Awa’s stomach gurgled at the smell of nut bread. Her head ached, burned, as if her hair was on fire. Bal caressed her cheeks and sang an ancestor song from the Smokeland talking books. Awa opened her eyes. They’d come through the border-void back to the everyday outside Yari and Isra’s goat-hair tent. Isra was a warrior-scout from the south, an Aido cloth weaver, the love Yari always returned to. Some Sprites claimed Isra was a reluctant Green Elder, yet vie was the anchor to Yari’s wandering spirit, to all their wandering spirits.

Awa shook off void-smoke clinging to her hair and smiled. Swampy wetlands turned silver in the twilight. Twisted tupelo roots clutched the banks of a gurgling stream. Demon-flies flashed green and blue butts, making love, eating foolish enemies. The enclave had marched from the northern desert to old Anawanama territory.

Yari and Isra carried their breath bodies around for weeks and set them on mats in this grassy knoll. A few moments in Smokeland could be days in the everyday. Moans and grunts poured from the tent. Bal pointed at a tangle of shadows. She and Awa giggled. Yari and Isra were noisy lovers. Both used many voices.

“Yari would kill me if I left your breath body unprotected and went off for a roll in the sand with a lover,” Bal said.

Awa poked Bal’s bony chest. “You don’t have a lover.”

“But if I did…”

“You don’t!” Awa was jealous of Bal’s shadow lover. “How long were we gone?”

“I don’t know.”

A wild dog shoved a cold nose in Awa’s face and licked her hot forehead. They wrestled in the grass. The dog pinned her down and nipped her nose. She rolled him over and tickled his mottled tummy. Her headache faded and jealousy burned off.

Bal laughed. “Stray dogs always smell Smokeland on you.”

“He trailed us from the border.” The dog sprawled by Awa’s side. She scratched his big smoke-gray head. “What did you see in the void?”

Bal broke off laughing, her breath suddenly short.

“Never mind,” Awa said. “Shall I tell you how I was sold to the Elders?”

“You’d tell me that?” Garden Sprites were usually too ashamed to tell who sold them or why. Poison desert turned good citizens into slavers who stole children, who sold their own daughters or even sons to buy food or passage on a pirate ship to the floating cities. Sprites imagined horror scenarios for each other. “Are you sure?”

Awa shrugged. “It’s what I saw at first in the void.”

“Why risk the ire of—”

“It’s not bad luck for Sprites to trade stories. Cowards made up that tale. Crossroads gods are tricksters, but they don’t care what we say to each other.”

Bal looked unconvinced. “I guess…”