“Vie promised to deliver your messages for no pay. A friend.” The healer talked on. Djola heard little except, “Vandana is too old, too fierce for Pezarrat, but he bought her anyhow, for you.” The healer offered Djola needle and thread.

“I don’t sew flesh.” Djola smacked his hand away. “I need conjure supplies.”

A woman stepped in front of the old man and held up a Lahesh metal-mesh bag of poison sand. She was careful not to spill a grain. “I am Vandana.” She dumped salts, lava stones, rare earth compounds, potash, dried bat dung, and crystals at Djola’s feet. Dark as polished lava, she had big bones, big breasts, big hips, and four teeth filed dagger sharp.

Dagger teeth were supposedly common among warrior women on the far side of the Mama Zamba mountains, where the maps ran out. Vandana shook skinny gray braids at a captive whose wounds seeped blood. “Captain says you need help.” She shifted to Lahesh—perhaps not her mother tongue, but well-spoken. “I told him, Vandana work medicine with you.” She got in his face. “You agree?”

Pezarrat loomed in the doorway. “You pine after your wife.” He’d bought Vandana to irritate Djola. “I hope your letter gets to her.”

Djola forced a smile. “Vandana, you help the wounded. Can you sew? I’ll do conjure for the captain.”

Pezarrat disappeared up the ladder. Vandana shook her head and lashed Djola’s cheek with a whipcord braid, drawing a line of blood. “You make death for Captain.”

“Acid-conjure means less death than fire raids.”

“Maybe. Maybe just more raids.”

“I’m trying to save us all.”

“A man with a mission.” She gripped him. “Captain says he dumps me in the sea, if you don’t want me. I’d have to kill him.”

Djola laughed the first time in who knows how long. “I want you.”

“Good. Many need stitches. I teach you sewing tomorrow. No time now.”

Vandana pulled a needle from a small bag at her waist and bent down to a captive. While Djola worked into the night making acid-conjure, she and the old man cleaned, sewed, and bandaged wounds. She babbled to her patients about flowers blooming in snow fields, eagles roosting by cliff cottages, and granddaughters clashing swords at dawn then sneaking off to lovers in the afternoon. “All done. They’ll live,” she declared.

“Thank you.” Djola admired her bold spirit.

She snatched a lamp and tramped out of sick bay. Djola followed her to the hold, which was jammed with salt, northland seeds, baskets, and outlaw cloth. She slung a hammock over water barrels then pulled a knife from her small bag, a long knife that shouldn’t have fit. She pressed the blade against his heart. “I sleep alone, knife ready, eye open.”

Djola grinned. “You haven’t come to kill me.”

“You’d already be dead.”

“But you could be a spy for … anybody.”