They stayed at Fauvaushok for four days, long enough for Wirrin to patch her jacket with hippopotamus skin and feel like she could maybe walk for a bit. Long enough for Wirrin to eat the rest of the hippopotamus.

  Yern hunted down two gazelle. Wirrin dried the meat, pounded the brains with some ash, and rolled the hides up to cure as they walked. And then Yern had an extremely sensible idea.

  ‘Maybe I should carry the pack? So you don’t die or something,’ Yern suggested.

  Even just carrying Yern’s pack with some of the dried meat, and her own weapons, Wirrin couldn’t make it far in a stretch. Despite having fewer punctured lungs than she’d been travelling on three weeks ago, the slow pace and regular stops weren’t enough to keep Wirrin going for more than an hour at a time.

  She needed to stop and lay down for at least as long as she’d been walking and it was only half a day before the pain was constant and distracting. After a few days at the springs, most of the pain had been reduced to dull ache at worst. But as Wirrin walked, it felt like every single stitch and cut turned into needles in her flesh.

  ‘If they work out where you’re going, you won’t be able to fight them off again,’ Mkaer rumbled.

  ‘They won’t work out where I’m going,’ Wirrin said, laying in the warm sand. ‘Really all you’re doing is agreeing with me. If I go to Tertic like this, I have no chance.’

  ‘If you reach Gnaer, you’ll be fine,’ Naertral burbled.

  ‘If I reach Gnaer,’ Wirrin said. ‘If there’s not even more of them waiting there to kill me before I manage that.’

  ‘Even if you’re better by then, more of them would kill you either way,’ Yern said. ‘This isn’t going to improve your chances.’

  ‘Vonaer let me go,’ Wirrin said. ‘Two of the Gods were excluded from the scheming. And I’ll have however long this takes to recover.’

  Yern nodded along. ‘Recover, is it?’

  ‘Would you rather we stay at Fauvaushok for a month?’ Wirrin suggested.

  ‘Hardly my point,’ Yern said. ‘That smell can’t be good for your lung.’

  ‘It just needs time,’ Wirrin said, picking up a pile of sand. ‘I’m hardly pushing myself, am I?’

  ‘After you fell down the mountain, did you simply return to travelling?’ Mkaer rumbled.

  ‘I wasn’t being hunted by the Church at the time, was I?’ Wirrin said.

  ‘And if they find you after? On the way to Tertic?’ Mkaer rumbled.

  ‘Then I’ll die, or I won’t,’ Wirrin said. ‘Suggest something more useful, Mkaer.’

  Mkaer was quiet.

  ‘Ulvaer, how many people do you have at the hetavatok?’ Wirrin thought.

  ‘More than I did before you lost that fight,’ Ulvaer rattled. ‘You’re not the only one with a mind.’

  ‘And I suppose you don’t need me to be awake, like everyone else does,’ Wirrin thought. ‘Think about it, though.’

  ‘We are,’ Ulvaer rattled.

  ‘Well?’ Yern said. ‘Did Mkaer come up with a useful suggestion?’

  Wirrin smiled. ‘There aren’t any,’ she said. ‘Going to the hetavatok or Ulvaer would take way longer. Someone will find Fauvaushok eventually. Going back to the ocean would be deeply foolish. Going straight to the Estelen means getting way too close to Keredin.’

  ‘We don’t have to go through ekhok koll,’ Yern said, sensibly.

  ‘You don’t have to go straight to Keredin to reach the river,’ Mkaer rumbled. While it was hard to say that the Fiends had voices in Wirrin’s head, it wasn’t quite like that, Mkaer didn’t sound hopeful.

  ‘We don’t have to not go through ekhok koll,’ Wirrin said.

  Yern sighed. ‘At least I’ll be closer to Tegalk when you get killed and I have to do this whole thing over,’ she said.

  Wirrin chuckled and sat up with a groan. ‘That’s the spirit.’

  North of the woodland in the centre of the desert, the savannah felt much flatter than it did further south. There weren’t even any particularly large hills, if you asked Wirrin, in the desert. But between the coast and ekhok koll or the woodlands, the grass seemed to stretch endlessly in all directions without interruption.

