The Sands of Tanaris (Vale)

This'll be a story in several parts covering the time Vale spent in Tanaris about three years ago. I should add that I'm making everything up, as naturally there's very little on Tanarisi culture in WoW lore (though Sophyra's done some work on making educated guesses, ones with which I agree and am using in this tale!). So... if you're thinking 'there aren't any people like this in Tanaris...' you're half right, but I'm attempting to describe what I hope is a believable, and yet somewhat in depth, culture.

That said, I hope the story is of some interest, and please toss criticism/commentary my way if you have any!

==

The Sands of Tanaris

The splendour of the desert sun

With a gentle movement, for the proud and wiry horses of the desert have delicate mouths, Vale reined in her mare at the the crest of a great dune. The sand swept away endlessly before her in rippling silver waves; there was no sign of life, not even the scuttling grey scorpions that had occasionally crossed her path since she had set out from the goblin settlement. She had kept well away from the creatures – the sorrel mare shied and snorted at even the distant click-and-rattle of their exoskeletons – but whenever she saw one, her mouth had twisted into a slight smirk of kinship as she thought of the mark burned against her chest.

The desert was a thing alive unto itself, Vale had decided in the past days, and she was beginning to consider it as sailors considered the sea. It was a vivacious and cruel mistress, arrayed in the sparse finery of slender, spiny cacti and a few gnarled trees, adorning her hair at night with lush blooms of the colour of blood, flowers that closed away again when the shining disk of the sun appeared each morning on the horizon. Beetles and scorpions scuttled around her feet, the ornaments of her court, and her song was the song of the little dust-wrens that flitted and nested in the hollows of the cacti.

Yet even the ragged beauty of the desert sometimes wilted before the desiccating heat, and there were expanses such as this one where the the sand shimmered like water and there was no soil, however dry, to offer anchor to so much as a thorn. Vale had been travelling at night, when there was cool air to caress her cracked skin, and resting in the shadow of a sandstone outcropping or a straggle of scrub juniper during the heat of the day. But it was nearing dawn now, and there was neither rock nor shrub, and so a knot of worry had begun to form in her belly. She should have reached the coast by now.

She lifted her head into the night breezes, drawing away the drape of cloth that protected her face from heat and wind and sand, and searched the air for the scent of the salt brine that drifted in from the sea. But there was nothing. A dryness filled her nostrils and she covered her face again; she had no choice, then, but to press on eastward and to pray that they had not drifted too far south into the endless wastes that she had heard called the Great Desert.

Vale touched her heel to the mare's side and began guiding her down the slope. Tanaris, she thought with a wry smile; what a world lay before her if she only managed to survive it. And as the sand shifted beneath her horse's hooves with a soft slip-hush of grains sliding down the face of the dune, she set her face to the gruelling path before her.

**

Two days later she was still crossing what seemed to be endless sands, and she had no more water.

As the sun had climbed to dizzying heights on the first day, its rays licking across the whole sky until there was nothing but white-hot gold both above and below her, she had at last dragged herself from her horse and curled up beneath one of the dunes. There was little shelter save for the shadow of the sorrel mare huddled beside her, but they could not go on forever; so man and beast had waited for the solace of nightfall, struggling to breathe beneath the splendour of the desert sun.

And now it was the second day without relief. The sorrel was tired; Vale could see it in the glassy film that had slowly crept over her eyes and in the way that the head which had once arched like a proud battle-standard now drooped toward the ground, the mane fluttering like a tattered red rag.

When dusk had finally drifted up from the horizon the evening before, slowly spreading its cool fingers across the scorching skies, Vale had given the mare her head in hopes that perhaps one of the desert's own could find direction where she could not – if only to lead to water, to lead to anything beyond the expanse that threatened to swallow them. Yet through the night there had been nothing save for the steady sound of hooves against sand and the great windswept dunes around then, silver beneath a gibbous moon. Near dawn, the mare had stumbled, and so Vale had slid from the saddle to walk alongside, her boots forming a second set of imprints in the shifting sands. Her head had felt strangely light, and she had clung to a stirrup in hopes that she could stay upright herself.

Now, she was uncertain whether or not she could continue to walk, and yet she had no choice. She had wrapped her face entirely save for her eyes, though she kept them closed as well, staggering forward with her hand wrapped in the stirrup-leather. She couldn't look up; the desert was like molten fire, and she was walking closer and closer to the heart of it...

