Sorcha was quiet for a beat. He nudged his camel forward so we could see eye to eye. He gave me a hard look, a challenging look. It was a look of wounded pride. It caught me off guard. “Ariah, just come clean with me. What’s with you and her? What happened back in Rabatha?”

“I taught her languages.”

“And?”

“And…her father made me clothes.”

He sighed. He rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand and stared at Shayat’s back. He sighed again, and he took the pipe from my hands. “All right. Look. I’m all right. Wish you’d’ve let me know, but I’m all right. But you’ve got to get your shit together, Ariah. Might make sense for you to scale back, let your talents out a little more.”

“What? Why?”

“Ariah, maybe nothing happened back in Rabatha, but you are damn near swooning over her any time she talks to you. And that one, she’s leading you back for no good reason? There’s an open door there just waiting for you to walk through it.”

* * *

Bardondour was a hard place, a community carved out of the mountains and surviving through sheer force of will. The elves there are clannish and isolate. The compounders spotted us when the mountain pass turned into a valley. We rode past a field of grain. There was a sharp whistle, and a half-dozen elves stood tall in the fields, turned to us in unison. I could make out the silhouette of bows held at the ready. Shayat whistled back: three long calls followed by a short, high note. After a tense moment, the compounders slung the bows back across their shoulders and returned to their fieldwork.

We rode up to the lodge, which was a huge, sprawling building of rough stone with a thatched roof. The windows were placed high on the walls, with ample room for snowdrifts. In a semicircle behind it sat huts of varying sizes: one was a smokehouse, one was an outhouse, one held grain, one was a small stable, and so on. In the center was a well, and next to that was a fire pit. A clutch of elves sat around the fire, each with one or two small children in arm’s reach. An older woman stood as we approached and dusted dirt off her thighs. “Shayat,” she said. She said it slow, and she dawdled on the last syllable, softening the hard t with the shadow of a vowel. “You return already? And with a new crew.” The woman spoke Mountain Lothic, which I had never heard before. It is a hard-bitten dialect, a prickly burr with its own, unhurried cadence.

“We come seeking hospitality,” Shayat said.

The old woman peered at her. “Hospitality was given a month past, Shayat.”

“We come seeking it again.”

“Vanniah’s reclaimed brother, this debt you have stretched far, Tamir,” the old woman said.