Rantan Taggah shrugged. “I don’t know anything about that. I don’t much care, either. All I know is, if you shove a spear into one of them, he’ll die. That’s the only thing I need to know.”

“If he doesn’t spell you into spearing a clansmate instead, thinking it’s him,” Enni Chennitats said.

“Yes. If.” Rantan Taggah scowled. “Well, we’ll have to figure out how to keep that from happening, because we’ll be traveling through Liskash country-through a lot of it, I’m afraid.”

“We are going to travel, then?” The priestess had known it was likely. Hearing it would actually happen still felt like a punch in the belly, though. “We had a good life here.”

“We had one, yes,” Rantan Taggah agreed. “No more, not with the New Water at our backs. We’re cut off from all the other Mrem in the world. The only reason the Scaly Ones didn’t jump on our backs before this is that they’re hatched cowards.”

It was more complicated than that. Enni Chennitats knew as much, and the talonmaster surely did as well. The Liskash rarely hurried in anything they did. She wondered if their being kin to lizards and snakes and other crawling things accounted for that. Lizards and snakes had no will to overcome their natural deliberation. The Liskash did-if Liskash nobles were anything, they were creatures of overwhelming will-but usually stayed slow all the same.

“Some of our clansfolk won’t want to travel into the unknown,” Enni Chennitats said. Liskash nobles weren’t the only ones who kept on doing what they’d always done whenever they got the chance. The Mrem also like to curl up and go to sleep in their old, familiar haunts.

“Well,” the talonmaster said, “we’ll have a clan meeting tomorrow to hash things out. The way I see it, if we don’t move when we want to, we’ll move when the Liskash force us out of here-if we can move then. Better to go on our own terms. That’s how it looks to me, anyhow.”