Vale paused as she heard sand slipping from a dune somewhere in the distance, the sudden soft rushing sound that had grown so familiar. But no, it wasn't in the distance, it was–

Her swollen throat couldn't even manage to form a cry as the sand slid from beneath her feet and she stumbled forward. She felt herself slipping, losing her grip on the stirrup – and then she was sliding down a vast expanse, tumbling, the sand rushing beneath her sleeves and scraping and burning her skin – and then, suddenly, it all came to an end and she was still again. She couldn't move, though the sand around her was like a funeral pyre. From a distance she heard a horse's shrill whinny, and she forced open her eyes in time to see a streak of copper moving across the white gold of the horizon.

Her mare: so now she was alone. Vale tried to cough, but her tongue and throat were like clay. If this was the end... then it was a poor end for Valerias Caan. It was a poor end... she tried to struggle to her hands and knees despite the burning against her skin. A whinnying of horses again... horses, but... no there had only been one, her sorrel...

And then there was a shout, and Vale lifted her head to find herself staring at the bright curve of a blade.

Very interesting story about the desert and Vale`s time there, I quite liked what image you`ve created for the dunes, and the atmosphere you`ve created in this story regarding the sands and heat of Tanaris left me with the feeling that I need to find something very cool to drink after reading this piece. Should I ask for moar? Yus plz!

Thank ye! If I made you thirsty I reckon I did my job well xD

It's curious, I'm finding it hard to write about Vale in a long narrative kind of story -- hers have always been so based on getting into her head in short snippets. So, I'm not sure how I feel about the writing quality and the progression of events, but I do have some plans for the tale at least! So, if anyone has suggestions, let me know, it's all rather experimental.

==

The people who bear these sands

A rag of breath caught in Vale's throat as she raised her sunscorched eyes from the steel to its owner. The glinting of the metal against the gold of the desert was such that she could barely see; only the outline of a white-clad figure, and a face shadowed by a dark beard. There was another shout – words, this time, in a harsh tongue that she had never heard – and the apparition before her looked over his shoulder, answering in kind.

What manner of people could bear these sands? She thought amidst the heat that raged across her skin and into the very corners of her mind. And yet they are my deliverers.

She threw the last of her strength into willing herself to raise one hand, her cracked lips parting to form words. And at the same moment, the white-garbed stranger turned his dark head toward her again and, with a motion as careless as hers was pained, lifted the curved blade to bring it down against her.

'I beg of you shelter and aid.'

Though all things happened at once, in a hair's breadth of time, it was to Vale as if darkness came up to surround her even before the man swung the blade, and her words seemed lost among the winds. She had learned what she could of the Tanarisi before she had ventured into their lands, had prepared herself with the few customs and traditions that bound together the nomadic tribes of the desert. Chief among these had been their respect for hospitality – once claimed, one was a guest – and yet perhaps what men said and what might happen to a half-dead traveller beneath the desert sky were different things.

The blade seemed to hover above her like a sunstreaked bird; and then in mid-swing the bearded man spun the sword away, so that she heard its whirring song and the breath of air as it passed beside her face. There was another torrent of words from behind, sharp with impatience, but the bearded man answered it and then knelt beside Vale.

'I, Hassan Mas Dhari, grant you my shelter and aid,' he said, his voice harsh and thick with an accented common that Vale only half understood, and yet it was enough. Relief flooded her senses and she slumped against the sands again, fighting the darkness that threatened to wash over her. She tried to form a reply, but her head felt so heavy- Everything was so heavy.

She heard another exchange in the desert tongue, and then as she felt herself gathered up and lifted from the sands as one might lift a child, the darkness at last came crashing down around her, and she knew nothing more.

**

Vale dreamed of white gold sands so hot that it was if she had fallen into the sun. She struggled to move but she was bound in place, while dark things skittered across the dunes unharmed: scorpions, her kin, and yet she couldn't survive like they, not here, where everything was burning, always burning.

Then there was a voice, rising and falling like a wind, it cadence full of syllables that had no meaning to her. And yet the fire of the sun that engulfed her seemed to lessen a little as she ceased her struggling for a moment and listened...

When she awoke, it was to the sight of a roof above her, and when she moved a hand she found herself abed, a roughspun blanket wrapped around her. She could smell the pleasant tang of smoke, and then far-distant, as if it had come as a gentle breath to cool her burning dreams, the salt-and-brine of the sea. Vale raised herself onto her elbow, surprised by how weak she was; she had never been weak, not even among the wolves in the village of her youth. The desert had won this match, she thought, but she was still alive, and so the fight was not over...

