He raised both palms in surrender. Any attempt to speak, with that blade so close to his throat, risked opening his own vein if the edge carried poison, so instead he simply pointed skyward.
A single star burned bright enough to drown out both moons and every other star in the sky combined.
The blade withdrew as fast as it had appeared (he never once saw where it went), and the hooded figure lowered her hood to reveal a face that matched his own in the essentials: dark, near-black skin, hair white as bone, ears drawn to a point, a nose blade-sharp. The similarities ended there. He was tall, firm-skinned, with the dull, dopey eyes of a man who'd been running on adrenaline for the last mile. She was small, loose-skinned, with heavy bags beneath eyes that carried a ferocity age hadn't managed to dull in the slightest.
"What in the world are you pointing at?" she asked.
"The sky. Have you not noticed the star, Matriarch? It is the star of the fox."
"How many times have I told you not to come charging up to my door like an ufoda tree caught alight?"
"Too many, Matriarch Simika." He bowed low. "Forgive me."
"If I forgive you, you'll only do it again. Perhaps I take a toe or two, so the lesson finally sticks."
He stumbled a step back and swallowed hard, laughing nervously into the silence that followed. She only stared.
"Uduak's wife," he managed. "Dina. She's given birth, Matriarch."
"Wonderful news. Now hold still while I take your toes."
He took another step back, shaking properly now. "The baby, it cried, and the star did that," he said, pointing again, unable to string a full sentence together.
It took her a long moment to understand what he was telling her. When she did, her eyes went wide, and it took her another moment to steady herself enough to speak.
"Take me to Uduak's home."
The young man ran until his breath tore at his chest; Matriarch Simika, beside him, barely broke a sweat. If a person looked only at her face and not her legs, they'd have sworn she was out for an evening stroll. The desert sand gave way gradually to red brick and clusters of ufoda trees, their long umbrella canopies casting deep shade even in the last of the daylight.
"Matriarch," the young man gasped, "we have arrived."
A crowd had gathered outside a small house, people climbing over one another at every window for a glimpse inside. Visitors filed in bearing small parcels and came back out empty-handed, trailed by a chorus of eager questions from those still waiting their turn.
The crowd parted for her like sand shifting ahead of a sand-boat's keel.
Inside, everyone dropped to a bow the moment they recognised her, pressing forward one after another to kiss her ring and touch their foreheads to the back of her hand.
Simika nearly tripped over a heap of gift parcels stacked in the middle of the floor.
"My apologies, Matriarch," a bearded man said. "The dark ore keeps arriving. Enough here for an army's worth of blades."
"It's no trouble. With this much dark ore you could raise a ship instead of an army. Boy or girl?"
"A boy, your grace. Small enough for a ship of his own one day, perhaps." He smiled.
"Then he's a blessing regardless of whether he turns out to be the desert fox returning to us or not," she said, though her voice suggested she already suspected which it was.
The child lay quiet against his mother's chest, sleeping through all of it. Simika lowered herself onto the edge of the bed and reached for him, cradling him a long while, stroking the soft crown of his head before her eyes filled without warning.
"Uduak. Come here."
The father crossed the room to her side without a word.
"Describe him to me. My sight left me years ago, as you know."
"He's beautiful, Matriarch. Has his mother's eyes. My chin."
"I thought you said beautiful," she said, and the mother laughed despite herself.
"I could never love a child without that chin," the mother said.
"He carries a warrior's aura for something so small." Simika turned her blind gaze toward the mother. "Can you feel it too? The current in him?"
"I'm no gifted woman," Uduak said, "but even I feel it. This boy will put whole armies to rest by himself."
"I feel it like staring straight into the sun," Dina said, drawing the child back into her arms. "What does it mean, your grace?"
"It means there is no doubt left in me. He is the desert fox, promised to us a thousand years ago." Simika wiped at her face, then struggled to kneel, needing Uduak's arm to manage it, and pressed her lips to the baby's small fingers before touching her brow to the back of his hand.
"The clan leaders need to hear of this tonight. I will call the other Matriarchs myself." A wet laugh escaped her. "I can't wait to rub this in that old bitch's face."
Whatever the star had truly meant to write across the sky that night, no one in that small house claimed to read the whole of it. A boy had been born; a star had answered; an old woman who could no longer see had wept anyway. That, for now, was as much of the story as anyone on Kharsat was given.
Years folded past the way they do in places with no calendars worth keeping: measured instead in festivals, in the slow crawl of the twin moons, in a boy's shoulders broadening season by season until the boy in question stopped being anyone's idea of a boy at all.
A science ship shuddered under another volley of laser fire. The cabin lights flickered, died, and were replaced by the dim red glow of emergency power.
Colonel Lyn's grip on the arm of her chair went white-knuckled.