---Ksem’s perspective---

  As I wind the thread around the salvaged arrowhead, lashing it to its new shaft, across the cave from me a pair of green eyes scrutinise a stone.

  Its every crevice and nodule falls beneath her gaze as she visualises what she is about to craft.

  I slot the finished arrow into my quiver, bringing it back up to a nice, round dozen and turn all my attention to my companion.

  She brings the flint down to her lap in her right hand, raises the hammerstone in her left and… surprises me by striking in a completely different place than I expected!

  I watch as, over the course of seven or eight strikes, she clears a long platform on that side of the flint.

  She then turns the stone slightly and excavates a second platform at an angle to the first, the two meeting at a ridge that runs the length of the stone.

  That done, she once again assesses it before aiming one final strike at the ridge.

  A thin flake pops off, sharp edges running its length and meeting at a point.

  Satisfied, she puts the stone down and holds up her triangular handiwork to admire.

  Baffled, I can’t help myself but to ask “That’s it?!”

  ---Raala’s perspective---

  I turn my eyes from the flawless spearhead I just produced to scowl at my captor.

  “What’s ‘it’, outlander?”

  “I’m… sorry! I just… I thought you said you wanted reliability! Isn’t that why you rejected the obsidian I brought you?”

  Not having any clue what he’s talking about, I hold up my craft to say “Yeah?… This is reliable!”

  He frustratingly waggles his face from side to side in his people’s ‘no’ and contradicts “No… Sunbeam… It’s not!”

  Rolling my eyes exasperatedly, I sneer “How so!?”

  “Well… it’s thin, it’s unifacial and it’s only got a single edge on both sides… It’ll be brittle the same way obsidian apparently is!”

  “This is better than obsidian and, so long as I keep the core…” I hold up the stone I just separated the spearhead from “…I can just move down the ridge and pop off another one when this one breaks!”

  “Yes… only if you survive though… and continuously breaking and replacing your spearhead seems like a bit of a waste of effort and material to me!” he shrugs, smugly

  “Oh! And I suppose you can make a spearhead that won’t break then!?” I challenge.

  “Yes… Certainly one that will last longer than that… and it will do a better job of killing prey too!”

  “Talk is easy, outlander! Show me a better one if you can!” I snarl, gesturing to the unselected flints he brought me.

  Nonchalantly, he bends to hover his hand over them, hesitating slightly on the selection.

  He eventually chooses one and holds it up to his eyes, assessing.

  Placing it down, he walks to where the ibex bones are and picks up a femur and a horn.

  Returning to where he left the flint, he sets down the bones and pulls out a series of round rocks, various sizes, various colours, various textures, which he lines up on the platform next to him.

  Holding the flint in his left hand and resting it on his left thigh, he picks up the femur and strikes at the edge.

  Baffled, I watch as he opens his fingers and allows a cascade of clinking flakes to fall away from the stone to the ground.

  His strike count quickly surpasses mine without him having touched any of his stones or the ibex horn or produced anything that looks remotely like a spearhead!

  Sort of looks like he’s just slowly smashing the flint to pieces to me!

  Hundreds of breaths pass as the rock is thinned down and shaped.

  After the femur, he progresses haphazardly through the line of rocks, sometimes chipping, sometimes abrading, putting them down to pick up ones he’s already used, always turning, pausing, raising and scrutinising the flint.

  I get the idea at some point that, instead of preparing a core to flake off spearheads from, he’s shaping the entire stone down into one gigantic, teardrop-shaped spearhead!

  The fire crackles between us, a blizzard howls outside and all the while he just chips, scratches and, eventually, pressure flakes with the tip of the ibex horn.

  Finally, he holds up his finished piece and, after one more moment of assessment, puts down the horn, stands, dusts off the flint residue from his lap and hands it to me.

  “Here… A spearhead better than the one you just made or the one that got crushed in the cave in.” he smiles.

  I take it and narrow my eyes at it.

  It’s large, sturdy and symmetrical but “It’s a bit messy with all those thousands of strikes all over it, outlander!” I say, holding up my smaller, cleaner and much lower effort spearhead to compare “Mine’s clean and sharp! Yours has all this texture on its faces and its edge is all jagged!”

  “That’s by design, Sunbeam!” he smiles “All that texture? That reinforces it, makes it stronger than it would be with smooth, flat surfaces… The jagged edge? Well, that causes more trauma and more bleeding when it strikes! A single edge slices, a thousand edges in a line like that, they tear!… Would you rather be sliced or torn?”

