We camp that night in a small tent supported by stakes driven deep into the sand. They're flimsy fabric shelters, little holes we crawl into the escape the vastness of the desert night. The desert after the sun sets is unsettling, almost otherworldly. The sky is vast and uninterrupted, its stars glowing like the lights of faraway cities and casting long shadows on the dunes. The sand seems to turn to water under the moonlight, undulating and rippling as the shadows shift. For a moment I feel like I'm underwater, sunk deep to the ocean floor.

I settle into my sleeping roll and pull Halima close to me, sharing her warmth. They let her sleep with me; I gather I'm supposed to take this for a kindness. I can hear Sholu saying how magnanimous it is to let a prisoner keep a servant at all. But he still controls my access to her, picks the times and places of our meeting. He never lets me forget that he has all the control.

Not for long, I promise myself, wrapping the blankets around myself and the little maid. The sun is long set and the heat is slowly leeching from the desert, leaving us shivering as the night air creeps in through the gaps in the tent. He might have all the control now, but soon I'll be able to remove Halima from the equation, to put us on a more level playing field. She will be safe, and I will be free.

Kaza remains with us, despite my protests. Perhaps I don't protest as loudly as I should; the guard's presence still chafes at me, but my fiery anger has faded to a dull burn after hours of conversation forced by the monotony of desert travel. I feel a terrible kinship between us, a similarity of purpose and of sin. We both drank the same poison; we might as well share the same tent.

"You should rest," I yawn, looking at Halima. "We leave at sunrise."

"How long will it take us to get to Rizsava?" She asks me.

"Eight, maybe nine days."

"Two weeks," Kaza corrects, pulling his own blanket tighter around him. "If we were just a few riders eight days might be possible, but with a caravan this large we won't be there before a fortnight."

A fortnight in that little carriage... my mind sinks at the prospect.

With nothing to look forward to but another day spent locked in a tiny box and jostled to and fro, we lie down and try to sleep. Halima squeezes my hand and closes her eyes. Kaza begins to snore lightly. I close my own eyes, expecting to lie awake with the worries swirling around inside my head, but my body is so tired from the travel I find myself pulled swiftly towards sleep.

I wake before sunrise, the sweat of an unremembered dream cooling on my brow. I instinctively reach over to Halima, trying to lay a hand on her sleeping form, but all I find is a blanket. I sit up and rub the sleep from my eyes, letting them adjust to the moonlight.

I look around and quickly notice I'm the only one in the tent. Halima and Kaza are gone, leaving two empty sleeping rolls. I'm about to run out into the night to find them when I hear a voice on the other side of the tent flap.

"That's Ocharya's chariot, isn't it?" A high voice asks.

"Yes," a lower voice answers. "And that cluster of bright stars next to her are the viper. Follow my finger up, you see those three stars, see how they make a point? That's the head of the coyote."

"Where's the tail?"
"That one right there, next to the chariot's wheel."

I crawl forward and pull aside the tent flaps. Kaza and Halima are sitting on the sand just outside it, heads turned up to the night sky.

"You're awake, miss," Halima says, startling when she notices me. "I hope we didn't wake you."

"It was a dream that woke me," I tell her. "Not you."

Halima shivers. "A dream woke me too. A nightmare, I should say."

I frown, sitting down next to her. "What did you dream of?"

She looks embarrassed. "It's a dream I used to have as a child. It's silly, really, but I can't help it. It still terrifies me."

"What was it?" I press.

She sighs. "I dreamed of the beast of the dunes, miss. It was chasing me, and I knew that I couldn't stop of it would catch me, but I also knew I couldn't keep going forever, I was so tired. I could feel its breath on my neck, its saliva dripping onto my back." She shudders. "It was awful."

"The beast of the dunes," I repeat. "I remember my mother telling me about it when she found out Shira and I would sneak past the guards to play on the sands at midnight. She told me about a great hulking monster that lurked in the shadows and devoured disobedient children whole."

Halima nods. "My mother told me the same story. It kept me in my bed at night."

"Well, I was a willful, disobedient child," I tell her. "I wasn't scared of the beast so much as I was fascinated by it. I wanted to know what it looked like, so I kept going out to the dunes late at night to try and find it."

Halima looks aghast. "Weren't you scared it would find you first?" She asks.

"I was also a stupidly confident child," I answer. "I had two knives with me and a year of training with them. I figured I could kill anything I needed to." I pause. "I found plenty of coyotes and a few sleeping lizards, but no beast. I fell asleep one night on the sands and woke the next morning disappointed. What kind of monster couldn't catch a sleeping child? I never went to look for it after that. I figured it wasn't worth my time."

Kaza laughs. "Your poor mother."

I smile, remembering her lecturing me until her face turned red, but then I remember her wild eyes and bent knees, pleading with the barrel of a gun.

"Yes, my poor mother," I repeat, sadness seeping into my voice.

There's an awkward, heavy silence hanging between us, an acknowledgement of loss, before Kaza speaks. "Look there," he says, directing our eyes to a patch of stars. "That's the Goddess' Chalice, the one supposed to give you immortal life."

We follow his finger to a mass of lights ancient people thought resembled a sacred cup. I can't find the picture in the stars to save my life.

"How do you know so much about the constellations?" I ask Kaza. "Aren't you a weaver's son?"

He nods. "My father taught me the stars when I was young. They always fascinated him, and we'd stay out late and watch them together. Now whenever I can't sleep I come to them. They clear my mind."

"That's why I came out here, miss," Halima interjects. "I couldn't fall back asleep after my dream, so Kaza offered to show me the stars."

"You could have woken me," I tell her.
She shakes her head. "You need to rest."

I frown. Part of me is grateful the guard was there to calm her, part of me is angry she turned to him instead of me. She must see the struggle on my face because she asks me what my favorite constellation is, turning my thoughts to softer things.

"There," I answer, pointing straight above our heads. "Sh'turen's Tears."

She looks puzzled. "Why? It's the saddest story in the sky."

"Maybe," I answer. "But only because everyone focuses on the ending of the story."

"What else is there?" Halima asks. "Sh'turen was betrayed by the First Goddess of the Desert so she killed her in a fit of righteous anger and took her place. Now she weeps perpetually because she's lost her mortality, her family, and her faith."

"I've always thought there's a better way to tell that story."

Kaza looks at me, understanding flashing in his eyes. "She lost everything, but before that, she had her revenge."

"She was a simple desert nomad who killed a goddess," I say. "What's more powerful than that? Her anger was stronger than immortality. Everyone focuses on her grief, but I was always captivated by her power."

"They're one and the same, aren't they?" Kaza asks, looking at me knowingly. "One was born from the other."

I shrug. "Maybe. But I always saw the power first."

"Stories are strange like that," he says. "Turn them around in your hands and you'll find entirely new ways of looking at them."

"I suppose. But some stories are simpler than Sh'turen's. Some have only one truth to them."

Kaza looks unconvinced. "I suppose," he parrots, smiling slightly at me.

Halima yawns. I open the tent flap and direct her in, then watch until she's settled into her sleeping rolls and fallen back to her dreams.

"I'm going back to sleep," I tell the guard.

"I'll keep the stars company," he says, settling his back against the tent fabric and closing his eyes.