But Lelie cried and snuffled against him, weak and miserable.

“Call Norit,” he said to the priest at his feet, wincing as Lelie hit his wound. But before the priest could decide to obey him, Lelie fell abruptly asleep, perhaps Luz’s work. Then he slid down into sleep, too, and that was the end of that.

When he next waked it was at the shift between bearers, and Lelie was still asleep, her spritelike face shaded by the aifad. The sun warming them in a clear sky.

It was afternoon, he decided. He tried to reckon where they were, and tried to fit an east direction into the angle of the distant ridge and the flat expanse of pitted sand. He could lift his head, he discovered. He moved a leg and a shoulder grown unbearably stiff with lying compressed between the litter poles, and found the pain of his side and his back was less, the swelling diminished.

The war of the makers for his life and health seemed won. And where were they? And how many days had it been? He began to know fear, and to care where he was. If it was not toward Pori, he thought, then he had to do something. He had to know.

“Where are we going?” he asked the man at his head, but, tilting his head, he saw only a back, and had no answer. Riders on beshti moved at the limits of his vision. That was as it should be.

He looked down past his feet at the priest carrying the litter, a strong man, a patient man. “I may be able to get up,” he said, under Lelie’s peacefully sleeping weight. “To ride, if not to walk. Stop.”

The priest stopped, and the pair carrying him drew aside from those riders immediately to the rear. They set the litter down. They were at the heart of the column, and beshti had to move around them, a tall shadow of legs and undersides as Marak shifted Lelie aside and tried to lift himself.

He could not quite sit up straightway. He gathered his breath and rolled onto a knee and both knees and his hands on the dusty sand, encumbered by the litter poles. Slowly then, in blood-stiffened clothing, he attempted to disengage his shirttail from under Lelie on the litter and get up. The priests’ belated help impeded as much as assisted him, and he shook off the offered arm, rested hands on his knee, shoved himself to his feet.

As he succeeded and dragged his shirttail free, Lelie waked, and sat up, too, rubbing her eyes with a bloody, grimy fist. He stood swaying on his feet in the passage of beshti on either hand—looked down at his little prize in numb curiosity, wondering what he was to do with her, and where Hati was.