The caravan guards saw her, but for a while no one seemed to react. The caravan lumbered forward like a beast staggering on its last legs, while her horses made it known they couldn’t understand why they must walk here when it was obvious they did not like the bones of the dead lake and the smell of demon lands. It was getting hotter as the sun rose swollen and fat. She licked chapped lips.

“Hoy! Hoy!”

A fat man on a sleek mare rode out from the wagons, waving at her. She kept riding at the same steady walk, and eventually he pushed up beside her. He had a funny complexion, like clay, and he was perspiring and licking moist lips and looking her up and down in a bold way that made her think he must be a demon, since men knew better than to look directly at women. Therefore, she ignored him.

He said, in labored and very precise speech, “You are a tribeswoman, are you? Never before see I one tribeswoman so close. Whew!” He wiped his dripping forehead with a cloth. “Why ride you here?”

“I will only speak to a man, not a demon,” she said, trying to shame him by meeting his gaze deliberately, but of course demons cannot feel shame. He did not look away.

“Whew!” He said words in demon language, then thought better of mumbling on in words that only proved he was not a man. “I say good things about your blue eyes. Very pretty! Your hair! Very pretty! I am a man. I am not a demon. I am obligated to say I am only a—” He spoke a word she did not know. “For this reason my—” Another demon word. “—sends me out here to speak at you.”

Despite the demon words, he spoke human speech well enough to make her wonder if he might be a human person after all, just a very ill-mannered one.

“I have come for my brother. He was traded to an eastern merchant. I want him back.”

Without turning, he indicated the caravan behind him. “One of the boys, eh?”

“Yes.”

“Hrm.” He scratched his bare chin. “I go ask my sarvar if he negotiate with you. You ride here, meantime?”

“I will ride here.”

He rode back to the caravan. He had a heavy seat that disturbed his horse’s natural grace. She was trembling as she considered her options. She had two horses. If she could get Kontas up onto the piebald, she and Kontas could outrace them. They wouldn’t know how to track her in the grass.

Six armed guards appeared from the vanguard of the beast and rode back to get a look at her. They were Qin, with demon-scratched eyes, coarse black hair pulled up into a funny knot, and broad faces, part human and part demon. Circling her with the easy grace of men raised on horseback, they called to each other in their barking language. They stared rudely, not civilized men at all.