She and Lalita were alone now, although Mehr suspected Kamal was still waiting just beyond the tent entrance. Lalita sat cross-legged on the floor, and Mehr sat across from her. Lalita pulled a skin of water from her robes and offered it to Mehr, who drank the warm water in careful sips, trying not to gulp it down greedily as she wanted to.

Lalita watched Mehr drinking for a moment, then began to speak. In a quiet, measured voice she told Mehr how she’d come to be in the desert with an Amrithi clan. She told Mehr that the restless nobility, stirred up by the Emperor’s missives, had become suspicious of her. Even though Lalita had changed her birth name to a Chand one to hide her origins, even though she had embraced life among Ambhans, the truth of Lalita’s origins had made it somehow to their ears.

Lalita had planned to move somewhere else for safety. But nobles who called themselves devotees of the Saltborn had come for her, and she’d been forced into Irinah’s deep desert instead. She’d found her way to a place where she had known she would be safe.

“Mehr,” Lalita said carefully, hope folded up in her voice. “Do you know—that is, did you see Usha? Is she well?”

Mehr’s stomach dropped like a stone.

“I’m sorry,” Mehr said, her voice soft. “I am so sorry, Lalita. The mystics killed her.”

Grief flitted across Lalita’s face. The hope in her eyes died away. “I should have known,” Lalita said. “And yet, I hoped …” She swallowed, holding her grief back. “I hoped she had escaped somehow.”

“On the night of the storm, I was looking for you,” Mehr said. “I walked through the dreamfire, and I asked it to help me find you. I begged it …” She trailed off, squeezing her eyes shut, embarrassed at her past naïveté. “It brought me to Usha. I was with her at the end, Lalita. She wasn’t alone.”

“Ah, Mehr, I’m glad of that,” Lalita said, her voice thick. “I’ll dance a rite for her. A proper death rite. She would have liked that.”

“She would have,” Mehr agreed.

They sat in silence for a moment, both of them thinking of Usha. Grieving her. Mehr pretended not to notice when Lalita wiped her eyes, slowly calming herself.

“Tell me about my mother,” Mehr entreated finally, breaking the silence.

“She’ll be here to talk to you soon. You know we were friends once, when she lived in Jah Irinah?” When Mehr nodded, Lalita continued. “When she left, she asked me to watch over you and your sister. So I did. But when I ran, I knew she would take me in. In this clan, your mother is Tara,” Lalita said, using the title for an Amrithi clan leader. “She took the mantle when she returned, after her own mother—your own grandmother—passed on.”