The chieftain’s name hasn’t been mentioned yet. This isn’t the affront it might seem. A leader of a sortie would have been chosen, just that morning, out of a team of qualified volunteers. He’ll retire from the position by nightfall (if he survives this encounter). In anonymity resides safety. In fact, this fellow’s name is Oyi’iathi, but you don’t need to hold on to it; you won’t hear it again.
Picture him as taller than Melena and Severin, in every way their equal in backbone. Sweat brings his forehead and pectoral muscles into high, varnished relief. The others in his party are variations on the theme. Neither does any Quadling avenger look morally uncertain about this campaign, or irritated at having been volunteered by some parent.
But appearances rarely suggest the ambiguities that prove human behavior to be actually human.
Melena is certainly good-looking enough for martyrdom. Melena, born to a line near-enough royal to have its own livery design, and rich enough not to have noticed that lots of other families don’t.
History lumbers on. It can’t help itself. If such a moment were recorded in a marble tableau or a municipal mural, its meaning would evolve over the decades. Melena might come to be seen as arrogant, solipsistic. Nanny as oppressed. Severin and Snapper as opportunistic and venal. The chieftain and his backups as noble defenders of their land. The last stand of doomed animism, of Quadling independence. While Boozy—but no one would ever make out how Boozy fits in. She’s the one-off that makes the moment, static as it is, continue to fizz.
Memory and history codify perception, but in real life nobody ever really knows what anyone else is thinking. Nothing stands still. Here comes the moth in the tapestry, the hammer against the marble entablature. The upset.
Pacing out of the reeds on her own two green feet, hardly three green feet high.