As soon as she thought of it, she knew it was true. Volemak was remonstrating with Elemak, and now Eiadh was near enough and their voices were loud enough for her to hear.

"But he was unarmed?" Volemak was saying. "He didn't threaten you at all?"

"I told you that I thought he knew where my daughter was!"

"So you crippled him? Even if you didn't care that we have to live in this place and you have needlessly made enemies of a tribe of sentient creatures, you might have thought that brutalizing the one person who might have helped you was beyond stupidity!"

Volemak was too angry, Eiadh thought. Elemak didn't respond well to tongue-lashings, especially in public. He had been faithful to the oath of obedience, but why push it?

Of course, she hadn't seen the injured angel, and Volemak had. What had Elemak done?

"Oh, yes, I'm beyond stupid," Elemak was answering. "But your perfect hero with the magic cloak was down playing god with a bunch of rats!"

"He got your daughter back, he and Oykib and Protchnu and I," said Volemak. "And we did it surrounded by armed diggers that outnumbered us by hundreds, because you had insisted on taking all but a handful of our men of fighting age."

"If you had commanded me to leave some behind," Elemak began, but Volemak cut him off.

"Oh, yes, you would have obeyed-while you accused me of wanting your daughter to die. Well, Elya, she lived, no thanks to you. Now let's see if that harmless angel is as lucky."

"What am I supposed to do, kneel down and worship at Nafai's feet? Is he supposed to be my god, too?"

That was too much for Eiadh. "You might thank him," said Eiadh quietly. "He gave us back Zhivya."

"No he didn't," said Elemak. "The cloak of the starmaster did whatever was done. If I had had the cloak, I could have done at least as well."

"No you wouldn't," said Eiadh. "Because you would have been up the canyon with the cloak, no doubt using it to shoot angels out of the sky, and down here without it we would have been overrun and slaughtered by the diggers, every one of us."

"How should I have known that some creatures we'd never seen before took the baby?"

"Oykib tried to tell you, but you wouldn't listen. It's one reason you aren't fit to lead us. You never listen, you just decide based on what you already know. Well, Elemak, you don't know everything." Eiadh heard her own words and knew she was saying too much. The rage in his face was frightening. He hadn't looked at her like that since... since she took Volemak's oath during the voyage.

"So this is my greeting from my wife when I come home," he said.

"I meant to greet you with joy," said Eiadh, bowing her head. "I'm sorry."

Because she had submitted, Elemak could turn his anger to others. "So I was wrong," he said. "I didn't hear any of you arguing with me!"

They answered him with silence.

"So don't go criticizing me if you haven't the brains to come up with a better idea."

"We all had a better idea," said Padarok quietly. "We all knew that you were wrong. We knew it from the beginning."

His words were like a slap in Elemak's face. "Then why did you follow me?"

"It was your daughter who was missing," said Padarok.

"That didn't mean that I was right? said Elemak. "It probably meant my judgment wasn't at its best."

"Yes, that's what I was saying," said Padarok.

"You followed me because my judgment wasn't good?" asked Elemak. "You all knew I was wrong, and you followed me because I was wrong?" The contempt in his voice made a poor disguise for the confusion he was obviously feeling.

"Elemak, come inside, come to the house," Eiadh said.

"No, I want to understand this," said Elemak. "I want to understand why these so-called men are so stupid that they knowingly follow someone that they think is wrong."

"Please, Elemak."

"We didn't follow you because you were wrong," Yasai finally said. "We followed you because you were irrational. We didn't know what you'd do if we refused to obey."

"What do you mean?" demanded Elemak. "What mattered was finding my daughter. That's all that mattered."

"Was it?" asked Eiadh. "If that was true, you would have stopped and listened to Oykib when he tried to tell you that it wasn't the angels who took Zhivya. Now please, stop arguing about it. Everybody's home safe and nobody was harmed."

Elemak shrugged off the hand she had laid upon his arm. "Don't patronize me, Eiadh."

"Don't be angry, Elemak," she said. "Zhivya was lost, and she's been restored to us. It's a day for rejoicing, not anger. You might even thank the ones who brought her back to us."

"Thank them? Because the Oversoul gave Nafai the only good weapon? Because they followed me on a foolish chase up the canyon because they knew it was foolish?"

Padarok stepped closer to Elemak. "No, Elemak. We followed you because we were afraid that you would do to one of us what you finally ended up doing to that harmless angel. And our fear was not unfounded. If you'll remember, you came very close to doing it to me?

Only now did Eiadh notice the bruises on Padarok's neck and jaws.

"If Father hadn't stood against you," said Padarok.

Elemak, his face red with rage-or was it shame?- answered contemptuously, "Do you think I stopped because of Us pathetic threats?"

"I don't know why you stopped," said Padarok. "But we never know whether you will stop. And so we obey you when you're angry and irrational, because we're afraid of you. And if you think about it without letting rage cloud your reason, you'll realize that we have cause to be afraid."

"Let's go home, Elya," said Eiadh again.

But Elemak was determined to have this out. "You would have let Zhivya die, because you were so afraid of me that you didn't dare to argue with me?"

Paradok shook his head. "We knew that Nafai would get her back, if it could be done at all."

"Nafai?" said Elemak. Then he roared. "Nafai! Nafai! Nafai! You trusted him to do it! You put my daughter's life in his hands! What does he know, that stupid, boastful boy, that snot-nosed little pretender, that-"

"He did it!" Eiadh screamed at him. "You stupid angry fool, he did save her, so they were right to trust him!" Her screaming frightened the baby, who started to cry. But Eiadh couldn't stop now. "And they knew that if you stayed here, you'd just do some angry stupid thing and cause a disaster, so it was better to have you off up the canyon where you wouldn't start a war between us and the diggers. Do you get it now, Elemak? Now that you've made us tell you more than we ever meant to, will you finally understand what you Are to us? We know that if anything delicate needs to be done, yauV belter not be there, because you'll always, always, always do something like what you did to that angel!"

For a moment Eiadh felt the thrill of having finally blurted out the truth, of having struck down the pride-ful man who had complicated her life so much for all these years.

Then she saw something she had never seen before. Elemak didn't rage. His shoulders slumped. He visibly wilted. He looked at no one, met no one's gaze. He just turned his back and walked into the forest.

"I'm sorry, Elya," she called after him. "I was angry, I didn't mean it."

But he knew she meant it. Everyone knew she meant it, and everyone knew that what she had said was true.

Everyone had known it for years. Finally, today, Elemak knew it too.

He came back the next day. Quiet, subdued. A different man. A broken man. Eiadh tried to apologize to him when they were alone in the house, but he walked out the door and wouldn't listen. They shared their bed, but he never reached out to her. He would answer the children when they asked him questions, and sometimes he would play with them and laugh and smile like the old days. But he didn't come to any of the meetings of the adults, and when Eiadh tried to involve him in decisions about their own household, he always answered the same way. "Whatever you want," he said. "I don't care."