More likely, the beetles were motivated by the smell of the lizards cooking in the stall next to them—the vendor was inadvertently spreading the scent by waving small bits of cloth over the lizards to keep the fire-legged flies away.

I hadn’t seen lizards with bumpy backs like that described in the books I’d read, which made me question how accurate those accounts truly were. But I didn’t have time to dwell on that now. I kept my eyes peeled for any ration coins that may have gotten dropped along the way.

I squeezed past a crowd of small children playing a game of sandstorm, where one child stood in the middle of the group and tried to bump into the other children, knocking them down without using their arms. The last one standing won.

Past the children, a crowd gathered around an older woman in baggy pants and a multicolored vest. She bellowed her name was Hannavas and that she had trained lizards to do amazing things. By the looks of her clothing, she used to be part of the traveling Aicilan menagerie known for training animals to put on shows.

But usually they performed with much bigger creatures like fluffy ellehcar, horned eiznekcam, or roaming nitsirk. Though bigger creatures required more water. Water we didn’t have. I wondered as I moved past if her group had gotten stuck here during the initial drought so many years ago and if all her exotic creatures had died of thirst, leaving her with nothing but desert creatures to train.

I continued past the stalls selling jars of dyed sand for sand ceremonies. Fiery reds and vibrant greens stared back at me. Each color had some meaning, some gift it would bestow on a new baby or newlywed couple.

I passed by the Sand Sayers. One woman swirled her fingers through the layer of sand on the table before her as she crouched on her stool.

“Care for a reading?” she called to me, raising one finger to beckon me to the empty stool across from her.

I shook my head and continued. Even if I believed in her powers to tell the future by guiding my hands through the sand and interpreting the picture I made, I didn’t know if I’d like what I was told.

I stopped when I spotted a cart holding bolts of cloth and other wares, peddled by a small child on top. It was the boy from the arena. He was dressed in the same tattered pants and fraying sleeveless shirt he’d worn in the arena.

My hands instinctively went to my sword, but I stopped myself from pulling it from its sheath. I took a deep breath, forcing myself to focus on the task at hand.

How long would it take Rodric to catch up to me? I still needed water, but most of the goods on the boy’s cart had already been sold. If I waited, I could follow him back to his hideout.