Then they began their daily trek to the west, under a sky still too bright for stars. Marak slept, nodding. So Hati did, and Tofi, from time to time, until they acquired a better mood and had some sense of rest. Norit managed: at least her head drooped, and Marak kept an eye on her for fear she might fall off; but she stayed, and waked, and rubbed her eyes, adjusting the aifad to shade them. There was little talk, little to distract them in a monotony of riding.

Hati pointed after a time to something Marak’s eye had begun to pick out far to the west, in the sunset, a particularly bright seam of light. But they had no notion, any of them, what that was. The au’it wrote, clutching her book and her pen and her ink-cake despite the lurch of the beast under her, in the absolutely last of the light.

As the sun faded and the stars showed, that glow persisted.

“Like fire,” one of the freedmen said. “What’s out there to burn?”

None of them knew. In the dark, stars began to fall again, none of the noisy sort, only a steady, gentle, remorseless fall.

“Will they all fall?” Hati asked at last in distress, scanning the heavens as they rode. She pointed at bright Almar. “See, Almar is still up there.”

“They are not stars that fall,” Norit said. “Almar won’t be among them.”

“What are they, then?” Marak asked, angry not at Norit, but at Luz. “What are they? Are they the vision?”

“Water,” Norit said. “Water, iron… stone and metals. A wealth of iron.”

Perhaps it was Norit that answered him, out of her madness. Or Luz told them the unlikely truth.

They never knew what the burning was. That next day, when they pitched the tent and lay down on their mats, Norit turned her back to both of them and lay apart.

Marak looked at Hati, questioning, and Hati at him, but neither of them knew what to do for her. He knew that within Luz’s will, Norit suffered, and that knowledge left him sleepless as they rested.

He thought about it. He tried to think what to do.

The au’it slept. Tofi and the men slept. There were no witnesses. He gave Hati’s hand a squeeze, one comrade asking leave of another, and moved to Norit’s side, stroked Norit’s arm, and after a time moved her hair aside from her ear to whisper into it: “Norit. Do you want to make love?”

Norit flinched and covered her eyes, turning away.