Antag nodded, and took down his veil, as a man did with a friend. So his brothers did, and they all did, while Norit’s Lelie slept, collapsed across Marak’s knee.

They shared the prepared meal, but not to their fill. They had riding yet to do. In no more than an hour, they tightened girths and prepared to set out, with Andisak and his household bidding them a courteous farewell.

The weary beshti launched only token complaint. They did not belong with these beshti, and were restless, outside their own camp.

So were they all. The voices dinned a constant noise as Marak got up into the saddle.

From Antag’s hands he then took Lelie up, and she waked and struggled and cried in fretful, constant misery, tears running through dust on her face, but Marak took her inside his coat, and took up an offered aifad for her, and sheltered her and wrapped the cloth about her small face, veiling it, and keeping her close.

“We owe you,” Marak said to Andisak. The woman who had cared for Lelie was the one who had given the aifad. She had turned up among the foremost to see them off, not without regrets, Marak thought, perhaps very much wanting the baby; but Lelie was Norit’s, and once she resumed her place across the saddlebow, wrapped within his coat, she quieted.

They rode out. He had done nothing that he had set out to do, and acquired something he had never planned on.

When, as they rode through the dust and fought the wind, Lelie opened her small arms and took a strong grip on his shirt, he found unaccountable satisfaction in that, and hugged her with his free arm, like a close-held secret.

Marak, Marak, Marak, the voices said, a guidance as the earth shook, once strongly enough to stagger the beshti.

They had learned to duck low when that happened. No one fell. The beshti had no liking for the sensation, and a few younger ones in the column bolted and had to be reined in.

Lelie, too, waked and cried, and Marak opened his coat and talked to her: “Be still. I won’t let you fall.”

“Mama,” Lelie said. “Mama, mama, mama.”

Not papa. Marak heard that clearly enough, justifying what he had done in taking her. “Hush,” he said, drying tears and leaving mud on her face instead. “It’s just the wind. It’s just the earth twitching its skin, like a besha. Such things happen these days.”

He flinched, himself, when something boomed, and the earth shook like a table jolted by a fist—all of it in murk that only gave them shadows to see, hulking tents with the flaps down in some instances, and others which had only pitched canvas halfway, as windbreaks, not a safe proposition, if the storm should worsen. It was better to have enough stakes down and more canvas spread.