She glanced around her tent. She waved at me. “We don’t have to talk anymore.”

“If you’re curious about him alone, you should talk to him, Shayat.”

She looked over at me. It was a searching, slightly suspicious look. “Do you really mean that?”

“I…yes?”

“Hmm.” She looked away again.

“What?”

“That would be all right with you? Really, it would?”

“Well, it…I suppose so. You’ve made it clear you’re not attached. You don’t owe me anything. And it’s him. It’s Sorcha, which would, I don’t know why, but if it was him, it would make it easier on me for some reason.”

Shayat was quiet for a long time. Her eyebrows knitted together. She looked consumed, serious, like she was weighing something in her mind, making calculations. When she looked at me again, it was with a fierce and unassailable certainty. Some decision had been made about something. “This is good,” she said. “No reason to change things. Forget I said anything,” she said, and then she kissed me.

Afterward, in the late, hot afternoon, I slipped out of her tent and into my own. Sorcha was sleeping; he lay naked on the blankets, sweat beading on his skin, one arm thrown across his eyes to block the light seeping in through the tent flaps. I sat for a long time staring at him. The talk with Shayat had left me unsettled. She’d said he was handsome. Was he? I knew he was. But, was it a thing I knew, or a thing I saw myself, with my own eyes? I couldn’t be sure. It was true that the sweet and stinging ache Shayat stirred in me with a glance was different than when I looked at him, but there was part of me that wondered if it was to do with all those rules I’d tried to abandon. It can be hard to abandon them when they’re woven so thick in you, right from the start. Was it a case of admitting to one and not the other? I tried to remember that night in Vilahna when I’d kissed him, how it felt just before, and found the memories were murky. I looked at him, this handsome sleeping naked man who loved me enough to come to Rabatha, and there was at once great confusion and a crystalline clarity in how I felt. I loved him, of course I did, there was little me without him. But the question of want was elusive as a snake lurking in the shadows.

I woke him with a gentle shake of his shoulder. He stretched and blinked, looked over at me and smiled. “What time is it? We’re off?”

“No, there’s some time yet before nightfall.”

“Oh. You been with Shayat?”

“Yeah.”