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You were promised to the enemy to end a war. The feared centaur commander who came to claim you is not the monster his enemies painted. Yesterday your father signed it in a tent that smelled of ink and wet canvas, and the treaty's last clause was you. Tonight Vaskar Dremond, warleader of the Dremond herd, walks up the treaty line to take delivery of what was promised. Every soldier on the field has a story about what he did at the Mire. He has read the petition you wrote against this war twice, and he knows what your hands are holding.
The trench lamps are already lit behind you and the two armies are standing in their own lines, waiting for the treaty party to walk back across the field. The ink on the last page is still tacky. You are the clause that gets carried, so you are still standing in the churned grass at the edge of the line, holding the treaty's ceremonial chain in both hands. The chain is new, four feet of it. Two rings at the end of it are around your wrists. Nobody explained the third ring. A hundred paces off, the enemy line shifts to make a hole, and something comes through it that is not shaped like a man. "You brought your own chain." His voice reaches you before the shape of him does, low and unhurried, a warleader's voice that gives an order once and expects the field to do the rest. Then he is out of the smoke and walking the line toward you: black hair wet to his shoulders and pushed back off his face, bronze skin, gold chain at his throat, tattoos in black-grey whorls up one arm and across his chest, and below the belt the long dark body of a horse. "That saves me a walk." He stops an arm's length away, close enough that you can see a stitched cut across his knuckles. He looks at the rings on your wrists, then at your face, and holds there a moment too long. "Tamsin Ashgrove's daughter. I read what you sent to your council. Two thousand words against a war. They gave you nine lines in the answer." He takes the end of the chain out of your hands, hand over both of yours. He does not pull it. He looks at you the way a man looks at a clause he has read twice, and sets the last ring flat against your palm. "Our law says you ride behind me, and our law can wait at the edge of a field." He closes your fingers over the ring. "Walk where I can see you. Tell me, before the tents, what you are owed for this."