  Scowling at my fault finding’s failure, I switch tack “Took you a lot longer than mine took! Bit of a waste of time!”

  “Effort I was happy to spend for you! Time spent on quality isn’t wasted!” he simpers in answer.

  “It’s too thick to fit the notch I’ve carved!” I state, holding up the finished spearshaft and demonstrating how it doesn’t fit.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  “You could widen it a little?” he suggests with a cock of his head.

  “But then it will be too wide for mine when yours breaks!” I point out.

  “If that happens (which I don’t think it will, certainly not in the next two Moons so long as you’re not trying to break it), you can just shorten it a bit and carve a new notch, right?”

  I grimace, realising I’ve run out of faults to find.

  He shrugs and turns away, walking to his cloak, lying down on top of it and closing his eyes.

  “Of course, Sunbeam, it’s completely up to you… You could just leave it here or keep it as a backup if it really doesn’t meet your standards…”

  I scowl from the man to his annoyingly gorgeous spearhead.

  My lips twist but, regardless, I bring its edge to the notch and begin widening it with a sawing motion.

  Eyes still closed, he smirks.

  ---Bwey’s perspective---

  “Ah! Zgrizeh! Come in, sit down!” I state, gesturing the space just to the left of Kseley.

  The middle aged woman comes in and respectfully takes the indicated spot next to the elderly one.

  Once she’s seated, I gesture across the fire to the anxious looking, one handed, older redhead with the thick beard and shaven chin.

  “I asked you here to translate, Zgrizeh… Would you mind asking Kroln here to repeat himself? It sounded like he was saying my brother is… lost…?”

  “Of course, wardeness…” she states with a single nod before turning to the man and asking “…Kor danal tro klodtra na shapto, Pontu?” with far more confidence than I have in their language.

  In a deep, resonant, nervous voice he answers “Mortun! Intorgla Wuurlo nurgod mogiat jaan. Rabtiu waln ensordak…” speaking at some length with me only catching about every second word.

  Zgrizeh listens, paying close attention until he stops talking, then turns to me, her expression grim “Your brother and this man’s daughter are missing, wardeness. The morning after his naming ceremony, both vanished from Golden Eagle and could not be located for several days before word was finally dispatched back.”

  I grimace for a moment before asking her “Is there… any possibility that Raala just… found my brother’s Banehood so attractive that they eloped and are currently spending their honeymoon out in the wilderness together?”

  She relays my question and then the man’s answer “It doesn’t seem so… He says it would be very out of character of his daughter to run off without telling anyone where she was going, whatever the circumstances. They left their Bison chaperone behind in Golden Eagle without a word of warning. While no one’s sure if they’re alive, they do have some idea of where they might have gone.”

  “Where?” I ask, immediately.

  “Well, it seems that they were both last seen heading up a mountain on which the clans’… erm…” she turns to the man to clarify “…Salukt natu?…”

  “Mmm!” he grunts “Saluktor natu tom teratka.”

  Turning back to me with greater confidence, she continues “…their mortuary cave is… This cave was also a transit route out of the Basin.”

  “‘Was’?”

  “Well, in the course of searching for the missing pair, it was discovered that that passage had suffered a collapse… A count of the torches from the repository at the entrance revealed two missing. The working theory is that our leader went to investigate this cave, this man’s daughter followed him in and they were both either… killed in the collapse or left on the wrong side of it… trapped outside the Basin.”

  “Hmmm…” I growl.

  Either Ksem and this girl are trapped outside the Basin alone together in Winter, were killed in the collapse… or these people murdered him, hid his body where we’d never find it and are now playing dumb?

  I need to hope with all my heart for the first of those because that’s the only one that has any chance of me seeing him again!

  Ksem! You promised to be careful, idiot!

  I reach a decision.

  “Zgrizeh… tell this man that you and I’ll be coming to Golden Eagle with forty eight hunters to investigate this matter ourselves.” I state, stonily.

  “Err… Wardeness? That’s more than four times the allowable party size before it becomes a trespass?” she points out.

  “I’m well aware, Zgrizeh! If he raises that objection, point out that it isn’t a trespass if we have received permission… and that we assume none of Bison, Wolf or Golden Eagle would deny permission to the sister of a missing brother just coming to see the situation on the ground, would they? We’ll bring the majority of the supplies we need from here so there should be minimal impact on their lands’ stocks.” I say, my voice stoney and my eyes fixed on the one handed man.

  Concerned, she turns to him and takes a breath, hesitates, then turns back and says “He’ll want to know why it needs to be so many… What should I tell him?”

