“We can’t rejoin the caravan, and we can’t ride by it on the road. We can’t go back toward Sherguz—there may be more Namreen behind us, and if there are, we can’t outrun them on the open ground.” He waved out at the undulating plains below us. He meant I couldn’t outrun them on open ground. “We’ll find a place to hide and see what happens. We don’t want the bodies lying out here like road markers.”

He used his shirt to elide the telltale marks in the dust of the roadway and then looked ruefully at it before tucking it into his belt. Slinging his armor on over his bare chest, he shouldered the saddlebags and supplies from the Namreen and climbed back up to where I was sitting. Then we walked into the hills.

From a rise, the Attolian looked back down at the roadway.

“Why Namreen?” he wondered aloud. “Why send the emperor’s bodyguard after an escaped slave?”

I knew why. I also knew that the Attolian wouldn’t live to see his king again. I’d thought the worst he would suffer was pointless travel and some embarrassment when he returned to his king, but I’d failed to evade him in Sherguz and now he was much too closely tied to me to escape my fate. The innkeeper would have told the Namreen whom they were pursuing.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I could apologize to him even if I couldn’t tell him the truth.

“It makes no sense,” said the Attolian, slowly shaking his head. He wasn’t as stupid as I’d thought back on the riverboat. If he put too many things together, it would lead to more than the hostile look he’d given me in the trading city’s back alleyways. If he knew I’d deceived him, if he knew what he and his king had been entangled in by my hand, he might march me right back to the city of Ianna-Ir and turn me over to the emperor. It was his only hope at this point—and my only hope was to continue to deceive him.

“It’s because I’m so valuable. I was to be a gift to the new emperor, so my disappearance was an insult to him as well. Do you know what I’m worth?” I asked. At my price, the Attolian’s eyebrows went up. I’d thought that would distract him.

“Perhaps your king did not know?”

The Attolian shrugged. “No one knows what my king knows,” he said. Without saying more, he led the way to the next hill. Though the sun was still high in the sky, dark shadows filled more and more of my vision. The Attolian gave me his arm, and I leaned heavily on him. I knew I was moving slowly and struggled on, mumbling apologies. Finally, the Attolian left me sitting again and went to scout ahead. He came back saying he’d found a good spot and led me to a cave under a rocky overhang, with a small entrance. He helped me slide in and then left me again while he went to find water.

I woke lying on my back, the ceiling just above me as if I were in a very high bunk, but I was puzzled by the sense of hard ground directly underneath me. I thought I was back in the emperor’s palace, waking after a beating. I turned my head to see the sandy floor of the cave and remembered the Namreen. My head throbbed as I tried to make sense of my surroundings. The cave was low, but deep, the back of it filled with darkness. It smelled strongly and very badly of whatever animal had lived in it before, probably a cat, possibly a herd of cats. The Attolian was squatting beside me, a dripping cloth in his hand.

“It stinks,” I said.

The Attolian nodded. “It’s all right, though. We’ll be safe here. I’m going to have to stitch your head.”

My panic had passed, replaced with a fatalism that was far more familiar. Hoping it would carry me graciously through to my demise, I nodded. Gently the Attolian began to wash my head until he could part my hair and see the wound clearly. I don’t know where the needle and thread came from; perhaps the Namreen had it in their supplies, or perhaps the Attolian had bought it along with his other purchases back in the river town. He’d gotten a leather wallet that he wore strapped to his belt and may have carried the needle and thread in it. Anywhere else and it would have been on its way with the rest of our possessions to Perf.

As he threaded the needle, the light dimmed, and there was a scrabbling sound from the entrance to the cave. Keeping my head still, I rolled my eyes to see a lion cub poking its head through the opening. The Attolian hissed and threw a pebble. The cub hissed in return and retreated and it dawned on me that the cave stank not because it had been a lair in the past, but because it still was one. Twisting to look around, I found myself surrounded by gnawed bones.

I gaped at the Attolian, who was now clearly revealed as a madman.

“No one will look for us here,” he said defensively.

“The lion will!” I said, my short-lived fatalism shattered.

“She’ll care about the cubs more than the den,” the Attolian said soothingly. He nodded to the relatively small opening and assured me we could keep out a full-grown cat. “It was just luck that I saw the cubs playing outside the den as I passed and that the lioness was away.” He seemed so unconcerned I almost believed him.

“Put your head back down,” he said. “Do you know any long prayers?”

“What? Ones to keep lions away?” I asked. I was thoroughly bewildered, and winced as the Attolian used both hands to adjust his work surface, my head.

“No, just something that will distract you while I stitch. I need you to hold still. Can you recite a poem?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. I find it hard to think clearly when I am in pain. It has always been a wonderment to me that people beat their slaves and ask them questions at the same time. Surely it is counterproductive to expect sense from someone you are beating senseless. “I can’t remember any poems.”

“No prayers?”

The Attolians recited long prayers in their temple rituals. “We don’t pray that way,” I said. I couldn’t think of any texts except the instructional ones from my homeland, taught to very small children.

Ine brings the rain

Ire starts the grain

Rae brings the dust

Harvest first we must

I remembered sitting in the dark temple chanting it with other children my age as the rains pattered down outside. I thought the Attolian’s stitching would take longer than my reciting, though.

“You understand my language pretty well,” he said.

“Yes,” I answered. My Attolian was probably better than his. He had a farmer’s accent and didn’t always conjugate his verbs correctly.

“Good. I’ll recite the chant we use. It’s called the surgery song. I’ll say it one time through first so you will know how long it is.” He looked at my head speculatively, turning it back and forth in his hands. “I’ll probably have to say it several times through,” he warned me, “but this way you’ll have an idea how long it will be until I am done.”

This was not a technique I’d ever encountered in my experience with Mede healers, but then, I was not a soldier.

“It goes like this,” the Attolian said, and recited very slowly:

There was a girl in Attolia town

Could knit and stitch with the best of them.

Wish she were here with my legion,

Wish she were here instead of the surgeon.

She’d take care of this painful lesion

With tiny little stitches