We fled as broken things flee. You have seen it. The struck bird beating its wings against the ground, going nowhere, going nowhere with all its strength, because the one thing its body still knows is that stillness means death.
Of my left hand there is little to say and I will say it once. It was a pulsing heat that kept time with my heart, wrapped in cloth torn from my shirt, and the blood found its way through anyway, as blood does, and left a trail of dark coins on the stones behind us. Whatever we could not spend in this life, we were paying it out all the same.
Behind us, thunder that was not thunder. Light that burned without flame, throwing our shadows out ahead of us down the mountainside, long and wrong. The war we had started did not need us in order to go on. Wars never do. Around us every scrape of scree sounded like something worse, and some of them may have been. We did not stop to learn.
Denna leaned against me. My legs ached with every step, and I welcomed the aching, because her weight was the proof she was alive, and I would have carried twice of it twice as far for the same assurance. Her hand stayed pressed against her stomach, where Cinder's blade had gone in and come out, and what seeped between her fingers was a darkness that would have looked black at noon.
"I can walk," she whispered.
"Of course," I said, and kept my arm where it was.
We both knew how to lie when lying was a kindness. It was the first language either of us had ever learned.
The mountain gave way to foothills as the first light touched the world's edge. We found a copse of ironwood and desert willow in a dry fold of land, their branches making a shade that was more rumor than shelter. It was enough to stop in. Stopping felt dangerous. Breathing felt important. Breathing meant we were not dead, and I had begun to keep count of the things that meant that, because the list was growing short.
While she rested I looked at Denna's wound properly, in the grey light, with the part of my mind the Medica built.
It was worse than I had feared and better than I had expected. Worse, because it went deep. The kind of deep that speaks in a low voice about organs and arteries, about what is fitted next to what. Better, because she was still conscious, still herself, still enough herself to try a smile when she caught me staring too long.
"That bad?"
"I've seen worse," I said.
Another lie. Another kindness. I had seen wounds like it in the Medica, and I knew the road they traveled. The slow waltz toward fever, the heat, the sweet smell that means the body has opened negotiations with the ground. Arwyl had a voice he used, teaching us those wounds. He never once used it about the patient in the room.
I tore strips from what remained of my shirt, fabric that was by then more memory than cloth. My hands knew the work. That was the mercy of the Medica's way of teaching. My hands knew it and did not trouble my mind for instructions, because my mind was not fit to give any. The stitching was rough. It was rougher than it should have been, done with a thumb and one finger doing the pinching that three fingers used to share. My new hand was learning its first task, and its first task was her.
Each pull of the thread drew a sound out of Denna that she tried to swallow before it finished. Each time, she nearly managed it.
I kept stitching. There was nothing else in the world I could do for her, and doing nothing would have killed me faster than the desert ever could.
When it was done, I took off my shaed and wrapped it around her shoulders.
It settled over her as it had settled over me the first time, in the twilight glade of another world. Gently, and all at once, like dusk. Felurian had gathered it out of shadow and starlight and given it to me with instructions I had mostly disobeyed. I had worn it through summer noons and winter nights without harm. It kept its own weather. But watching it lie dark and cool across Denna's shoulders, I felt the first misgiving touch me, light as a moth. I had never asked it to endure a desert.
She looked down at herself. At the black threads holding her together, at the cloak of woven night over ruined traveling clothes.
"I look like something from a story," she said.
"The heroine," I agreed. "The clever one who outsmarts death."
Her smile came up, just barely, one corner only. "You're a terrible liar."
"I'm still learning," I said. "I've had a patient teacher."
She laughed at that. A small true laugh, and it cost her, I saw what it cost her, and she paid it anyway. That was Denna entire, if you want her in a sentence, and you cannot have her in a sentence.
By the time I had bound the wound and settled her to rest, my hands were shaking so hard I could not have held a pen, and sweat ran stinging into my eyes though the morning was still cool. I pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw stars, and breathed, and went on breathing until the breathing was all there was. There is a place past the end of yourself where the counting starts over from nothing. I lived there now. The rent was everything.
The desert began without announcing itself. The foothills flattened, the willow gave out, and then there was sand, and after that there was sand.