She looked up and found that she was in a tent, its sloping shelter stretched from a central pole across a space as large as a small dwelling – it was a small dwelling, she thought, as she looked up, blinking, through the shaft of honey-coloured sunlight that fell through the tent's opening. In the midst of the space was a fire ringed with stones, and beside it knelt a woman.

'Where– ' Vale began, but her head was beginning to spin as if with overmuch wine, and her voice came out dry and cracked.

The woman turned from the fireside, and as she stood, Vale saw that she had the same browned skin and the same hair, dark as charcoal beneath a loose white scarf, as the man who had plucked her from the endless sands. She was small and thin-framed, like a fluttering bird, and as she crossed the floor with a clay pitcher in her hands, she offered a fleeting smile.

'Be still and drink,' she said, the words sounding strange in her heavy, accented speech, and moved a hand around Vale's back to support her. Her arm was stronger than Vale would have guessed; stronger at present than her own. Vale drank from the pitcher, the bitter thought washed away amidst the sour and yet not unpleasant taste of goat's milk. It had been a long time since she had tasted it, years since the dry farmlands in the west. Another world, it had been, and now here she was–

'Where am I?' she whispered, as she looked up into the woman's narrow face.

'Be still,' she said again, as she lifted the pitcher from Vale's grasp. Her voice had quality both gentle and commanding, as if she were used to the sickroom, and had often cared for those who had fallen foul of the cruelty of the endless sands. And then, after a long pause while she turned to set the pitcher against the dirt-packed floor, the woman looked at Vale.

'Three days you burned with fever, and so you must rest.' She lifted a hand, and the angry words that had risen on Vale's tongue remained only thoughts, quieting as easily as they had first flared. 'I am Eshani Mir Dhari, and you are safe among the Dharayid.'

Approval, mine you haz.

A good story. More to come? :3

Thank you Mik! <3 There'll definitely be more to come.

Note: In the chapter below, the terms 'tuhru' and 'shaykh,' meaning 'sir' and 'chief' respectively, I've borrowed from Sophyra's project of Tanarisi language. All the other words/terms/culture I've made up.

==

The rumours of a gathering storm

It was dark, though not yet the darkest hour of the night. The great constellation that the Dharayid called the Warrior hung over the eastern horizon, the stars that formed his upswung blade burning fiercely above the sea. The shimmering heat of the day was long vanished and a chill clung to the breezes that drifted through the coastal palms. Yet the desert was far from slumbering; she was more alive beneath the pale moon, in the whispering hours when mice and voles came scurrying from their burrows and little sand owls emerged blinking from their holes among the cacti. At night the promise of rain hung heavy in the air and, stirred by the pulse of life, the harsh lands blushed and revealed their beauty. The desert was as deceptive as she was strong, a thing which no one knew better than Hassan, son of Jareth, the leader of his tribe, who squatted beside a low fire sharpening a knife.

For eight years he had shepherded his small flock in the barren lands, moving each season or more along the rocky coast, or sometimes trekking inland to where oases flourished. There was more grass for their herds in the lush places where springs bubbled from the ground, each an ancient gift from the desert to reward her people for their tenacity. Yet where the oases were, there were always bandits; nomads like most of the Tanarisi tribes, but outcasts whose only living was theft. Rayani, the Dharayid named them: the accursed, for they were men without tribe or honour to their names.

Usually a camp of two hundred such as Hassan Mas Dhari's was enough to frighten them away; usually, but not always. His father Jareth, who had been chieftain before him, had been killed in a raid among the verdant foliage of one of the Maidensprings, a chain of oases that were the three greatest and most constant sources of water in central Tanaris, and Hassan had not forgotten.

He lay down the whetstone and ran a callused thumb along the curved dagger. This was the blade he had pulled from his father's chest; through the ancient rituals safeguarded by the tribe's hakara he had cleansed the weapon of the blood that it had tasted and had made it his own, as was tradition. He remembered every word.

'Lady of the Shining Sands, Lady who sustains the blood of our people, bind this blade to the hand of Hassan, son of Jareth, that the strength of his father's blood may become his own. Lady of the Flowering Night, cleanse this blade, that through the death of this man Jareth his son might lead his people to life, and may what happened on this day never be forgotten.'

May what happened on this day never be forgotten. They were ancient words, the traditional ending to every Dharayid ritual. And it was so: the Dharayid always remembered. Sometimes, Hassan thought, it was why they were still alive.

'Tuhru, the goats are restless.'

