need to count the dead if they were to be used on men.

"Hasheem, be ready to ride to the kha'a at my signal," Nazir said to him. "If my father rides, you stay and protect Djari."