“I just realized,” I said when the spasms finally subsided. I wiped the tears from my eyes, staring at her like I’d never seen her before. And she was beautiful then, truly beautiful. Wild hair kicked every which way by the winter wind. Black skin that drank in the light. “I just realized you’re to be a caravaner. A merchant! You! You know if you’re going to make a go of it, Shayat, people will have to like you enough to buy from you.”

She grinned a canny, cat-like grin at me. “Maybe if you had two coins to rub together, professor, I’d turn the charm on for you.”

“What charm?”

“Oh, who’s the rude one now?”

I laughed again. “Let’s get something to eat.”

* * *

It was an ungainly, unlikely friendship that developed between Shayat and me. I think the truth of it was that neither of us was particularly adept at building a friendship. It was a clumsy thing, a blunt thing, that stumbled more often than not, but somehow the stumbles became amusing instead of offensive. She stopped asking me personal questions. I could not bring myself to ask her personal questions. We muddled through a weird and welcome friendship that was, in retrospect, anchored to nothing in particular.

The weeks passed, and the classes ended, and the Qin students retreated for a month of reflection. Shayat lingered in Rabatha. She was not as proficient in the southern languages as she wanted to be. She had ambitions, and she was a careful, thorough person, and her pride was such that she could not bear to start a route when she was not yet fluent. Her ambitions intrigued me: an elf-run, elf-led caravan. Maybe even elf-only. She had separatist leanings. She flirted with divulging them, dropping a reference here or a dig at the Qin there, then gauging my reaction.

It was because of Shayat that I learned Droma. She favored the Qin markets. I rarely ventured out of the borough on my own. The sting of the border still lingered, and any time there were more of them than there were of us, a panic rose in my chest. Shayat, peculiarly, managed to keep that panic at bay when I was with her. Shayat dragged me to the Qin markets week after week. She practiced her Athenorkos and Lothic by conversing with me about prices of this and that, and marking those prices down in small notebooks. She tracked anything and everything but the live goods. And it was the live goods that drew my interest.

She was there the first time I saw a slave auction. It was a lively thing, voices cresting like waves. What drew my attention was the tone of it: it had a crazed character; it sounded malevolent and broken, like the screech of a train felled by a loose wheel. “What is that?” I asked.