Hassan lifted his head to meet the approach of the speaker, a young man with the same high forehead and aquiline nose that he had himself. 'And so? You have the herd watch tonight, do you not?'

'I do, with Farinash, but... it's a restlessness such as I haven't seen. The land is clean, and there is no sign of scorpids, nor of jackals. And jackals wouldn't worry them so, at least, I don't think they would.'

The chieftain shifted, watching the boy's face in the firelight. Majar, barely old enough to grow the beginnings of a beard, was the most like to Hassan of all his sons in looks, and yet he was very unlike him in manner. The Dharayid were a patient people, but Majar thought too much, and was uncertain in his own judgements.

'Then what do you make of it?' Hassan asked, laying the knife down on the sandy soil and folding his arms across his chest.

Majar hesitated. 'The hakara says that a storm is coming. Perhaps... the herd has sensed it.'

Hassan had heard the hakara's mutterings himself, and as any good chieftain, had made note of what they contained. Yet he knew also that some of the wise woman's words were meant for later times, that some were not what they seemed, and that there was no sense in fearing them, only in heeding them.

'And if they have? The rains come every year. The Dharayid may winter beside the sea, but we are no fisher folk to live by the whims of the water.'

'Your forgiveness, tuhru, but... there is talk of another storm.' The boy leaned against his shepherd's staff, having the good grace to redden somewhat at the weakness in his words. 'It is said that there's a new power among the rayani, and... among some of the tribes.'

Hassan frowned, tugging at his coarse beard. He knew the talk of which Majar spoke; for some month the traders that his people encountered in their travelling had brought rumours of men conjuring dark spirits in the heart of the great wastes, and, indeed, that some of the tribes had taken to following magics both powerful and devastating. But always the desert had been full of spirits, since the beginning of time, and always the Lady had guided the tribes through her perilous sands. There was no reason that it should be different now, no matter what black things other men turned to.

'It may be so, Majar, but have we met any of these men? The Lady watches over us as she always has. Why should you think the goats would be restless at traders' rumours?'

Majar shifted again, and then Hassan knew that there was more that the youth had not yet said. He looked, searching for his son's gaze; when at last his eyes were met, Majar spoke quickly.

'What about the woman who lies beneath your roof? She is not a trader's rumour. She is not from the tribes, and you found her on the edge of the great wastes.'

The woman... so that was it. When Hassan and his oldest son, Jaqar, had brought her back to the camp four days past, she had been nearly dead of the desert, her skin cracked and blistered and her head burning with fever. It would have been the simple thing to put an end to the desert's work, but she had found words enough to beg for his shelter, and once that was done he had been honour bound to try to save her life. A few of the tribe had muttered, for strangers were strangers, but the woman was not the first stray traveller that they had found dying beneath the sun's glare, and she would not be the last. And now, though she was still weak and had spoken little, she was alive and she was a guest.

Hassan rose to his feet. 'Have you seen in her some dark demon, then?'

'She... is not of the tribes. Her skin is so pale, like milk, have you not seen? She...'

With a horizontal movement of his arm, Hassan cut him off. 'You shame yourself with this talk. I have seen men so pale when I have gone north to trade, and they were fools, not demons. This woman is a guest, and until I decide she is a danger, she will remain so.'

Majar opened his mouth to speak, but closed it again, clutching his staff. The fire flickered between the two men, the driftwood burning low and red as a few wavering flames rose from the heart of it.

'As you say, shaykh,' the boy muttered at last. Bowing, he turned from the fireside back toward the slopes of sparse grass where the goats were grazing, and where old Farinash waited to keep the rest of the night watch in his company.

Hassan, son of Jareth, looked into the bright embers of the dying fire, his brow lined with thought. Only time would tell when it came to the woman, but he trusted his wife's keen senses, and she had raised no concern in the four days that she had been tending to the stranger. Whatever there was in the news that came with the traders – and Hassan had no doubt that there was some grain of truth – he would not have his son spouting womanish superstition and clinging to stubborn fears. It was a kindness of fortune that Majar was Hassan's third son, and that he would not have to be a chieftain of the Dharayid, but he was still the son of one.

With a grunt of irritation, the chieftain reached for his knife again, and, kicking out the last sparks of the fire, made his way toward his tent.

The voice that whispers through her dreams

'It is time for you to enter the world again,' he had said in the soft voice she had grown infinitely used to; a voice dry like the rustling of parchment, yet one that it did not occur to its hearer to contradict. 'It is time for you to make use of the tapestry of knowledge that I have woven in you.'

