“You’re too kind,” Hati said. “They’ll cut your throat if you don’t beat them.”

“I was wishing,” Norit defended herself. “If I’m wishing, I can wish them to be honest workers.”

“If we’re wishing,” Marak said, entranced with this folly, “we can wish for peace between the Lakht and the lowlands, and sane minds for all of us.”

“Perhaps the visions will stop when we see this high place,” Hati said, putting an arm over him and snuggling close. “Most of us hope so. Those of us who have hope. And I do.”

“I hope so,” Marak said. He had not put it in words before, but that was the promise in the madness, that there was something to find, something to do, something to see that they must see, and once they had found it and done it and seen it they would be sane, and at peace, and free forever.

There was a flaw in this notion, of which he was keenly aware. He had promised the Ila his return, and a report. More, on the Lakht and around it for as far as the lands stretched, he knew nowhere else to go to postpone that report, especially since he had the au’it in his care.

Live as an’i Keran? He could, but he would reject the tribal life. He had no wish to fight their battles, when he had had his belly full of his father’s.

Besides, he had made a pledge, and still kept it, and knew that this freedom of his lasted as long as the journey… at least, he had had it clear in his mind until there was Hati; and now his pledge left him a tangled maze of choices.

The Ila had promised him his mother’s life, and his sister’s, and he had bargained for that.

What had he bargained?

“And what would you have?” Norit asked him. “What would you have if you could have anything in the world?”

“My freedom,” he said.

“Nothing else?” Norit asked, disappointed. Her father had owned her; then a husband did. He supposed now he owned, in some measure, in Norit’s sight. He tried to set her free, but freedom was not even within her imagination. When she was free to do what she wished, she sang to herself, and looked at no one, and was maddest of the mad.

But Hati, he thought, well understood what he meant. They understood each other; and were both free; and that was what he loved in her.

“If I were rich,” he said, “I think I would be Tofi, with a good number of beasts and tents, and the whole desert in front of me.”

“A good wish,” Hati said, with her fingers laced in his, and gave a sigh, and clearly intended to sleep.