Turning back to the bandit, he saw the man trying to heave his bulk upward. With no further reason to toy with him, Aidan kicked him in the side, sending him back to the ground. Assuming the look of contempt taught him by Gonn, he forced the bandit to roll over with further kicks, then stared into the man's now-frightened eyes. Aidan was revolted by the man's look of fear. Showing such emotion had no doubt contributed to this man's failure as a warrior, if indeed this particular freebirth had ever been a warrior.

Aidan did not care to savor the act of killing. It was necessary but repulsive to him. Quickly, he brought the bandit's knife down toward his face. The man tried to turn his head sideways, but Aidan knocked it back with his pistol, then he plunged the knife into the victim's open mouth, forcing it deep. The bandit's eyes widened in pain. Blood followed the knife blade out of the man's mouth, then—watching the horror in the dying man's eyes—Aidan finished him off. With the same casual, almost indifferent motion the bandit leader had used on Glynn, Aidan slit his throat.

Looking around him, Aidan saw that the battle was over and that they had won it. The survivors among the outlaw band were running from them, and the bodies of the less lucky were strewn about the improvised battlefield. Like Aidan, other members of the sibko were standing and surveying the damage they had done. Many of them hovered over the corpse of the bandit leader, who had more than the requisite wounds in his body to bring about an agonizing death.

For a moment, he saw the scene as it might have looked from the viewpoint of the enemy. The bandits had lost a fight with a raging horde of children.That would damage the pride of the survivors. It was the first battle, other than planned ceremonial skirmishes, that Aidan's sibko had ever won. And the cost of it was Glynn's death.

When Aidan arrived at the side of Glynn's corpse, where the sibko was assembling, his body was still trembling and his stomach still bouncing around inside his body from the exhilaration and disgust of his first killing. Looking at Gonn, he saw that lines of tears ran out of the corners of Gonn's eyes. Aidan could not tell whether they were angry or sad tears. No one ever could, or did, know what went on in the group leader's mind.

Their other sibparents had seen to it that Glynn was given a proper ceremonial funeral, marked with a few rituals that normally belonged to those who had attained warrior status. After the funeral, Gonn was severely reprimanded and removed from command over the sibko for having lost control of it at a key moment, even though the sibko itself was praised for its bravery. He was demoted to menial tasks, which he did desultorily. Then, one day, Gonn drowned in a river alongside which the sibko was camped. Some wondered if he had committed suicide, although direct suicide was rare in the Clans. Few clansmen or women ever chose to kill themselves, except through recklessness in battle.

Though Aidan had despised Gonn for his cowardice against the bandits, he nevertheless felt some grief upon hearing of the man's death. A few years earlier, a different kind of Gonn had taken Aidan under his wing—under his falcon wing, a catchphrase he used often—and helped with the training of Warhawk.

One day Gonn had found Aidan trying to pull some broken feathers from Warhawk's wing. The falcon had been in a mysterious fight somewhere, apparently with a bird nearly as tough as she, and she had returned from the fray much the worse for wear. Many feathers were tattered, with others severely damaged and attached by only a few remaining strands of quill.

"Silly child," Gonn had said. "Do not pull out feathers that way, no matter what shape they are in. Do you not know that when they are taken completely out, you can be sure that they will not grow again at next molting, and perhaps at no future molting?"

"No, sir. I did not know that. I—"

"None of your excuses. Warriors do not try to find reasons for their failures. That is not the way of the Clans." The way of the Clans, another catchphrase, was one all the sibparents used. "As you do in so many other ways, you show yourself not ready even to imagine yourself a warrior. I doubt that you will go that far, for all your fancy achievements. And you will not answer now, quineg?"

"Neg."

"Now here I will show you what to do. It is called imping."

Gonn took Aidan, who held and soothed Warhawk, to his quarters, at that time in their existence a hastily put-together shack, whose sides and roof were made of the durable caldo leaf, which grew abundantly on trees in that particular part of Circe. The shack was like all the places Gonn had ever lived, cluttered and strewn with debris from his life. Using a set of needles that he kept in the kit-bag that always hung from his belt, he selected some three-sided needles of various sizes. Reaching into a box under a strange-looking work-desk cluttered with tools whose uses Aidan could not begin to imagine, Gonn took out a spray of falcon and hawk feathers. He told Aidan he had saved them from the molt of many of the damned birds that the sibko kept.

Taking the first needle and holding it up to the light streaming in from the open doorway, Gonn examined it closely, then measured the old feather against it. He told Aidan they would match old feathers with Warhawk's real feathers. As Aidan clutched Warhawk firmly but gently, Gonn went to work on the bird. With the delicate strokes of a surgeon, working the knife slowly, he cut away the feather at the point where the fracture occurred, then on the remaining section he fashioned an oblique edge. Leaning away from Warhawk, he took the old feather and sliced its edge off. With nimble fingers, he checked to see that the edges of the true feather and the old feather fit together neatly and that the remade feather would be about the same length as those around it. Inserting the needle into Warhawk's real feather, he fastened the old one to it, gently pushing the false feather onto the real one until the break between them was hardly noticeable. Satisfied with his handiwork, he leaned back and said:

"There. That will suffice until Warhawk's next molting. The needle is treated so that it will attach to the inside of each feather and hold it securely. Now, let's do some of the others."

Aidan and Gonn worked together for several hours. It was the only time when Gonn had seemed even remotely human to Aidan. His grave lay somewhere in the graveyard, but Aidan and Marthe refused to visit it.

For three years afterward, Aidan dreamed of the man he had killed in battle. Variations on the act made the dreams even more frightening than the actual experience.

In some dreams, the victim fought better and was not so easily killed. In the ones from which Aidan woke up in a cold sweat, the victim was about to win.

The other graves he and Marthe searched for and found that day were of the sibko's dead, the ones who had died in trials or been the victims of disease or accident. These were few, however. Most of the now-absent members of the sibko had simply failed tests and been sent to other areas where they were integrated into other castes. No one ever really lost face in Clan society. Any momentary shame was made up for by assuming a useful life in another caste.

Now there would be shame, Aidan thought, as he tuned back in to Dermot again. It is a bad thing to have to leave a sibko before training, but it was a lifelong embarrassment to be dismissed from warrior training. True, one could join a new caste like the earlier flush-outs from sibko training, but the knowledge would always remain that one had been on the verge of becoming a warrior, the highest caste of all. People who talked to you, however cheerfully and respectfully, would never quite be able to forget that you had suffered the ultimate ignominy, the removal from warrior status. The few failed warriors whom Aidan had met while growing up had seemed to be exoskeletons covering no body, as if the inability to be warriors on the outside had dried up the inner self and turned it to dust. These individuals performed their caste roles well enough, even admirably, but something was always missing. Aidan did not want that kind of life. He could onlybe a warrior.