And without any reason

For me to suffer the dull needle poison

That comes from a point

Pushed through hides

Tougher than mine.

“Ready?” he asked, and I nodded. He stuck the needle in, and I shrieked.

“Shh,” he said. “I don’t want mama lion coming back just yet.”

So I was quiet and held very still as he stitched and recited. He paused after each line to pull the thread through, tightening his stitch, then set the next as he moved to the next line. There were only a few longer pauses in his steady pace when he was biting off the thread. I focused on his words and on my breath, exhaling in the pauses, holding it during the stitching, wondering how many times the song had been recited in scenes similar to this one, only probably absent the lion cubs I could still hear meeping outside.

When he neared the end of his second recitation, he lifted his head up from where he’d been hunched over my scalp in order to look me in the face. “I’m not finished,” he said apologetically. “Just a little more. Can you recite it from the beginning?” So I did, fumbling for the words at his prompting until, at last, he was done.

He recited one last couplet like a benediction: “Stitched is the seam, whole is the skin, let it hold bad vapors out and blood in.” Then he said, “I’ll get you a drink.”

He brought a blanket as well and draped it over me. I was glad, as I was shivering—more from distress than cold. I pinched it curiously between my fingers.

“A gift from the Namreen. Our bags must be nearly to Perf by now.”

Once again, we had the clothes we wore and little else. At least he’d kept his wallet this time.

“Hungry?”

“No,” I said.

“Rest, then,” said the Attolian. He pulled his blade out of its sheath and put it with his dagger close to the entrance and then lay down beside them. I wasn’t sure I could sleep, but at least the blanket was comforting. The pain in my head throbbed, but it grew no worse. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine that all was well.

I woke with my heart in my mouth. It was dark, and the lioness was screaming. Scrambling toward the back of the cave, I had only a sense of shapes and hasty movements as the Attolian frantically stabbed again and again. I could make out no more, until the lioness pulled her head back and allowed a little of the moonlight into the cave. She reached in, one paw at a time, and the Attolian struck at it with his dagger. I could hear her low, rumbling snarl just outside the cave.

Inside, I could hear the Attolian panting.

“Are you hurt?” I whispered.

“I’m fine,” he said curtly. The lioness had obviously been more than he had expected.

We crouched, listening, as the lioness paced back and forth outside, still snarling. Twice more she tried to enter, but halfheartedly. The Attolian slashed at her face, and eventually she retreated, complaining, down the hillside.

“Try to get some more sleep,” said the Attolian, as if that were a perfectly reasonable suggestion. I reached for the blanket I had abandoned. Pulling it toward me, I pushed myself up against the back wall of the cave as far as I could get from the entrance.

I was surprised when I opened my eyes to find that enough time had passed that it was light enough for me to see the Attolian curled up asleep. When I stirred, his eyes opened. Crouching over, he crossed to my side and bent over my head, sucking his teeth in concern. I reached a hand up to touch the sticky mess in my hair. I must have hit my head against the ceiling without realizing.

“Leave it,” said the Attolian. “Only one or two of the stitches have gone.”

He rifled through the Namreen’s saddlebag and produced some dried meat and another waterskin, which we shared. I was tired and still rattled by the midnight arrival of the rightful owner of our lodgings, and the meat seemed more effort than it was worth. Still, the Attolian insisted, so I ate. I saw that he had two lines harrowed into his forearm, sticking out either end of an awkwardly tied bandage. I should have offered to stitch it for him, as he had stitched for me. I didn’t have his experience and would only have made a mess of it, but I still felt guilty.

After I ate, the Attolian lay down to sleep again. “We’ll hear the kittens if she comes back,” he reassured me, before closing his eyes.

So I sat up, careful not to bump my head this time, and listened like a mouse in a mousehole for any scrabbling sound that might be the lioness and her offspring returning. I realized that I was hot, still tightly wrapped in my blanket, and threw it off. The day stretched long and painfully ahead.

It must have been after noon when we heard voices and a dog barking. The Attolian was instantly alert, and we both leaned close to the opening of the cave as they came nearer. I knew one of the voices—it belonged to a shepherd from the caravan. He kept the dog to help him manage his flock. I didn’t recognize the voice of the other man, but it wasn’t one of Roamanj’s guards, I was sure. I wondered if Roamanj had stopped the caravan to organize a hunt, but these two men seemed to be on their own. The shepherd was insisting his dog would find us, but the other man thought they were on the wrong trail.

“We haven’t seen a single track in more than a mile; the dog is hunting caggi.”

“Look at him. He’s on a trail or he wouldn’t be this eager.” Indeed, we could hear the rising excitement of the dog. I looked to the Attolian, but he only put a finger to his lips.

The dog was barking now, louder and more frantic by the moment.

“Yeah, but trail of what? I’m telling you, he’s hunting caggi. He’s wasting our time following the trail of some—”

The man had been raising his voice to be heard over the dog until he broke off. I was afraid of what he had seen to stop so abruptly. Our footprints? Some other sign of our presence? We were trapped in the cave—escape would be impossible were we discovered. Then we heard the snarl directly over our heads and saw the lioness’s shadow flick across the ground outside. The Attolian and I nearly knocked our heads together trying to see more. The men screamed, the dog barked, the lioness howled. The dog must have held her off for a moment because we could hear the men’s shouts continuing as they ran downhill, followed by the yelping dog, perhaps followed by the lioness as well, we had no way to know. The noise they made diminished in the distance while I stared accusingly at the Attolian.

“They won’t come back,” he pointed out. “They’ll assume the dog was following the scent of the lion, not us, and if they do think we were up here, they’ll assume she has done for us and they can give up.” He actually looked pleased with himself.

I longed to point out to him that there’d been a lion sitting right above us and we hadn’t known it, but I was much too well behaved. I curled up on the blanket with my back to him and pretended to sleep.

When evening came, I turned up my nose at the little bit of food left from the Namreen’s packs. I drank some water and only realized when it was gone that I’d had all that was left. The Attolian waved away my apologies, and I was too sick to care if he was angry.

“It’s just the wound fever,” he said as he covered me in a blanket I didn’t want. “You’ll feel better tomorrow.” I fell into a nightmare-filled sleep of lions sent by my master to drag me to an afterlife I knew would be even worse than life itself.