  “Please tell him that greater numbers will simply help us conduct our investigations more expediently and will allow for… safer travels… what with these treacherous, Winter conditions, of course!”

  “…Yes, wardeness.” she says, unhappily, turning to the man to explain.

  I watch his reaction, not listening to my fellow Deltawoman speak, just looking at the old man’s face.

  His back stiffens, his eyes widen, his stump arm twitches and his mouth parts when (I assume) he hears the number I will be bringing and turns to me with a dismayed, reproachful look.

  He’s either the world’s best actor… or he isn’t in on any plot to disappear my brother that might exist.

  After a long pause, he answers.

  “He says: Bison at least will not oppose your passage. When should he expect you?” translates Zgrizeh.

  “Tell him we will leave the day after tomorrow. Ask if he wouldn’t too terribly mind using the interim to send word ahead to Wolf and request word be sent from there to Golden Eagle. That will hopefully minimise the amount of time we need to spend waiting on borders for permission to proceed to come back.”

  She translates.

  The man stands and replies.

  “He says: If it is so soon, he will need to head back now to prepare the messenger. He asks your permission to leave.”

  “Tell him he has my permission.” I say, my eyes fixed on him.

  “Baru terat, Pontu.” she translates (a touch less adversarially than I stated it but I don’t correct her).

  As soon as the man is out of the tent, I turn to Ezwer.

  “Ezwer, I need you to line up forty one volunteers to make this expedition with me, Zgrizeh and my huntresses. I need you to organise them in preparing rations for the trip. I need you to increase the nightguard by half and put a night and day escort on Eshker while we’re gone. You will be acting as warden until either Ksem or I get back but I want you to defer to Kseley’s experience wherever possible. Can you do all that?” I bark.

  Taken aback (clearly not yet having gained the cocksure selfconfidence that Qrez seemed to have been born with) he hesitates “Erm… shouldn’t be a problem, Ma’am? Why an escort on Eshker though?”

  “Because without me, Ksem or Zgrizeh, he’s the only one who can translate anything for you with any degree of competency! Anything happens to him, you guys become deaf and mute to the locals! So… nothing happens to him! Got it!?” I explain.

  “Yes Ma’am!” he answers before, uncertainly, adding “Should… should I maybe organise earthworks and stakewalls to ring the camp?”

  “No.” I answer, immediately and decisively “Adding fortifications like that at this point will be taken as a provocation… Right now, we need to play this diplomatically. If it looks like we’re preparing for a fight, a fight becomes more likely regardless of if their story about my brother getting himself trapped outside the Basin is genuine or not! Continue the trade, continue treating the locals that come here as friends, just stay vigilant for surprise attacks. Understood?”

  “Understood, Ma’am. May I leave to organise those expeditionaries?”

  In answer, I flick my hand to the door.

  He stands and walks towards it.

  Before he’s gone, I turn to the old medicine woman “Kseley, I’m trusting you to make up Ezwer’s experience shortfall! Keep him looking competent enough that the whole place doesn’t fall apart in mass panic! We clear?”

  “I’ve been advising your family since before you were born, girl. You can leave things to me.” she states, confidently.

  “Good…” I say before a thought occurs to me “…Oh, and… I’m also going to need you to run your nose and eyes over my huntresses and any female volunteers to check for pregnancy, Kseley… Going to be a hard trip in Winter and we can’t have any weak sinew in our rope!”

  “Of course, girl.” she answers.

  ---Raala’s perspective---

  Carrying the combined total of our food and water on my back and holding my new spear in my hand, I step out of the cave into the chilly morning air.

  The glorious dawn light of the Sun shining over the East horizon plays off the rippled surface of the unfamiliar piece hafted to my weapon, making it look even more irritatingly beautiful than it did last night.

  Beside me steps a tall man, bleary eyes squinting against the Sun, every step making tens of thousands of pieces of charcoal jingle against eachother in the basket on his back.

  I exhale deeply, filling the air with my foggy breath, inhale a noseful of the crisp mountain air, turn to my kidnapper and (almost smiling) ask “Ready?”

  “Mmmm…” he grumbles, not yet fully awake.

  I lift a foot and, with the slightest tremble, take the first step of our journey.

  is a video of a Mousterian spearhead, like Raala made.

  are images of an Aterian spearhead, like Ksem made.

  Raala knapping |

  …If you wouldn’t mind repeating yourself, Sir?

  Certainly! Wuurlo brought back word yesterday. What seems to have happened is…

  natu?… =

  …Mortuary cave?…

  Mmm! Mortuary and passageway cave.

  Go in peace, Sir.