It wasn’t until they reached the desert itself and began making their way across uneven, shifting ground that Mehr realized they had no transport. No palanquins, no horses, no howdahs on elephant back. Wherever they were going, they were traveling there on foot.

Hours passed. The sky darkened and the city receded behind them. Mehr was thankful for the cool nighttime air, if only because there was precious little else about this journey to be thankful for. The ground was growing even more uneven, the sand rising in thick waves of deceptive depth. Her dancing had made her stronger than the typical noblewoman, but it hadn’t prepared her for anything like this.

Without warning, her foot sank deep in the sand and stuck fast. As she stumbled forward, a hand caught her arm and steadied her.

“It will get easier,” Amun said in a low voice. As soon as she’d righted herself, he let go of her. “The desert has its own laws. Once we’re farther from the city, you’ll see.”

He was right. Long after Mehr had passed the point of exhaustion, when Jah Irinah had dwindled into nothing behind them, the desert … changed.

Mehr couldn’t pinpoint the difference at first. But slowly walking became easier, her footsteps consistently meeting solid ground instead of rolling sand. Mehr looked around her. As far as the eye could see, the sand was still thick and uneven, near impassable.

The desert has its own laws.

Mehr looked down.

The sand was reshaping beneath her footsteps. With every step, it was flaring out in circles, flattening to match the shape of her tread. Her breath caught. The way it moved, coiling out in spirals beneath her feet, reminded her of the way dreamfire had clung to her ankles on the night of the storm. The sand was quietly, vibrantly alive. In the darkness it gleamed like embers, rich with storm and starlight. The awe filled Mehr up from head to toe. For a moment, one ridiculous moment, she felt like she could walk in this desert forever. This was what the Irin believed the Ambhans had driven out of Jah Irinah: beauty in the earth, ethereal and strange, born without even a storm of dreamfire to bring it into bloom.

As the night deepened and the temperature plummeted, Mehr began to see faint lights from villages on the edges of Jah Irinah in the distance. But the mystics steered clear of them and stopped to make camp deep into the desert, where the lights were fainter than starlight. Tents were erected and a fire was lit. One man paced the edges of the encampment, his dark robe melting into the black of the night. The rest waited in silence.

He trudged back to the fireside and kneeled down. “All’s quiet,” he said. Then he peeled the cloth back from his face.