“Norit din Karda is dead. Her mother is dead. Her father is dead. Her aunts are all dead. And she’s dead.”

“To the life she had in Tarsa, yes. She is.”

The old man made no reply.

“Is Lelie dead?”

Still there was no reply.

“She named that name to us,” Marak said. “Is it a sister? A mother? A daughter?”

The old man was still a while answering. But Marak waited.

“The girl’s with her father,” the old man said. “As she should be.”

“A daughter, then.”

“Yes.”

“Does the father treat her well?” He as much as any man knew the situation of an unwanted child, and the fate of one dragged into the affairs of state and the angers of leaders.

“She’s alive,” Agi said flatly. That was all.

Not a good situation, then. And Marak made a quick decision, a desperate and dangerous decision, since if there was one person on whom thousands of lives relied, it was Norit, through whom Luz spoke most easily; and if there was one person whose sanity was in greatest danger, it was Norit. “If the father isn’t happy, then give her to me, omi. I’ll relieve the father of an obligation and take good care of her.”

The old man considered the proposition.

“This is a great lord,” Antag said across the wind-battered gap. “What he says he’ll do, he’ll do, omi.”

The old lord reined aside to one of his own men and spoke.

Then that man, no skilled rider, managed to turn aside in the storm and the dark and the stubborn persistence of the beshti in evading the wind, and to go back into the caravan of Tarsa.

No one spoke. The effort to converse was too great, and Agi had no great desire to speak to them, that was clear. Marak waited, thinking how he had come out into the caravan to take a life close to him and now bid to save one he had never met.

Memnanan’s messenger had never gotten here. Why that was he still had no idea, and saw no profit in asking: it was the desert at fault, the abjori, his father, or Agi himself, but it was nothing he could mend now, under present circumstances. In some measure he was a fool even to trouble what was settled, a fool to think of taking a young child back the route he had come. It was a dangerous enough ride for him and the Rhonandin, and he had no idea of Norit’s frame of mind. One might: Marak, Marak, his voices raged at him. But he paid no attention. He shut his eyes. He rode without attention to anyone. He waited.

Men moved forward in the line, one that might be the old man’s messenger, the other that might have some answer about the child, both faceless shadows in the violent, sand-edged dark.