Patya saw them. She rode over just out of range, looking for a signal, but she was no great rider, and she could hardly guide her mount with any subtlety. Hati waved to her. Marak would not bend to acknowledge a close relationship, not now, not since the caravan was under way, but she could come to him, and it was his hope that Patya and his mother would move toward him if he came up in the line. He had no need to ask whether their mother was safe: she drifted close, a far better rider, and stayed just within sight of him, presence enough to assure him she was safe and well, but she, too, had her dignity before her new neighbors, her relatives. She would hold off as long as there was Patya to run the errands between them.

“Are we really going to the end of the world?” Patya asked, as if she of all these leaders and all these people could have the precise truth from him. “And is that woman with you a real prophet?”

“You mean Norit,” he said; he was aware of Norit having followed him, also at a distance. “Her name is Norit. She’s my wife. Is that what the priests say?”

“For what the priests are worth.” There was never any great reverence for priests in Kais Tain. “But if you say she is, I believe it. And your wife, too. You’ve joined the tribes like us.”

Tribesmen might have more than one wife.

“I suppose I have,” he said.

“She’s very pretty,” Patya said, meaning, he thought, Hati, but Hati said nothing.

“Where did you meet her?”

“On the road,” he said. “After the Ila sent us east.” He found there was a great deal he dared not tell his sister, not about Luz, not about the tower, not the least detail from his own mouth. Now he regretted he had come up here, or that the questioning had taken this direction. Let Tofi gossip, let Hati, if she chose: but what he said, men would repeat as coming from authority, and that was substance: men would debate it, dispute it, argue over it, dice it fine and begin to reject parts of it or to substitute their own notions. He could not.

“Did Father send you away,” he asked Patya, “or did you just go?”

“Oh, we were going to, but Father—” Patya hesitated, trouble shadowing her brow. “But the Ila’s men came and arrested us. And we rode to Oburan.”

“Did they treat you well?” He had not ridden to Oburan: that, at least, indicated that Patya had fared better.

“Oh, they gave us everything. You never saw such food. And fine clothes, and everything. But Mother wanted to leave.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Then the sky started doing what it does.” Patya was brimming with things she likely had no words to say. “And everybody was scared. Why does it do that?”