Rhys washed his face and hands at the kitchen sink; just a sluice set in the wall above a chipped clay basin. They shared a privy down the hall with the rest of their floor. He avoided it as much as possible. Someone had found a dead infant there not three weeks past, cold and unmoving in a pool of blood and afterbirth. Insects had already eaten out the eyes and hollowed the placenta. The bugs were worse out here than even the Tirhani wilderness. After they heard about the baby, Elahyiah insisted that Rahim sleep beside them. There was no more talk of leaving him on his own for hours to scream out his frustrations.

Rhys pulled on his burnous. He leaned toward Elahyiah to kiss her, but she turned her head away.

“Remember the milk,” she said.

“We may not have enough for milk.”

“We seem to have enough for your filthy habits. I expect you can find something for milk.”

“Don’t presume to tell me what to spend.”

“It is our money. Our family’s money. We used to decide everything together, Rhys. Now you shut me out like I’m some stranger.”

The anger came then, unbidden. “Isn’t this enough? Selling myself into servitude? What else can I do for you and this family? Bleed all over your shoes?”

“It was your idea to come here to the edge of nothing,” Elahyiah said. “I believed we would do better in Chenja itself, not this terrible outpost.”

“I’ve told you why I can’t go back to Chenja.”

“Things have changed. We can do much good there. Have you heard about the women’s initiatives there?”

“What we don’t need is Chenja becoming another Nasheen.”

“It won’t be Nasheen. It can be another Tirhan. I want to help them, Rhys. They’re our people.”

“The decision has been made.”

Rahim began to squall again.

Rhys threw up his hands. “Enough. You want him to eat, let me do my work.”

He shut the door behind him without waiting for a response. He knew what Elahyiah wanted. What he could not tell her was that going home to Chenja terrified him. Being this close had given him many sleepless nights, but what she wanted was to go home to Chenja—her parents’ country more than hers—and teach women to read. He had to tell her, gently, that only the very poorest Chenjan women did not know how to read. Some of the gross generalizations he heard in Tirhan about how Chenjans treated their wives often offended him. Yet after many years abroad, he could not help but hope for a future for his daughters that looked a little more like a Tirhani one than a Chenjan one. Why couldn’t his daughters have good marriages to men who honored and protected them but retain the freedom to vote and speak in matters of governance, so long as they did so modestly?