The three hands lifted from the stone, and the fire down the valley kept climbing. Takoda stood in the doorway of the Elder Moot Hall and watched the red line eat the lower hills. The agreement was sworn. Now the gods' king's fire was coming to burn it off the earth. Takoda did not even know who the king was. He turned to the one god who did. "Pyros." Takoda crossed to the kneeling war god. "You named the king. Tell me who he is. Tell me how to meet him." Pyros rose slow. The fire was gone from his chest now, just scars where it used to live. He looked at the smoke through the carved timbers of the hall. "You cannot meet him. He stripped the fire from me while I slept. My own brother. The gods watched and said nothing." His voice stayed flat. "That fire down there is his. It does not stop. It hunts what he points it at." "Then help me point it back," Takoda said. "You want your seat. You want him. I am the only blade here that both bloods will stand behind." Pyros was quiet a long moment. "The fire obeys the hand that made it. I made half of it, once." He held up his empty palm. "I have no flame to call it. But I know its name. A thing with a name can be told to stop. Your mother taught you that an hour ago." Takoda understood. He whistled sharp. His battlehound came bounding through the split doorway, the bloodhound-badger female, ears flat, nose already working the smoke. Outside, his mount stamped and tossed its great antlers, the bull-deer blowing steam into the cold. Takoda swung onto its back. He pulled both ancestral swords free, eagle-sun in one hand, serpent-lightning in the other. "Ride with me," Takoda told Pyros. "You speak its name. I braid the bolt. We turn it before it climbs the hall." Pyros climbed up behind him. The hound ran ahead down the slope, baying at the wall of heat. Takoda drove the mount into the smoke until the fire roared close enough to blister. Pyros leaned past his shoulder and spoke one word, low and hard, the king's name for his own weapon. The fire shuddered. It knew its maker's blood. Takoda crossed his two blades and poured both bloodlines into one braided bolt. He drove it into the heart of the flame. The fire bent. It did not die, but it turned, rolling back down the valley the way it had come, hunting the hand that sent it. The hall stood. The council held. Pyros slid down from the mount and stared at the retreating glow. "He will feel that," Pyros said. "His own fire, sent home. He will come himself now." He looked at Takoda. "Not a threat. The king. You made him real tonight."

The fire rolled back down the valley, but the damage was done. Takoda sat his great antlered mount on the slope and watched the red glow shrink toward its sender. Below, the lower lands still burned. Smoke climbed from the valley floor where people lived. He had turned the fire. He had not turned it fast enough. By morning they came up the slope on foot. Valley people, soot-black and shaking. A woman led them, her arms wrapped around a child who no longer moved. She stopped at the edge of the Elder Moot Hall and looked at Takoda on his mount, at the swords still in his hands. "Your gods did this," she said. Her voice did not rise. That made it worse. "Fire from the sky. They fight over a stone and we burn for it. Build your council. We will not bow to any peace made in their names." The crowd behind her murmured. They had carried their dead up the hill to say it to his face. Takoda's battlehound pressed against his leg and whined. He slid down from the mount. Whatever council he built, it meant nothing if these people spat on it. Pyros stood in the hall doorway, scarred chest bare, watching the crowd with flat eyes. "They are right," he said. "The fire was divine. No word will unburn their children." "Then I don't give them a word," Takoda said. He turned to the valley woman. "Come with me." He did not take her to the hall. He walked her down the slope toward the smoking fields. He sheathed the eagle-sun blade and kept the serpent-lightning one. Then he knelt, drove his free hand into the scorched earth, and called both bloodlines through his open palm. His mother's green magic rose through the soil. His father's storm cooled the air above. Together they drew water from the deep ground and pulled new shoots through the ash. Grass came first. Then saplings, uncurling where the fire had killed everything. He did not stop at a patch. He worked down the field, crawling, hands black to the wrist, until a long stretch of dead valley wore green again. He stood, shaking, and faced the woman. "The gods took this from you," he said. "I am half theirs. I will give it back with my own hands. That is the council I offer. Not their names. Mine." The woman looked at the new grass. She looked at her dead child. For a long moment she said nothing. Then she knelt and pressed her palm to the living shoots. "We will stand with you," she said. "Not the gods. You." The valley people knelt behind her. Pyros watched from the hall and said nothing. Takoda had won their faith. But he had won it in his own name, against his parents' gods. Now the council he was building belonged to no pantheon at all, and both his bloodlines would soon ask why.