“It is,” she said. The firelight played across her face. She smiled. “It is a terrible place, but I still like the route. I like that it’s part of the route. It keeps me honest, having to manage this place. It makes me think. Rabatha is not that different than here. It’s empty there, too. We’re always a heartbeat away from death there, too. It’s just dressed up in nicer clothes there, and that’s dangerous. Losing sight of that is dangerous. Growing comfortable is dangerous.” She leaned her chin into her palm and looked over at me. “You’re comfortable with Sorcha. You never looked comfortable in Rabatha, but you do with him.”

I felt the question. I didn’t need to be a shaper to hear it unasked: Is he why you run? Is he why you don’t belong in Rabatha? “I never was comfortable in Rabatha.”

“But you’re going back.”

“I have obligations.”

“Don’t we all,” she said. After a moment, she sighed. “When I recruited for the crew, I was looking for people like you. The kind with a foot in each place. The kind who is Semadran and not at the same time. I think caravaners need to be that way; I think if you’re not like that, the life eats you alive. I worry about Tam sometimes because of that. I wound up with him, and he’s a cartographer who hates the travel, hates leaving his wife and striking out, and the rest are men who just hate the Qin. Which I understand. But there’s no adventure in them.”

“You think there’s adventure in me?”

“There’s nothing but adventure in you. You live up to your name, Ariah. You’re wild.”

I stared at her for a long time. She stared into the fire. The image of her profile silhouetted against the flickering orange light is burned into my mind, a fixed point in time. It’s one of those indelible memories that serves to organize a remembered life. “Shayat?”

“Hmm?”

What little grace I ever had with such things had been stolen by the herb. Clumsily, and I suspected ineptly, I nudged a door open. “Remember, I am just a quarter red.”

Shayat looked at me. The light caught the shape of her mouth, the sweep of her eyebrows. “Well, I spend half my time outside the Empire. A quarter red is all right by me.”

The night air had grown cold. The fire kept off some of the chill, but not all of it. I tapped out the ashes of the pipe. I wanted to reach for her, do something, but all I could do was tap out the ashes of the pipe. My tongue was loosed by the herb, and I was, at least, able to speak. “Shayat, may I tell you something?”

“Sure.”