“Are you saying a woman has no place on this expedition?”

“You are a woman. Eridit is skillful at disguise. She collected useful information in Horn three days ago. And that tale she sang had real power. But she has never actually killed a man. We cannot know if she is prepared for what will come. Why did the temple council send her?”

“And the Hieros agree to it? I don’t sneer at her ability to disguise herself, ask questions, and chant tales. She’s proven herself more valuable so far than the militiamen and the ordinand. Because truly, I ask myself if those four are the best Olossi could put forward for such a crucial expedition. Have we become so ill prepared, all of us?”

“We soon find out.”

“So we will. I’m going to sleep.”

He nodded. “I will take first watch. I wake you later.” He began scraping clean the used se leaves. “Shai,” he added, without looking up, “best you catch some sleep, also.”

“And I wish you would stop talking so much, little brother,” said Zubaidit from her blanket.

Stung, Shai sheathed his knife and wrapped up the carving in a strip of cloth. “Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool, than to open it and be proved one.”

“Wit to go with those brawny arms!” Chuckling, she yawned and turned over.

He settled against the rock wall, where even if it rained hard, he’d be sheltered. When he closed his eyes, he thought of Eridit. He was hot all over. Impossible to sleep in this state. He herded his thoughts to cooler pastures. Stuck without horses, they’d trudged east-northeast for many days, careful not to stray into the Lend. Edard had suggested again and again that they return to Olossi and get new gear, but Tohon and Zubaidit had refused. Horses were useful, but not necessary. Like himself, he thought as he drifted off to sleep.

SHAI DID NOT like to think about things that bothered him. If he did, then he felt as if they nipped at his heels wherever he walked. As Eridit was doing this morning as he trudged a final time over the remains of a battlefield.

“It has to be the battle where your brother was lost,” she was saying. “Everyone I talked to in Horn agreed there had been a cadre of outlanders with the troop. No one had seen anything like them. The time is right, if you think he could have died three years ago.”

He stooped to turn over a rock. Bugs swarmed over white roots, like thoughts hiding from the light. He settled the rock back in place.

She went on. “The odd thing is, no one knew where the outlanders came from, or where they were going. Or who the men were who attacked them and wiped them out.”

They reached the highest point in the tumble of rocks where they had made their camp. Shai halted in the shadow of a huge rock to survey the grass and scrub growing in the hollow beyond. There were remains scattered all the way from the banks of a distant stream cutting down the far slope to these outcroppings, as though the men fighting had done it on the run.