When I awoke in the morning, I did feel better, my fever had broken, and the waterskins were full. The insane Attolian had been out to refill them. I told myself that I was lucky not to have been awakened by the lioness eating me and fell asleep again. A little later the Attolian checked his work on my head and nodded, pleased. He brought me water to drink and asked if I could eat something.

I nodded, and he gave me what I thought was probably the last of the dried meat. I held it in my mouth to soften before I swallowed it in a painful lump.

The Attolian went to where the ceiling of the cave was highest and he could sit upright with his feet splayed in front of him. He had his knife in his lap, though there’d been no sign of the lioness since the day before.

“I think she’s moved to another den,” the Attolian said quietly. “I’ll go out later in the day and see if I can get us more to eat, but for now, it’s best to keep out of sight of lions and any slave trackers, too.”

“Do you think Roamanj’s guards are out there?”

The Attolian shook his head. “If they were hunting us, one of them would have been with the dog. Roamanj won’t hold up his caravan. He’ll press on to Perf and report this business to the authorities there and let them deal with it. I think those two Namreen were alone, so we have some time to get clear of here.”

That left only the lioness to consider.

The Attolian sat. I lay on the ground. Time passed very slowly. The Attolian tapped his toes restlessly and said, “So, there was a scholar once who got sick and called the doctor. The doctor wanted a fee for his services, and the scholar promised him he’d pay when he got better. Later the scholar’s wife wanted to know why he was drinking so much wine when he was still sick. He said, ‘Do you want me to get better and have to pay the doctor?’”

I smiled politely.

He tried again. “There was a young scholar once at the school of Etitus who was ashamed of his beardless state. One day one of the older scholars told him, ‘Your beard is coming in,’ so the scholar ran to the front gate of the school to wait for it. Another scholar, walking by, asked what he was waiting for. ‘My beard! I was told it was coming in!’ ‘What an idiot,’ said the other scholar. ‘This is why people think we are such fools. How do you know it isn’t coming in the back gate?’”

That was funnier, but I still couldn’t produce more than a smile.

“Maybe you know a joke?” the Attolian asked. “A funny story?”

“Only Senabid jokes,” I said, dismissing those with a shake of my head.

At the hottest part of the day, when the lioness was most likely to be sleeping somewhere in a patch of shade, I watched how the Attolian managed his exit from the cave. He’d pulled a lace from one of the Namreen’s packs and tied a scrap of fabric to the end of it. He flipped the fabric out into the dirt outside the cave and pulled the string, making the scrap dance across the ground. He did this for some time, waiting for any lurking cat to jump on the scrap, and only when there was no sign of the lioness or her cubs did he carefully exit the cave himself. He must have set snares when he was out earlier because he came back fairly quickly, and I heard him outside starting a fire and cooking his catch. He rolled a rock into the cave and crawled in himself, holding his knife at an angle so that the meat he had speared on it wouldn’t fall off.

“What is this?” he asked.

“It looks like caggi,” I said. “Like a large rat that lives in the desert.”

“That’s what I thought. It’s edible?”

I shrugged. I’d never heard of anyone eating caggi.

“It’s caggi or nothing,” the Attolian said. He put it on the stone and cut it into small pieces, then fed me one piece at a time. Never had I been so carefully served. If there was a little sand in my meal, I wasn’t going to complain.

The Attolian made a face, though, when his teeth crunched on the grit. “Attolians who don’t like my king,” he said, “put sand in his food. I don’t know how he puts up with it.” I couldn’t imagine. I was surprised they hadn’t put something worse than sand in what he ate.

The Attolian smiled down at his food, lost in his memories for a moment. “When he gets fed up, he climbs up on the roofs or the tops of the walls. Sometimes he gets drunk first.” That made me think the Attolians might be rid of him soon enough and poisoning their unwanted king was unnecessary.

“That chain around your neck,” said the Attolian, abandoning his happy thoughts of the interloper king falling to his death to focus on the present. “I thought we might pound the links between two stones.”

We could do that, but it wasn’t going to hide the source of our gold. I said, “The flattened pieces of gold would still be suspicious if we tried to trade them for anything.”

“What if we claimed to have found it out here in the hills? On a body?”

I shook my head. “The only safe thing a man could do if he found such a thing would be to take it to his local imperial justicer to deliver it back to its rightful owner, who might, or might not, send a reward. A lot of trouble, maybe for nothing. To have it and not have returned it makes a man liable—not just for the gold but for the value of the slave he is judged to have stolen.”

“There must be a black market,” he said.

“Yes, but difficult to find,” I said. “And very dangerous if you ask the wrong person.”

The Attolian grunted in disappointment and said we should plan to move on the next day. “It smells even worse in here than it did before.”

I agreed, envying him his time outside—except for the lion.

When the sun was high, we left the den. I lay on my back with my arms reaching out of the cave, and the Attolian dragged me outside to a rocky patch where I could stand without leaving any prints. He’d already piled the Namreen’s saddlebags there, and we shrugged them over our shoulders and then checked to see that the long scuff mark we’d left in the soft dirt had covered all of the Attolian’s remaining footprints.

The Attolian said, “With luck, the lioness will come back and leave a few more prints on top. Anyone who sees this will think she dragged you in.”

I looked away.

“So, so, so,” he said, conceding that he had doubts as well. “We’ll hope they’ll never see this at all.”

As carefully as possible, we walked down from the hills back toward the road, stepping from rock to rock and then wiping away any prints we could not avoid leaving. If they brought a dog, of course, it wouldn’t matter, but we thought that the men from the caravan had probably lost faith in their tracking animal. By the time Roamanj made it to Perf to report what had happened and imperial authorities of some kind returned to this spot to look for us, our scent would have faded.

We reached the empty road and waited there in a sheltered spot until dark before crossing in case someone was watching. While the Attolian hadn’t seen any signs of searchers, he was very cautious. The moon was nearly full and waxing, and we would walk through most of the night, navigating by the visible stars. We would hunker down out of sight just before the sun came up. We were headed overland toward Traba. The Attolian, who had demonstrated he could knock down a caggi from a surprising distance with a stone and a flick of his wrist, would feed us. In Traba, we could pick up the road again and follow it to Koadester.