I want to give you the size of it, and I cannot, and that is not modesty. I have stood on the Stormwal and seen clouds below me like a sea. I have crossed real seas. Nothing taught my eyes what that desert asked of them. An emptiness with no edges. Sand the color of old bones, running out ahead until running out lost its meaning, and the heat rising off it in slow waves that made the air shimmer and lie. The horizon promised water all day long. The horizon was the biggest liar I have ever met, and I say that having been one.
I held the shaed up over us when I could, a stretched scrap of night on my arms, shielding Denna from the worst of the sun's attention. And the shaed began to die.
I noticed it at the edges first. A thinning, a fading, the deep dark going grey like cloth worn past its last thread. Then the small holes came, opening like little wounds, growing wider as the sun leaned on them. It had crossed a battlefield unmarked. It was made of night by the oldest hands I know of, and it had lain across my shoulders on that mountain, easy, unafraid, the only unafraid thing there, and the plain unmagical sun of that desert was killing it by inches, and there was nothing I could do but give it rest. Each evening I folded it away small, and each morning it came out of my pocket whole but weary, like a fever patient who has slept and is not better.
By the second day it barely lasted through the afternoon. By the third I was folding it away before the sun reached full height, and carrying it like a sick thing, and grieving it, quietly, in the part of me that was still keeping accounts. Even magic cannot outlast the desert's hunger. The desert has been hungry longer.
"Bad luck?" Denna asked, watching me tuck it away.
"For the shaed, maybe." I nodded ahead, at nothing, at the shimmer. "Just a bit farther."
She laughed, or tried to. The sound had no water in it. "You're a terrible liar when it matters."
"I'm an excellent liar," I protested. "I'm just choosing not to be."
"That's the worst lie yet."
We walked on. There is no wind in that desert at midday. I have thought about it since, and I believe it plainly now. The wind knows that country and will not cross it in the heat of the day. I had no strength left to call it, and nothing left to pay it with, and for the first time in years the sky over me was simply empty, and I walked under it like any other man, which is a thing I had forgotten how to be.
Denna leaned on me more with every mile. Her fever came up slowly, as dusk comes, so that there was never a moment I could point to and say there. Only, at some point I realized her feet were leaving the ground more than they were finding it, and I stopped noticing when they left it at all. My legs had stopped feeling like legs sometime the day before. They were things that moved when I told them to, thoughtless as breathing, reliable as pain.
I played the games desperate men play with themselves. Count a hundred steps, and you may think about water. Count fifty, and you may remember shade. Count ten, and you may keep walking. Count ten again. Again. The numbers wore smooth with handling and became a song without melody, a prayer without words. And I knew a great deal, by then, about prayers, and something about what they cost, and I counted anyway. My world narrowed to the rhythm of footfalls in sand. To the weight across my shoulders. To the next step, and the next breath, and the next thing I pretended to believe.
I was watching my feet, counting for no reason I could have named, when a voice cut across the silence.
"Ho there! Stragglers in the sand!"
I looked up, fully prepared to learn that the heat had cracked something new loose in my head. The figure shimmered like everything else. But it grew more solid with each blink instead of less, which mirages do not do, until I could make out the pack towering on his back, the brass pots swinging and catching the sun and throwing it back like small rude suns of their own, and the wide-brimmed hat casting the first shadow I had trusted in three days.
A tinker. In the middle of a trackless desert at the end of the world, a tinker, walking toward us as though we had met on the road to Abbot's Ford.
I have given up wondering at tinkers. They are where they are, and the day you need one is the day you learn what you carry.
By the time we reached him Denna was barely conscious against my side.
"Water," I croaked. My voice was sand all the way down.
He had the skin off his shoulder before the word finished, and handed it over without a syllable of bargaining, which I have thought about many times since, tinkers being tinkers. I poured it into Denna's mouth first, a little, then a little more, watching her throat remember what to do. Then I drank. It was blood-warm and it tasted of old leather and the inside of a boot, and nothing in my life has ever tasted so much like living.
"I've little else to spare," the tinker said, with a tip of his head toward the pack. "Some bread hard enough to drive nails. Cloth for your faces, against the sun. The desert gives less than it takes, I'm afraid."
I reached for my purse, knowing already the whole of what I would find. Three iron drabs. A broken gear from a project whose purpose I could no longer name. And a button. A plain horn button, cracked along one edge, that had once closed my father's cloak against the wind of better roads. I had carried it from Tarbean, sewn into linings, moved from coat to coat for a dozen years, and never told a living soul, because a button is a foolish thing to keep and I could not have borne to hear anyone say so.
