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though he might say more on the subject, so deliberate he could’ve been raising a hand to strike me. But when he did speak, his tone had quieted.
    “You should sleep.”
    It didn’t feel like a command, but the weight of his words hit me like one. I sat down on the cot. Gannet left without saying anything else, but he didn’t need to. Where I was and what was happening to me were my own doing, among the first things in my life that were. Gannet had called me a liar because I openly scorned circumstances that deep, deep down, thrilled me. I feared my captors, but I feared more the ugly independence my choice had wrought, how already it was changing me.
    Sleep was laughably beyond my reach. I lay on the cot, eyes roaming the darkness. The sun had set, and I could have mistaken the sudden movement then for the shifting of one of the curtains that divided my chamber from the rest of the barge. But it was too slight even for the wind. I looked down and saw a scorpion, his body like so many links of dark chain, skittering across the coarse blanket but a finger’s width from my hand. I leapt from the bunk, fell, crashed with the creature racing after me. My scream was breathless, strangled, fear mummified in my lungs as the scorpion’s tail, bright as an onyx bead, whipped like a lash above his back.
    And then a blade swept him from his mark, leaving a gouge in the floor like the beginnings of a ritual sign.
    “ Han’dra Eiren.” The captain of the guard, Antares, stood there, offering a hand in the same instant that the other pinned the scorpion to the floor with his spear. The squirms of the creature’s dying were brief and soundless. “Let me help you.”
    But I didn’t, rising shakily without his assistance and backing as far away as I could. If he was slighted, he didn’t show it.
    “We have seen many of these pests in the desert,” Antares continued, though we shared a look that proved to me he was wondering exactly the same as I was.
    How had it come to be here ?
    Antares gestured for me to move to the center of the chamber, and after a moment, I complied, my loose skirt drawn up in fists without needing to be asked. He swept the room with his eyes and his spear, stripped the cot, his limbs and armor near enough that I could smell him, the day’s exertions on him, feel his tension without the need of my talents. My discomfort had as much to do with his proximity as that of the dead scorpion. But he was thorough, and I knew that he had finished when he exhaled, for he had held something in his mind as ugly and as hard as the breath in his lungs.
    “There are baskets of fruit and root vegetables in a nearby compartment, dark places full of sweet things I am told these creatures like to eat,” Antares lied. Someone had put the scorpion here, or it was not so unbelievable to him that someone would. I didn’t know why he would try to deceive me, but I knew that he didn’t want me to worry. That worried me more. “But that one was alone. You’re safe.”
    He retreated to the chamber’s entrance, pulling the curtain closed without a word, his look full of more meaning than I could process.
    I would never be safe again.
     
     

Chapter 5
     
    I couldn’t chart the exact moment we traveled far enough from my home that I no longer recognized the landscape. It wasn’t that sloping sand and rock had much to distinguish themselves, only that it became impossible for me to deny that what I had admired at a distance now troubled and slowed the sprawling caravan. We were stopped in the highest hours of the heat nearly every day to replace a wheel or tend to a split beam, to bury a beast or see to rations reduced for the soldiers who marched all around us. I didn’t know what to think of my being fed at all, especially now, when they made the choice to keep me in comfort over their own.
    Though burdened with the barges and pack animals and carts heavy with rations, we were moving with surprising speed over the