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She wore a greyish-tan garment this time, one with a long, loose cut. Deiq wore a similar outfit, and hooked a small pack over his shoulders. She had nothing to carry; even the robe from Juric had been taken away.

Silent and tall, Acana stood in the darker shadow of the entrance to the Qisani, oil lamp in hand. She bowed to them once. They returned the bow, and without speaking turned away and began walking.

The moon hovered low on the horizon, just past full. Wan light shifted the darkness into strange, flat pools and lines, eerily reminiscent of what Alyea had seen at the beginning of the blood trial of Ishrai. She tried not to think of that: a chill still ran down her spine at the memory.

The sand lay deep and loose in spots, in others hard as a thin layer over buried rock. Deiq set a steady pace, one Alyea could easily match; still, within an hour her legs ached and cramped.

“Hold on,” she said, stopping, and bent to rub her calves. “I need a rest.”
“No,” he said, and knelt to push her hands aside. “Not like that.”
She frowned down at him. “My legs hurt.”
He sat back on his heels and put a finger to his forehead, just above his left eye. “Here. Don't use your hands.
Tell
your body it's going to walk without pain.”
“You're mad.”
He stood. “We're not stopping again. Do it my way or I'll leave you behind.” He turned and started walking again.
She cursed under her breath and jogged awkwardly through the sand to catch up.
“How?” she panted when she reached his side.
“You're in control,” he said without looking at her. “Your body's a tool to get you from place to place. You control the tool. You tell it what to do. You don't have to breathe hard, either, by the way. You can control that, too.”
He didn't break stride as he spoke, moving forward with the same even pace he'd used before. Alyea fought to slow her breath, distracted by the increasing pain in her calves.
“Don't force it,” Deiq said, still not looking at her. “Just
know
it's under your will.”
“Will you
stop
so I can focus?” she snapped.
“No.”
“
Damn
you!”
He made a dismissive gesture with one hand and said nothing.
“This is what you call teaching?”
“Don't waste your energy yelling at me,” he said. “Use it to focus.”
She snarled, feeling rather like an angry asp-jacau, then forced her attention to her breath. Step . . . breath . . . step . . . breath. It took a few minutes to catch the rhythm; abruptly, the pain vanished, and she only felt the ground rolling past her feet. Her body consisted of breath moving in and moving out; turning that breath into forward movement, and then balancing a thousand tiny adjustments in each step. Sounds, smells, sight, the slither of fabric against her skin and the taste of the air in her mouth: all senses combined into one long liquid moment. Pain arose, rerouted itself into energy to take another step. Protesting muscles simply smoothed themselves out.
Astonished at the incredible, flowing clarity, she fell. The ground sprawled up beneath her with a hard thump, shaking her breath back into erratic gasps. Aches redoubled, cramped her into a whimpering ball for a moment, then eased.
Deiq laughed and helped her stand, brushing sand from her clothes.
“Good start,” he said. “Everyone falls the first time.”
She stood still, blinking to clear a doubling of her vision, until things returned to normal. Her leg muscles quivered.
“What did I just do?”
“You reached center,” Deiq told her.
“It felt like an aqeyva trance,” she said, the words sounding thick and blurred to her own ears, “but I was taught never to try walking while in trance.”
“What you call aqeyva is the closest a human can get to the discipline of the ha'reye,” Deiq said. “No full human can ever reach as far into the center as you just did. You can do it because you've traded essence with a ha'rethe; you're not full human any more.”
“Am I a ha'ra'ha?”
“Not even close,” he said with a patience that told her every new desert lord asked that question. “Desert lords are . . . in a grey area between human and ha'ra'ha. As I said earlier, you may have some of the blood, but it's too faint to mean much. It's given you an edge with learning aqeyva meditations, and those most skilled at the aqeyva trance are considered the best candidates to be desert lords; it's part of the blood trials.”
Alyea remembered the odd look on Juric's face when she'd come out of an hours-long trance.
Deiq nodded as though hearing her memory himself. “From what I'm told,” he said, “you did exceptionally well. The taska said you were a natural—that you sat for much longer than any supplicant he'd ever handled before.”
She couldn't think of anything to say to that.
“Let's move on,” Deiq said. “We've a way to go. Move faster this time.”
He turned and started walking again.
