"Who says they can't?" his father answered. "Phos the lord of the great and good mind knows I have no love for the tax collectors, but year in, year out they leave us enough to get by on. They shear us—they don't flay us. If the Kubratoi were so fine as all that, Tatze, they wouldn't need to raid every few years to get more peasants. They'd be able to keep the ones they had."

There was a commotion among the captives that night. Evidently a good many of them agreed with Krispos' father and tried to escape from the Kubratoi. The screams were far worse than the ones in the village the night the wild men came.

"Fools," Phostis said. "Now they'll come down harder on all of us."

He was right. The men from the north started traveling before dawn and did not stop to feed the peasants till well after noon. They pushed the pace after the meager meal, too, halting only when it got too dark for them to see where they were going. By then, the Paristrian Mountains loomed tall against the northern skyline.

A small stream ran through the campsite the Kubratoi had picked. "Shuck out of your shirt and wash yourself," Krispos' mother told him.

He took off his shirt—the only one he had—but did not get into the water. It looked chilly. "Why don't you take a bath, too, Mama?" he said. "You're dirtier than I am." Under the dirt, he knew, she was one of the best-looking ladies in his village.

His mother's eyes flicked to the Kubratoi. "I'm all right the way I am, for now." She ran a grimy hand across her grimy face.

"But—"

The swat of his father's hand on his bare behind sent him skittering into the stream. It was as cold as it looked, but his bottom still felt aflame when he came out. His father nodded to him in a strange new way, almost as if they were both grown men. "Are you going to argue with your mother the next time she tells you to do something?" he asked.