What I remember most is Tamir. He was a raw nerve; every sound, every shadow, opened old wounds. He rode ahead of us, slow, careful, and terrified. His one good eye searched the landscape for a path, and it saw death at every turn. I lived inside his anxiety, drinking it in, drowning in it. I could not see past it. I could not shake the feeling that if I could count—and I wasn’t sure I could—that I was useless, as trapped as I was in Tamir’s mind. We traveled in the high summer heat. We forced the camels onward through the wretched noon sun. Sorcha and I were grateful for the robes and head scarves, but that kind of heat claws at you, crawls into your lungs and burns you from the inside. Travel would have been easier on us and the camels at dawn or twilight or during the night, but Tamir refused to travel when he could not see the horizon. I remember the taste of my sweat, the way the salt of it never left my mouth, and how it tainted every precious sip of water. I remember the sound of my teeth grinding in rhythm with Tamir’s. I do not remember much else.

Sorcha kept a close watch on me in the badlands. He took to charming me to bring me back to myself enough to eat. He slept curled around me, protective, like a living shell of trust and empathy. He gave me some respite from the horrors lurking out there in the dead lands beyond the tent.

There were times Sorcha pulled me out of the fog of Tamir’s moods, and I found Shayat studying me from across the campfire. Tamir himself did not understand what was going on. He, I think, thought me childish and weak. When he looked at me, there was no sympathy or concern, no hint that he realized we were in this together, just disdain. And anger. There was anger in him directed to me, and I can’t say for sure why I sparked it, but I suspect he saw me struggle and thought it meant I had fallen prey to the heat and stress of travel.