After a few days, Talal pointed to the south. Valyn squinted. A line of golden hills flanked them in the far distance, miles and miles beyond the river. Sand, he realized, the huge, undulating dunes of the Seghir Desert. Entire armies had been swallowed up in the Seghir, foreign and Annurian, bones and armor lost beneath the shifting sand. Even north of the river, where his own Wing rode, the soil began to turn dry and cracked, forcing Valyn to alter course, breaking away from the river for greener grass while still pushing west.

Twice they spotted herds of bison in the distance, thousands of shaggy brown beasts three times the size of the horses they rode. Despite the curving horns, the creatures seemed docile enough, lazily cropping the long grass, pausing occasionally to snuffle at the air. When they broke into a run, the whole mass wheeling and charging away into the distance, Valyn could feel the ground quiver beneath his feet while the air trembled with a sound like thunder.

Near the end of the fourth day, they pulled up atop a low hill just in time to see a much larger band of riders—maybe three or four hundred—also headed west, probably half a day’s ride ahead of them. Despite the size of the group, they were hammering hard, even harder than Valyn’s Wing, the herd of horses kicking up a haze of dust that hovered over the steppe like a storm cloud, dimming the noon sun. Valyn counted three more taamu after that, all headed west, moving fast. It was easy enough to stay clear, to avoid the hilltops and rises, but the sight of so many Urghul on the move made him nervous.

“Where do you think the bastards are going?” Gwenna asked.

“No idea,” Valyn replied, shaking his head. “Hopefully not the same place we are.”

The lack of cover during the long, sun-baked days made Valyn sweat, but it was the rain, finally, that did them in.

He had called a halt early. Though daylight lingered, the east wind reeked of storm, Gwenna, for all that she refused to complain, looked ready to fall out of the saddle, and Valyn himself didn’t feel far behind. As Hendran wrote, There is speed in slowness. Much as Valyn chafed to be back in Annur, to find Kaden, to find whoever was behind his father’s murder, and the monks’, and Ha Lin’s, there were miles of steppe and little to be gained by trying to cross it all in one frenetic push.