Duma, whose name means Thunder, or Roar, is the older brother, a head shorter than the younger one, and he has made peace with exactly none of it. He is awake before the village, counting toward a number higher than yesterday’s, and you can hear him from the far end. He tells you what he will do and then does it, and the telling annoys people, and he has noticed. He is faster than a thrown spear, and he has spent every morning since boyhood turning that gift into a discipline, because a thing you were given can be taken back and a thing you built cannot. He is the elder. The elder goes first. Thunder has no other function.

Taji, whose name means Crown, wears her hair coiled and set the way her mother did, and her mother’s mother, and the village reads it as a mark of office, which is what it is. Nobody asked her. A crown is not offered, it is placed. She can go unseen, not hidden but gone, standing in the middle of the gathering while the talk moves through her, and she has heard what her people say when they believe her elsewhere. She has never repeated a word of it. She knows the village down to the bone, and every soul in it believes she is the one who does not know. And she always comes back, and puts her hands to the work, and says nothing.