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believe he caught me off guard like that. Over a stupid fish!”
    Richard put a concerned hand on her shoulder. “I’m just glad you’re all right, Cara. Maybe you’d better lie down. You don’t look so good.”
    “ My stomach just feels upside down, that’s all. I’ll be fine after I’ve rested for a minute. How did Juni die?”
    “ He was running and must have tripped and fallen,” Kahlan said. “I almost did that myself. He must have hit his head, like you did, and blacked out. Unfortunately, he blacked out facedown in the water, and drowned.”
    Kahlan started to translate as much to the other hunters when Richard spoke. “I don’t think so.”
    Kahlan paused. “It had to be.”
    “ Look at his knees. They’re not skinned. Nor his elbows or the heels of his hands.” Richard turned Juni’s head. “No blood, no mark. If he fell and was knocked unconscious, then why doesn’t he at least have a bump on his head? The only place his mud paint is scraped off is on his nose and chin, from his face resting on the gravel of the stream bottom.”
    “ You mean you don’t think he drowned?” Kahlan asked.
    “ I didn’t say that. But I don’t see any sign that he fell.” Richard studied the body for a moment. “It looks like he drowned. That would be my guess, anyway. The question is, why?”
    Kahlan shifted to the side, giving the hunters room to squat beside their fallen comrade, to touch him in compassion and sorrow.
    The open plains suddenly seemed a very lonely place.
    Cara pressed the wad of wet grass to the side of her head. “And even if he was disregarding his guard duty to chase a fish—hard to believe—why would he leave all his weapons? And how could he drown in inches of water, if he didn’t fall and hit his head?”
    The hunters wept silently as their hands caressed Juni’s young face. Tenderly, Richard’s hand joined theirs. “What I’d like to know is what he was chasing. What put that look in his eyes.”

CHAPTER 4

    Thunder rumbled in from the grassland, echoing through the narrow passageways as Richard, Cara, and Kahlan left the building where Juni’s body had been laid out to be prepared for burial.
    The building was no different from the other buildings in the Mud People’s village: thick walls of mud brick plastered over with clay, and a roof of grass thatch. Only the spirit house had a tile roof. All the windows in the village were glassless, some covered with heavy coarse cloth to keep out the weather.
    With the buildings being all the same drab color, it wasn’t hard to imagine the village as lifeless ruins. Tall herbs, raised as offerings for evil spirits, grew in three pots on a short wall but lent little life to the passageway frequented mostly by the amorphous wind.
    As two chickens scattered out of their way, Kahlan gathered her hair in one hand to keep the gusts from whipping it against her face. People, some in tears, rushed past, going to see the fallen hunter. It somehow made Kahlan feel worse to have to leave Juni in a place smelling of sour, wet, rotting hay.
    The three of them had waited until Nissel, the old healer, had shuffled in and inspected the body. She said she didn’t think the neck was broken, nor did she see any other kind of injury from a fall. She had pronounced that Juni had drowned.
    When Richard asked how that could have happened, she seemed surprised by the question, apparently believing it to be obvious.
    She had declared it a death caused by evil spirits.
    The Mud People believed that in addition to the ancestors’ spirits they called in a gathering, evil spirits also came from time to time to claim a life in recompense for a wrong. Death might be inflicted through sickness, an accident, or in some otherworldly manner. An uninjured man drowning in six inches of water seemed a self-evident otherworldly cause of death as far as Nissel was concerned. Chandalen and his hunters believed Nissel.
    Nissel hadn’t had the time to speculate on what