He turned his head and found her, as he feared she would be, lying on her side, watching him.

That evening, as they rode across a red, rippled flat, she rode next to him, not even using the excuse of the beasts’ wandering in line.

“Why do you look away?” she asked him. Those eyes could melt brass. And they were not dark. They were clear brown. He found himself noticing that fact for the first time, in the light of evening, and admiring what he saw. His blood was moving faster. He found he was in increasing difficulty in refusing her, and had to decide now… to send her away with a firm rebuff.

Or not.

“I don’t look away,” he said, and then committed himself. Halfway. “But not here.”

“Where?” she asked. She passed a dark hand about her, at all the Lakht, and seemed to laugh at him. “If not here, where? The latrine? I think not.”

“We’ll come to a village,” he said. “Under a roof.”

“A roof,” she said in wonder, as if that were the least necessary thing he could have named.

“I’m from the villages.”

“You don’t ride like it,” she said. “Under a roof.” It still seemed to amaze her.

“Or if we find some safe place.”

She laughed at his foolishness, the notion of finding anywhere alone in the desert a safe place, and he knew she was right. Rocks held predators: the empty sand held predators. Beyond a dune was an invitation to disaster. There was no place, and now he wanted one, badly.

“Hati is my name. Hati Makri an’i Keran.”

From Keran, that was, Makri her mother-name and Keran her tribe-name. Hearing it, he was surprised, and not surprised: he knew the customs of the Keran, who refused all outsider wars and as often as not refused the Ila’s taxes and levies. They were wild people, fierce, apt to fight singly, if not as a tribe.

And had the madness that afflicted the villages crept even there, to the wildest, least sociable people in the world?

“Peace,” he said. That was the first thing strangers said when they met in the desert.

“Peace,” she said. Her eyes shone with satisfaction, having won him. “Under a roof, then.” Then she added: “The woman from Tarsa also.”

In the Keran a woman could demand a second wife or a second husband, or an agreement of spouses could demand a third or a fourth, for that matter. He had seen how Hati had taken to Norit, to the soft-handed wife from Tarsa, and instructed her, until now Norit could mount and dismount and ride far better than he had ever thought. Norit was surely a puzzle to Hati, and she had become a friend, of sorts.