“Let me look,” Caroni said, bending over to look. “Hmm. Just a cut. Not deep. If it doesn’t get infected, you’ll be fine. I think I have a little rum in my pack. I’ll get it.”

She returned with a small glass bottle. “You fought well. Both of you. I’m sorry about Landis, but…” Her voice trailed off. “This’ll burn. Hold still.” She poured careful drops of rum on Sorrel’s cut. “Keep it clean,” she said. Then she held out her hand to Emrallie and pulled her to her feet. “Come farther inside. We’ll set guards.”

They followed Caroni to the back of the cave. Sorrel wanted to lean against Emrallie but she squared her shoulders and resisted the impulse, which she knew would be unwelcome.

They lay around like fallen branches, their heads on their packs or piles of extra clothes, their eyes swollen from crying. Rashelope rested dry-eyed, her head on the bag of hair. The torches flared straight up into the heavy, motionless air. They couldn’t see the roof of the cave, but sensed it was large. No one spoke of Landis. Sorrel smelled of porc and blood and the cut on her thigh was on fire.

Emrallie knelt beside her. “Here,” she said, handing her a wet rag. “Clean yourself up.”

She wiped her face and hands and lay down. The floor of the cave was hard but smooth, and she remembered that the whole ravine had once been underground. If water had carved this cave, it might be part of a series of subterranean channels, which could now be pathways, leading them out of the ravine. But leading them where?

Sorrel lay in the dark, listening to Emrallie’s breathing beside her. Would she ever stop reliving Landis’s death? Think of Jiba, she told herself. She had worked in the garden every afternoon and had loved tending the stony soil, watching the insects come, the flowers appearing, the reaping of the food. She tried to hold their lives at Jiba in her mind, but all she could see was Landis’s mutilated body. She knew nothing of Landis’s life story. No one who had been part of her history would know of her dying. She groaned in the dark and Emrallie reached out and touched her bare head. “It’s better she died.”

“How can you say that?”

“Suppose she had lived with a serious injury? Suppose we had to care for her during a long dying? Sleep. We’re safe here. For now.”

Daylight came. The Tribals stirred. The back of the cave was still in darkness, but they could see the sides nearest to the entrance where Rashelope sat with one of the torches. Had she been on guard all night?