Riverwind the name he borrowed, borrowed for him out of the grass and the darkness moving, out of their fear of the sky and the blade of the swallowed moon. And honored he was among families, as the source of the blood was lost in the people, as the path of the eland, the high call of the hawk buried themselves in words and the long wind died at the back of his head as he moved and he moved, as the Que-Shu contained him, becoming his country, as the dream of the Que-Shu wed to his dreaming like dark to the moon, until he remembered the plains and the wind and the wandering only.
II
Riverwind, borrowed from night, grew as the eyes of the People, reading the air, the descending wind, the back of his mind a prophet, a jackal, while the cry of the leopard, unheard by the People except at the place where the world falls over, choired at the back of his head. And his hand, with the grace of the falconer's hand or the falcon herself, unjessed in the diving air, was the hand of the People, the left hand, the off-hand, the hand that steadies the bow. And so it would be, my sons and fathers, until the night of the dancing moons when the sky to the east was silver and black, red the sky in the westland falling, the night when we bring forth the daughters.
Robed in the friends of the people, robed in eland, robed in the fox, in the falcon's high feathers ten winters counting, came forth the daughter of chieftains, the daughter unwed to man or to sorrow, unwed to the things she could not be.
Grace of the fathers dove through her veins like a wind that the world obeyed. Heart of the hunter she was at the heart of the wandering, gold of the eyes imagining gold of the moon descended her naming night, and Riverwind knew that the journey, the truce with horizons, was ending in light and the promise of light.