'And where would you have me go?' Vale had replied, choosing her words carefully as she always did, observing the robed figure of her master through the pale violet light of the shadowflame that flickered between her hands.

'You must decide. It will be a place of humans, for your initial experimentation should take place amongst the shadows of those familiar to you. Yet you will not go to a city, and you will not venture too far into society, lest you imperil all things toward which you have been working.'

The shadowflame began to rise and to wrap itself around her hands, drifting like a serpent's tongue around her forearms and coiling about her elbows. When she spoke, her voice was a silvery whisper. 'I will go to Tanaris.'

She thought that he smiled as he watched her, though from the long months she had spent with him she knew that his expressions were as impossible to predict as the drifting of the wind across the sparse Barrens grass.

'I will teach you what you need to know,' he said, rising from the seat across from her. In the softness of the shadow-light, his stretched skin was ageless as he raised a hand and brought his fingers to her cheek. 'And then it will be time.'

**

After her fever broke, Vale lay abed for two days. On the first morning of her waking she had attempted to rise, but when she had slipped from beneath the blankets and set her feet on the floor, the room had spun before her and she had nearly fallen. Wordlessly, Eshani had helped her back into the bed, the bangles on her slim wrists clinking against each other with a soft timbre of sound, and had given her goat's milk that must have been drugged with poppy, for Vale had dreamed strange dreams.

She stood atop an outcropping of rock on an unknown shore, the night draping the skies around her while a red moon, the rust-red colour of old blood, rose in the east. His voice whispered around her, born on the sea breezes and yet more potent than any salt spray. His words caressed her, wound themselves around her like a silver thread, snaking across her skin and up her spine, rippling through her hair and then sliding into her mind, exploring the chambers and corridors of her thoughts. And all the while she stood there, tensed, watching the moon rise and grow, and as it loomed across the star-blanketed night, his voice grew within her thoughts until she could no longer hear the words, only the voice itself like a rising gale, until the blood moon seemed to fill the whole sky and there was nothing but the storm.

When she woke, it was the early hours of the morning, her head was thick with the milk of the poppy and the dream had left a sour taste in her mouth.

That day, though she was restless, Vale remained in her bed, leaning against the cushions with a soft-knit shawl pulled around her shoulders. Dreams were only dreams, and she had a task to accomplish when she recovered: and so, dragging her thoughts back into the sandswept world that was the real one, she asked Eshani about her tribe as the woman and her handmaidens went about their work.

The two young servants barely spoke at all, save for a few hushed words in their own tongue, and neither did the soft-eyed girl who Vale learned was Natayah, the wife of Eshani's oldest son, but Eshani herself answered Vale's questions with concise and graceful sentences.

Her husband was the chieftain, the same man who had answered Vale's feverish plea among the sands. Vale could hardly recall the meeting now, and what it had been like dying of thirst; the image was distant, as foreign to the tent in which she now lay and the pulse of life that murmured in the air around her as were the forests and people of her childhood. Yet for once it seemed that fate had done her a good turn, for now she was the guest of the leader of a people; not, perhaps, of one of the coastal villages she had been hoping to reach, but of one of the wandering tribes of the Dharayid, a people who, Eshani explained, drove a herd of goats before them to provide them with their needs, for there was little hunting in the desert.

Yet herdsmen though they might be, there was a refinement in the slender wife of the chieftain that drew Vale's curiosity. There was no coarseness in her manner, nor in those of the women she kept around her. Vale watched as Eshani and her flock combed wool and spun it into cloth, as they cooked the evening meal and tended to the fire, as they took the woven rugs that covered the tent's floor outside to beat them free of dust and sand, and yet always their work was deliberate, careful, well done. It was unlike that of the women that Vale had seen working throughout the course of her twenty-five years; fishwives and slatterns in Ratchet, rough-handed farmers' wives in the villages she had known across the sea, and then there had been her own clan, of which none among them had ever heard the word gentle.

Her own clan... the thought of them grated against the lintel of her fever-wearied mind, only the merest whispers of memory managing to slip through the doorway. They were still there, waiting for her across the sea, their pale bones worried by wild dogs, strewn among the tangled undergrowth and picked clean by the circling crows. The village had always had crows nearby; they had known, they had waited. Closing her eyes for a moment, Vale shook herself from the remembrances and strove to disentangle her thoughts from the web of the past.