She followed, finding it easier this time to fall into the walking trance. Time slowly ceased to matter. The stars moved overhead, the moon shifted across the sky; she felt no sense of hurry, just the steady sensation of sand shifting underfoot. The sand seemed almost to be helping her move forward, propelling her faster with each step.
Emotion peeled away in layers. The vast sky overhead and the endless, moonlight-greyed sand around them reduced everything in her life to a tiny, insignificant speck. No wonder, no astonishment remained. Her movement became more an act of will than the shifting of muscle and bone. She moved through a thousand contradictions and saw the resolution to each for a fraction of a second, brief and sharp, then lost the answer again.
If she had been capable of tears she would have wept.
As dawn began to rearrange the colors of the sky, she felt a vast sense of presence ahead. Refocusing her vision with an effort, she saw a fortress, built of enormous chunks of whitestone and granite. It sprawled across the sand, not nearly as tall as she'd expected, far from gracious— nothing but an unattractive pile of disorderly rock.
Deiq put a hand on her shoulder, slowing her to a stop.
“Take a moment,” he said. “You need to come all the way back to human time and space.”
He stood quietly, keeping his hand on her shoulder, as she shook off the lingering half-daze. She shuddered at a sudden feeling that everything inside her had broken beyond repair. At last the fragmented sensation eased, her sight cleared, and she studied the fortress ahead with a much different eye.
It still seemed an ungainly sprawl of blocks, the design almost haphazard; it fit no pattern she'd seen before. The walls curved here, ran straight there; rose three stories high and dropped to one without symmetry. Much of the stone seemed to have been bleached and weathered by hundreds of years of desert sun and sandstorms, but Alyea saw two large, yellow-orange patches whose crisp lines indicated a more recent history.
Several tents had been pitched well away from the walls of the fortress. The morning breeze carried the thick scent of a dung-coal fire and recently cooked food: probably the ubiquitious stew with cactus peppers. People sat on blankets spread before the tents, resting and talking quietly.
Nobody seemed to have noticed Alyea and Deiq yet.
“Stay still,” Deiq said, his voice low. “They won't see us until we move. We blend in. Take the time to study everything.”
She saw four tents, each large enough to hold five people comfortably. The term “tent” could only be broadly applied: these sturdy, collapsible shelters sat atop the loose sand, secured more by weight inside than by stakes and string.
Alyea realized she knew at least some of the people in front of the tents: Gria. Sela. Chacerly. Micru. She wasn't sure of the others, but something about the way those four figures shifted, the shape of their heads, a gesture, a slouch, identifed them to Alyea beyond question.
She could tell there would be no joy in the reunion. Chacerly sat with a tautness that spoke of anger and fear; Gria and Sela slouched in despairing postures. Micru sat still, but something about his form reminded Alyea of his coldblooded namesake, coiled and waiting to strike; he sat far from Chac.
Another group, this one composed of small dark-skinned men, huddled in a compact group: talking, occasionally gesturing widely. They radiated anger and danger.
“Teyanain,” Alyea breathed, not at all sure she had it right; but Deiq's hand tightened on her shoulder.
“Yes,” he said.
“What are they doing here?”
He didn't answer. Glancing up at him, she saw by his expression that he wouldn't.
“All right,” she said. “I'll figure it out for myself.”
They walked forward, the sun at their backs, and for a few steps nobody noticed the movement. Finally one of the teyanain looked up and scrambled to his feet, shouting. Moments later almost the whole camp seemed to be standing, squinting into the bright light.
Gria, Sela, and Micru stayed seated. Alyea wondered what that meant: were all three prisoners? The two women certainly had that look to them, but Alyea couldn't imagine Micru sitting tamely in cuffs, somehow.
She kept her face expressionless as she and Deiq advanced on the camp, watching where people stood and where they looked—and didn't look. The teyanain weren't glancing anywhere near the seated people, and neither was Chacerly.
The wrinkles on Chac's face deepened as he strode forward. He directed a glare at Deiq.
“You have a bad habit,” he snapped, “of interfering where you're not wanted.”
Deiq said nothing, his own expression bland.
Chac made a dismissive, hostile gesture and turned his attention to Alyea. “Took you long enough to get here,” he said. “And where's Juric? He should have had you here days ago.”
“I'm sorry I'm late. I was healing,” she said, keeping her voice neutral.
“Healing? From what . . . ?” He stopped, returned his glare to Deiq. “You
didn't
.”
