“Will he not reveal your plans if slave hunters catch up with him?” I asked, but the Attolian shook his head.

“He was happy to fool whoever was pursuing me in exchange for most of the coin I got for my ring, but he didn’t know a slave was involved. I understand that imperial law takes a very dim view of people who aid escaping slaves, even unwittingly.” So he had taken my warning seriously. “If that guard finds out he’s helped a slave escape, he is most likely to lay very low and pretend he never met me at all.”

“Perf is the wrong direction, though.” I almost didn’t say anything, still unsettled to have misjudged him, wary of seeming to doubt him, but he answered without any sign of offense.

“We can go northwest on the road from Perf to Koadester, then cross the Taymet Mountains into Zaboar. There’s an Attolian trade house there, and Attolian ships often trade in the Shallow Sea. Any of them will take us at least to the Narrows, where we can get another ship to carry us home.”

He had an open face and an honest one, and I’d mistaken that for stupidity. He was not a liar by nature, certainly, but he was not the fool I had taken him for.

“Not the fool you took me for, Kamet?” he asked.

Wrong-footed, I could only wring my hands. I’d not only underestimated him, I’d let my opinion show. “It seems to be me who is all kinds of fool lately,” I said. I almost added “master” but bit it back in time.

The Attolian snorted. “Look up, Kamet, you’re a free man.”

I raised my eyes to his face.

He shrugged. “We all spend our time under the sign of the idiot,” he said, and the matter seemed settled, at least as far as he was concerned.

We found the entryway with the striped curtain and made our way up the steps that led to it. Inside, on bales and boxes, were the other guards for the caravan, sitting at their ease with cups of tea. The Attolian nodded to the men. I did not miss their measuring glances—I don’t think I looked “good with a sword.” Once the Attolian picked a bale for himself, I settled on a box nearby. Raising the height of the floor above the courtyard to keep the dust and dirt out seemed to have been a futile effort. Everything was coated in a fine grit. One of the guards shouted through another doorway that led deeper into the warren of windowless rooms, and a skinny boy appeared with a tea tray and poured from a large pot into the men’s cups. Silently he handed two more cups to us, filled them, and then slipped back into the darkness.

My cup was cracked and mended with staples, ugly but serviceable. The crack was a ragged black line like a road on a map, surrounded by stains that might mark deserts or seas, if only I could read them. I ran my finger along the rim to make sure there was no rough edge before I put my lip to it. Then I sipped the hot tea and listened as the guards talked. Most of them were longtime retainers of Roamanj. One of them looked like a westerner. I thought he might be from the Greater Peninsula, but he greeted us in the round vowels of a Southern Gant and said his name was Benno. Another guard, new like us, was a Braeling, with fair hair and the bright blue eyes of the north. He had loosened his shirt, and his fair skin was a motley of red where the sun had burned it and white where the sun hadn’t touched.

He had been in the midst of introducing himself to the others when we arrived, and he backtracked to tell us that he had come down the inland waterways from Mûr to the Shallow Sea with a company of mercenaries. It was a common story. Men set out in companies, and one by one, the companies were whittled down either by death or by disagreements. The Braeling, whose name was Skell, or Skerrell, I was never certain which, had parted ways with his friends when they had decided to return to the north. He was working his way to Perf and meant to press on farther to the empire’s eastern frontier. In the mountains there, he thought his experience of winter would make him valuable. He said that he would have to regrow his heavy beard when he reached cold weather again.

“And you?” he asked the Attolian.

“Aris,” he answered, pointing to himself. “Metit,” he said, pointing to me. There was a moment when the other guards waited for more, but it passed quickly. One by one, the men offered their own names. They answered questions about Roamanj, saying that he orchestrated his caravans well and that there were rarely problems from bandits on the road to Perf. There might be more trouble heading south from there, but the caravan would join another, and more of Roamanj’s regulars were waiting in Perf to sign on. They were all old hands, and it appeared that the caravan was going to be safe even if I was one of the people responsible for protecting it.

We whiled away the afternoon, the guards exchanging stories about the merchants and the caravan masters and the various jobs they had worked up and down the emperor’s roads. The Attolian nodded along at the appropriate moments, his Mede evidently good enough to follow the conversation. The boy from the back room eventually brought us food, and after some reshuffling we slept there on thin mattresses rolled out on the floor. Long before the first light of day had dawned, we would be up and on the road.

I woke to the sound of the animal keepers leading out the horses and the camels and loading them with their burdens. The guards around me yawned and stretched themselves and called for more tea and cakes for breakfast. One by one, the boxes and bales we were sitting on were carried away until we were sitting cross-legged on the filthy stone floor. In several more hours all was prepared outside and Roamanj put his head through the curtain to call us to our work.

The other guards had bundles that they dropped into an assigned wagon. The single bundle that the Attolian and I had shared was much smaller, just a change of clothes. Again, we drew measuring looks, but no one commented. As guards we took turns on horseback, moving up and down the caravan. When not riding, we sat on one of the wagons or walked beside them. They went slowly enough and rattled so much that walking was almost a relief. There were sixteen wagons altogether, with about three times as many beasts of burden interspersed between them. When I had nothing else to do, I tried to count them, but never came to a number I could trust. The merchants traveled with their goods, and many, also, with their families. Wives, children, livestock roamed in every direction. It was part of the guards’ job to make sure none wandered too far. As the caravan traveled, its components would slowly spread out, and then at Roamanj’s direction those at the front would stop and wait until it had been collected back together before moving on.

No one seemed able to speak in anything but a shout. By the end of the first, very long day we were still climbing out of the fertile valley of the Ianna and I was surprised anyone still had a voice, but evidently some did. There was a great deal of loud swearing as the animals were staked for the night and the camp set up. There were arguments about everything, from where tents would be pitched to who would water what animals in what order. Roamanj was the universal arbiter and walked the camp with a guard at either shoulder.

There was no caravan site to protect us that night or for the next several nights; none seemed to be needed this close to Sherguz. (I felt we had traveled halfway to Perf and was dismayed when I learned the actual distance we’d covered.) With no bandits to fear, our responsibility was to prevent petty theft. Cook fires were started, and food made, if you could call it that, and the guards arranged among themselves to take the night shifts in turn.