On the other side of the fire, Eshani was singing, leant forward on a low stool, spinning a skein of wool from a distaff. Her handmaids sat at her feet, listening; one spun in like manner and the other wound the new-made thread around a spool, while soft-eyed Natayah gathered her skirt with one hand and knelt to tend the fire. Vale drew in a breath, gathering her strength, as the low song resonated within her, soothing her in its unknown tongue. She had so much to do here; she had no time for dreams and memory, no time to wrestle with splinters of doubt or pain.

She pushed back the pile of blankets and swung her feet over the side of the bed. And then, five days after Hassan Mas Dhari had plucked her from the burning grip of the desert, Vale was able to stand without fear that her knees would give way beneath her.

Weeeeeeell. I'm bringing this story back, because I've recently begun RPing a new character - a Tanarisi woman - who I have had in mind as a background character for years. I knew how I wanted this tale to end when I started it, but since I never intended to RP Aya I dropped off with writing it; but now I am, so, I really owe it to both her and Vale to finish this.

As always, I really want to improve my writing so if there's -anything- that you think I could change for the better, just say so. Thoughts, or reactions, or all of that are welcome too <3 And hopefully in the future I'll have more chapters up.

==

She who walks with the feather-light of dawn

Eshani gave her a dress of soft blue wool in the style of the Dharayid: the garment itself was simple, with a sash that went over one shoulder and draped loosely across the chest before being wrapped about the waist. As Vale tugged the dress down over her hips and smoothed the skirt, and as one of the slight, quiet handmaidens tied the sash for her, she began to find life again.

On that first day that she was well enough, Vale sat outside the chieftain's tent on a little stool that one of the little handmaidens had brought for her and had covered with a soft black goatskin. It was a few days later, resting there, that she first saw Aya.

There was a stream that flowed from some distant rocky spring down to the sea, and it was for reason of its water that Hassan's people had made camp. Each morning the women carried their waterskins down to the streamside and then bore them filled back to their tents, offering prayers to the Lady and then setting themselves to the day's work. Perhaps because she was still too frail from the harsh embrace of the sands, or perhaps because Eshani had not asked her, Vale as yet carried no water, but each morning watched the desert women instead. There were young girls, their movements still as straight and careless as boys'; women grown and wedded, as comfortable in their work as they were with their callused hands and strong arms; wrinkled women whose backs had begun to stoop a little beneath the water's weight, yet who carried their heads proudly, as if to say they were not so close to the grave as to keep them from their days' work.

But also there was one woman, who unlike the rough undyed goatswool that the Dharayid wore day to day, wore a dress stained the colour of saffron and a drape of red silk to veil her hair. She walked unlike the others, with a gentle sway to her body, and there was a softness to her steps that reminded Vale of a bright songbird, waiting to fly.

'Who is that?' Vale asked of one of the young handmaidens who stood with spindle and distaff at the opening of the tent-flap.

The girl looked to where Vale gestured, and then turned her eyes to Vale, large startled eyes like a doe's. She gave a little shake of her head as the saffron woman disappeared among the tents, and then, when Vale thought that she would not speak at all, said; 'Aya.' And then she looked down to her spinning, as though the wool that she gathered round the spindle was the only thing in the world worth her thinking, and Vale looked out instead at the eastern sea as dawn feathered across the horizon like the soft rising wings of a bird.

Later, when she sat around the central fire in the great tent to eat the evening meal with the rest of Hassan the chieftain's household, Vale leaned aside and asked Eshani about the woman called Aya. 'Ah,' said the woman, as if she had been expecting the question. 'She came from the sands, much like you.'

When Vale only looked at her, bringing to her mouth a piece of flat bread dipped in broth, she continued: 'My son found her near dead from thirst, a year and more ago. We welcomed her and gave her refuge, for she was fleeing from danger, and now she lives among us and shares our food.'

'It is in my thoughts that you like her little,' Vale said, watching the other woman's face as she set her bread back into her bowl.

Eshani paused for a moment, reaching forward to the cast iron kettle – the pride of any woman of the wandering tribes – that hung from a hook over the fire, and made an inclination of her head as she served more of the broth to Hassan, and then offered the ladle to her son's soft-eyed wife. 'It is not about my liking,' she said at last, settling back into her place and turning her eyes to her guest. 'She is a fetah.'

Though at the time the word meant nothing to her, there was in Eshani's tone a strange regret that made Vale's weary head spark into thought. She had come in search of a mind; she had come to exercise what she had drawn from the teachings of her master, the one whose voice whispered to her. Perhaps she had found the key in this woman Aya, who, like she, was not of the Dharayid.