“She did,” Deiq said, and smiled. “She bears the marks of both Comos and Ishrai.”
The teyanain had been hanging back a few paces, listening intently. At those words, one of them pushed forward. He stood at least a head shorter than Alyea, with the dark skin and facial structure of a deep southerner, but mysterious blue tattoos wrapped across his face and arms.
“Show them,” he ordered. “Show marks.”
Deiq put his hands on Alyea's shoulders and turned her to stand facing away from the onlookers. She felt him draw the loose cloth of her shirt up to show her mid-back. After a moment he let it drop and carefully pulled the left side of her leggings down a handspan to expose her hip, then tugged them back up and turned her around again. He gave her the faintest hint of a smile when she glanced up at him.
Chac let out a hiss through his front teeth. “You're a
fool
.”
The teyanin leader said nothing, but seemed to be studying Alyea with markedly more respect than before.
“How is possible?” the tattooed man said. “Ishrai year not past.”
“I'm standing in for the ha'reye,” Deiq said.
In the deathly silence following those words, Chac's weathered face seemed to lose color.
“You can't do that!” the old man snarled. “That's not allowed!”
“The ha'reye of the Qisani agreed to it,” Deiq said. “That's all the authority I need.”
A murmur rose among the teyanain behind Chac. Alyea heard “Qisani” repeated several times.
The teyanain's expressions shifted to distinctly impressed. Chac jerked, lowering his chin to his chest for a moment, then took a deep breath and straightened.
“Juric was told to bring you straight here, not to the Qisani,” he said to Alyea. “You should not have gone through those two trials yet. Juric will be called to account for this.”
“Juric is a Callen of Comos, and a friend of mine,” Deiq said with lazy amusement.
Chac's glare shifted back to Deiq, and it held a murderous anger this time.
Alyea cleared her throat.
“Excuse me,” she said in a tone that brought everyone's attention sharply back to her. “I'm here to take the last blood trial. Is there a Callen of Datda here that is ready and willing to test me?”
The tattooed teyanin bowed, both hands clasped together in front of him, and when he straightened he pointed to Chac.
“Callen,” he said, and stepped back three measured paces.
“
Chac?
” Alyea said in disbelief. “You can't be serious!”
The old man's expression could have melted the stone of the Qisani.
“Yes,” he said finally. “I'm here to test you.”
Alyea suspected events had moved far from the path Chac had intended.
“We left the Qisani last evening and have been walking all night,” Deiq said. “I'd like to request that she be given the chance to rest before beginning the trial.”
Another murmur from the teyanain. The blue-tattooed one now had an expression of open astonishment. “You walk from Qisani in
one night?
” he said.
“
Toi, te hoethra
,” Deiq said. “I swear it to be truth. She walked by my side with the wings of the desert wind.”
“You have right to rest,” the tattooed man said before Chac could speak. He pointed at the tents behind them. “You use my
shall
, my shelter. Go.”
“
Saishe-pais
—gratitude to your honor,” Deiq said, and put a hand on Alyea's shoulder. He steered her past the watching crowd and towards a shelter that had a bright blue stripe near the entrance.
“Don't look back,” he murmured as they walked. “Don't look at anyone. Just get in the shelter and say nothing until we're inside.”
The
shall
was wide, round, and smelled of sun-baked, unwashed human. A light mat lay on the canvas floor, grey and worn with long use; Alyea sat on it without waiting for a prompt. She looked up at Deiq.
“What
can
you tell me,” she said deliberately, watching his mouth twitch as if against a smile, “about what just happened out there?”
He sat beside her, drew his knees up, and grinned.
“Very little,” he said, seeming pleased about something. “Chac expected you to be here several days ago. I made arrangements otherwise. I thought you'd be better prepared for the blood trial of Datda if you'd been through the other two first.”
“Chac didn't want me to pass his trial in the first place, did he?”
“I can't speak to that.”
“You don't have to,” Alyea said sourly. “Gods! This is a mess.”
“I've seen worse,” Deiq said, and stretched out. “Go to sleep.”
She stared at him for a while, watching him as his breathing evened out and his eyes began to flutter in the onset of true sleep. He said nothing more, and as the day's heat began to seep into the chill air of the shelter, it seemed to steal away the energy she'd been using to stay upright.
She didn't remember lying down, but found herself stretched out limp next to Deiq. A heartbeat after that, a darkness thicker than night drew her from consciousness.