The tinker's eyes moved across my offerings without landing. I watched him do his tinker's sum, the one they do in a glance. What you have, what you need, what you are.
Then his eyes found Denna's hand, where her silver ring caught the light.
She saw his look. Her fingers went to the ring and turned it, once, twice, a small habit I had seen a hundred times across the years, in taverns and gardens and once in the moonlit dark of the Eolian's stair. She turned that ring when she was thinking. When she was uneasy. When she was about to run. There was nowhere to run now, only the boundless sand in every direction, and I understood, watching her turn it, that I had never once asked her where the ring had come from, in all the years of not asking that made up my half of us.
"Take it," she said. She pulled it free before she could change her mind, and held it out steady. "It was never really mine anyway."
The tinker paused. It was a real pause, the kind that lives on the border between kindness and commerce, and I will not tell you which side of the border he was standing on, because I do not know, and because with tinkers the border itself may be the point. Then he took the ring, and it vanished somewhere about him, and he gave us what he could spare, the skin, the nail-hard bread, two lengths of pale cloth, and he pointed us northwest with one knotted finger.
"Follow the dunes until they dip," he said. "Half a day's walk and you'll find the Tahl. Good people, though strange. They'll help, if help's a thing that can be done."
He went his way, and his pack went with him, jingling its small music of little trades and littler profits, and the desert took him back without a ripple. I stood looking at Denna's hand. Where the ring had been there was a band of skin, pale as the sand was pale.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"Don't be," she said. But her voice was smaller than it had been, and I did not ask, and that is one more thing I carry.
We did not find the Tahl in half a day.
I want to be fair to the tinker. I no longer knew what my half-days were worth. A whole man might have done it by dusk. I was walking on legs that had resigned and stayed on out of pity, carrying a woman who weighed nothing and grew heavier every hour, as all the truest burdens do.
Denna had gone quiet. Not the quiet of sleep. The quiet of a person saving her strength for one last thing, who has not yet decided what the thing will be. I knew that quiet. I had heard it in the Medica, from the beds by the wall. I talked, to fill it, to keep us both on the near side of it. My jaw was loose in its hinges and every word cost, and words were the one coin I have never in my life run out of, so I spent them.
I told her stories of the University. Of Wil and Sim and games of corners, of Auri on her rooftops, of Elodin and the roof I jumped from to please him. I told her of all the times I had been clever, and all the times I had been lucky, and how long it had taken me to learn which was which, and that I still, on the evidence, had not. I told her how we would walk out of this desert and find water and shade and a bed with actual linen, and how she would laugh at me one day, over wine somewhere with a breeze in the room, about how close we had come to ending in the sand.
She did not answer. Her breath against my neck kept a rhythm, and I walked to it, and it was the last music I had.
When I fell the last time, I knew it was the last time, as you know a string has snapped and not merely slipped its tuning.
The sand received us without judgment. That is the one kind thing I will say about that desert. It does not gloat. It has seen everything come to it eventually, and it makes room, and it does not ask you a single question.
It would have been easy to close my eyes. Some part of me observed, in a voice too tired to argue with, that I had fought well. That the account, such as it was, could close.
I wrapped my arms around Denna and held on. Above us the sky stretched too blue to look at and too wide to matter, and the sun pressed down with the patience of a thing that has never once been beaten, and has all the time it needs, and knows it.
I thought of my mother singing while she cooked. I am going to tell you the truth about that thought, because I have promised you the truth in this telling and it is too late to begin economizing now. There was no song in it. They took her voice out of me under Renere, and it has never come back. What I had was a kitchen smell, and steam, and firelight on a wagon's wall, and the shape of a woman swaying at her work. Joy, with a hole in it where the sound should be. I reached for my father's hands, painting a story on the air, and found the story, and the air, and no hands.
I held what I had. You will find, when you are down to the last of yourself, that you do not grieve the holes. You are only grateful for whatever is still standing around them.
And I thought of Denna. Denna, who was in my arms and leaving them by the slowest road. Denna, who was worth more than the moon, and I had walked one long night with the moon and knew what I was saying.
The desert waited. It is very good at that. It has never lost.
I closed my eyes.
I held her close.
I listened to two hearts beating. Growing slower.
Growing quiet.