It will be bad, Hati said, and her estimation, Marak readily believed. Obidhen ordered two water packs given to the beshti, the sweet water they carried for themselves, carefully measured.

Fear was still there. Any man, lowlander or Lakhtanin, feared the west wind in summer, but they were as ready as they could be. Some joked. The jokes rang hollow in the storm-sense that all but smothered cheer, yet they laughed.

It was coming, and there was nothing they could do more than they had done.

Marak, for one, decided to rest and take advantage of a night without traveling, and sleep another few hours. The air was stiflingly still; men talked in low voices off across the shelter of the open-sided tent. The au’it, who had written their preparations, wrote something else now, while the dim light lasted.

Hati lay down to sleep by him, as she had slept for days.

But now in the sense of storm that quieted the whole tent, Norit, too, moved her mat closer, and whispered, “I’m afraid.”

“Settle,” Marak said. “The tents will be safe. The tribes survive these winds many times a year.”

Hati shifted against him to make room for Norit. It was hot, and still at the moment.

It was not that Norit particularly chose him, he thought, but that Hati had formed a friendship. Norit had become her lieutenant as Hati had become his, and took to that responsibility. In Tarsa a cast-off wife was no one’s and nothing, of no honor, no estate, no support at all. In Hati, Norit had found anchor against a different kind of storm.

And in the process he had acquired unlooked-for obligations. Hati co-opted him, placing herself between him and all others. Now Norit added herself, and he found, as in the vision, the random pieces made unexpected structure, not one he would have chosen.

Norit suffered from her madness. She no longer sang to herself aloud, but made small sounds as she talked to her visions. No one dressed her hair: by day, as she rode, she combed her black mane obsessively with her fingers, until it straggled in some order over her shoulders. She combed it now as she rested on her back, staring at the visions that came. She plucked at her fingers as if taking off rings. She talked to the unseen. She was not the most wholesome of their company.