Sorcha and Shayat warmed up to each other there in the desert. The narrowness of the Lost River forced us to ride single file in the black nights. I had to manage my own camel, which was a slow and arduous thing. Tamir led the way; I in my complete incompetence brought up the rear. Shayat and Sorcha always wound up in the middle together. I listened to them talk. “The one good thing about the Empire,” Shayat said one night, “is the plumbing.”

“You all have proper plumbing there?” Sorcha asked.

“We do, yes.”

“I’d thought it was only the City.”

“Well, it was only the City until a couple hundred years ago. When the Exalted took it as a protectorate, the first thing he did was send in a bunch of ours to reverse-engineer the running water. All the major Qin cities have running water, heated water, now,” Shayat said. “It will be good to be in a real city again.”

“Oh, I know!” Sorcha said. “Alamadour, it’s little more than a town. And they’re so proud of it.”

Shayat laughed. “They really are. It’s not a city if you can walk from one end to the other in half an hour. It just isn’t.”

“Ah, they don’t know better.”

They talked like this often. Sometimes, Sorcha played his violin as we rode. The thread of his music bobbed along with our small lanterns, cutting through the thick silence of the desert night. It was beautiful and haunting. It was pure and unencumbered. Sometimes after he finished Shayat would ask him questions about music and the violin, and about the lives of musicians in the City and Vilahna. She seemed fascinated by it, this idea that he could scrape by on his violin alone, that he had no job, no mark of employment. But, really, she was fascinated by him. Sometimes, in her tent, when we lay together sweating and half-asleep, she asked about him, and about the us that was him and me. Sometimes in the early morning, when we chewed on rations after a long night’s travel, she watched us from across the camp. Sorcha and I sat in the cold blue light, nestled close together to shake off the chill, contained in the ease of our relationship. I’d look out at the dunes—lilac mountains slowly turning a pinkish gold—and catch Shayat studying us with a strange and impenetrable expression. Sorcha had warmed to her and thought highly of her, but he seemed to have little reciprocal curiosity about her.