“How big do the spiral cacti grow?” I asked.

“The biggest I’ve ever seen was probably about this tall.” He held his hand as high over his head as he could. “They topple over and get buried pretty quickly. But the spikes will go straight through a sandal if you’re not careful.”

“Thanks for the warning,” I said. “Anything else I should be on the lookout for?”

He slowed his pace, allowing me to walk next to him. This time, I didn’t move as far away.

“The usual. Sandstorms.” He stared off toward the horizon. “There will probably be another one of those in a day or two.”

I tried to see what he was noticing in the distance, but I couldn’t figure out what made him so certain. “How do you know?”

“You can feel it in the air, in the heaviness of the sand on your feet, like even it’s hunkering down, preparing for what’s to come.”

His knowledge amazed me, but I guess out here, you had to know when one was coming if you wanted to survive, unlike in the city where you had walls to block the worst of it.

“There are also fire-legged flies, blood beetles, and scorpions.” He paused to see my reaction.

But I didn’t flinch. I’d been expecting those. Fire-legged flies were a nuisance no matter where you lived, although the spider silk curtains we had up at the palace had meant I’d dealt with them far less often. The blood beetles, on the other hand, hadn’t become a problem until the artists no longer had water to make dyes with. They stopped hunting the beetles, and the population had flourished since the drought started. But I’d only seen a few close to the palace.

Once while training, I’d given one of my instructors a cut on his ankle. The blood had run down his sandal into the sand. It didn’t take long for a blood beetle to catch its scent and burrow upward, ready to eat its way into whatever creature was reckless enough to get injured.

And with scorpions, I’d known their danger secondhand. I’d once asked Latia about her parents; she’d grown stiff and said they both died from scorpion stings. She told me they’d been apothecaries and had kept numerous scorpions on hand because some claimed the heat of the poison would bring down a fever if it was rubbed over the body.

In fact, most scorpions I’d encountered had been raised for food, already dead and on display in the market or on my own plate, stingers long since removed. I’d only seen a live scorpion once or twice in my entire life. “Don’t the scorpions keep mostly to Scorpion Hill?” I asked. Not that I had any idea where in the desert that was.

“Why? Do you want to go?” He eyed me.

It’s not that I hadn’t thought about it, but I had bigger things to deal with. I shook my head.

He nodded. “I just wanted to make sure you weren’t going to run off and test that insane theory about royals being immune to scorpion stings.”