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.

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.

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.

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.

He closes your fingers over the ring.