“Yeah, I do. I feel good,” he said. We watched them talk. Their camels stepped this way and that, they pointed north and sometimes east. Shayat whistled; she waved at us to follow, and then she and Tamir set off at a gallop together. Sorcha took the reins of my camel. He swatted his and mine, driving them to follow before Shayat and Tamir slipped out of sight. They rode up a rise of stone jutting from the dead earth, over a ledge, and disappeared. We followed them over. We rode up the ledge, our camels struggling for footing on the loose scree, and the world opened up before us. The sands came up and swallowed the boulders of the badlands whole. Dunes swept out in elegant arcs; the land ahead was dappled with shadows. It was midmorning when we got to the desert. I remember because you can track the time of day there by the color of the sand. The angles of light as the sun makes its way across the sky turn the sands pink, then orange, then gold, then a ruddy brown, and at sunset the sands glow as red as the sky. The sky was a pristine, cloudless blue. The sun was a hot, vicious yellow. And the sands were moving from orange to gold.

Sorcha turned our camels east. He’d spotted Shayat and Tamir in the shadow of one of the last boulders of the badlands, a huge shelf of stone jutting out into the Mother Desert like a tired sentry. They had dismounted. Tamir unbuckled his camel’s saddle while Shayat rooted through her pack. “We’re stopping?” Sorcha asked. I waited for the crush of Tamir’s endless anxiety, but nothing came. I was yet myself. I laughed. All eyes turned to me. Sorcha filled the silence. “Seems early to stop.”

“We need to recover,” Shayat said. “Shake off the drain. And we need to stop traveling in the day, stick to traveling through the nights. It’s only going to get hotter from here on out. Give your camels some water. We’re camping here two days and finding the Lost River tomorrow night. It’ll take us up to Rabatha.”

“The Lost River?” I asked.

Shayat coaxed my camel down and helped me dismount. I blushed like a school girl. Shayat seemed exactly the same as she always was: I know because Sorcha watched her like a hawk and reported this to me later.

“It used to be a tributary of the Exalted Sea. It dried up hundreds of years ago; no one knows why. It should have been swallowed up, but the Mother Desert keeps it clear. It’s a natural highway up to Rabatha. It winds past the oasis at Iyairo, and then straight up to the market factory district. Good travel.” She smirked and caught my eye. “Good travel for those who can chart a path through the badlands and get through Bardondour.”