  While there was the odd stand of cacti, trees were rare this far north.

  If Wirrin had been worried about getting sunburned on the boat, this was worse. At least on the boat she’d had a sail to shade her sometimes. Out here there was nothing.

  Nothing except Yern, who lived in the desert.

  Basketweaving was high on the list of crafts Wirrin had never bothered learning much about. She spent too much time in the south to worry about hats over a nice big hood and some blinders if it was bright enough.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Yern, by contrast, spent several of Wirrin’s rest breaks slowly braiding the long dry grass into a pair of wide-brimmed, itchy hats.

  The hat helped immensely, which shouldn’t have surprised Wirrin as much as it did. Not only was it far more comfortable without the sun shining in her eyes, but it felt much cooler without being baked by the desert the whole time.

  She could even walk for longer at a time before needing to rest.

  ‘You’re lucky there’s someone with some sense around,’ Mkaer rumbled, or grumbled.

  ‘I am lucky,’ Wirrin said.

  ‘You are lucky,’ Yern said.

  ‘So lucky,’ Haerst bubbled.

  ‘Exceptionally lucky,’ Ulvaer cackled.

  ‘Amazingly lucky,’ Naertral shushed.

  ‘Astoundingly lucky,’ Mkaer rumbled.

  Wirrin smiled to herself in the shade of her hat.

  Despite the relative lack of shade and tall vegetation in this part of the desert, bigger animals were more common than to the south of the forest. The gazelle and antelope and wildebeest herds were bigger. There were rhinoceros and hippopotami and elephants. What few giraffes were found in the desert were usually found around the woodland.

  Along with the bigger herds and bigger animals came more and bigger predators. Any small stand of trees had a pride of lions lounging in the shade. Big packs of dogs and hyenas trailed the big herds. Cheetahs kept their distance. Watering holes and streams were home to crocodiles.

  The only ones that Wirrin had any concern about were the odd Leopards settled deep into the grass or hanging in trees over watering holes. But it was easy to give them a lot of space.

  Most predators would be closer to the rivers either side of the desert, and certainly weren’t going to get more common as Wirrin and Yern crossed toward ekhok koll.

  Wirrin wasn’t concerned about the vultures. But it was hard not to notice the birds circling high above whenever they stopped so that she could lay down.

  She hadn’t expected it to be quick, but Wirrin hadn’t expected it to take as long as it did to reach ekhok koll. She should have.

  Last time she was in the desert, Wirrin hadn’t actually gone to Fauvaushok. She and Koholshya had travelled up the western edge of ekhok koll from Hestagal, through this same part of the savannah and then southeast to Hekaulget before heading through the woodland to Hekaulseg.

  Her estimate based on that trip was that it would take about a week to get from Fauvaushok to ekhok koll. She hadn’t thought about just how much slower they were travelling while she was injured.

  It took closer to two weeks to reach the outskirts of the burning sand. Unlike the Sand, where Ulvaer’s statue was, ekhok koll didn’t have a particularly stark border. It was, admittedly, starker if you were coming from the woods.

  Gradually, the tall yellow grass got shorter and patchier, the cacti further apart, the animals sparser.

  The Sand, where Ulvaer was, was called that because it was almost completely empty, especially toward the middle, where the statue itself was now leaking water into the sand.

  Ekhok koll wasn’t empty in the same way.

  The sand was looser, there were very few animals and most of them were lizards and insects. Plants didn’t grow well, but they grew. Wirrin had been assured several times that the area was called ekhok koll was called that because there were precisely zero trees there. No shade, so it was the burning sand.

  If there was a good time to be out here, it was winter. Wirrin supposed no one in the desert would know that. Winter was when everyone was at the hetavatok, of course.

  Not that there was anything worth doing in ekhok koll even in winter.

  Wirrin had spent years of her life, all told, working on farms. Being the sort of person she was, she hadn’t worked as a harvester all that often. One of the jobs she’d ended up doing quite often, especially working in the Blavan Plains, was irrigation.

  What was becoming clear to Wirrin as they headed generally southwest into ekhok koll was that the reason it was so dry here was because it was perfectly elevated above the Estelen river.

  What rain fell here would seep through the sand and flow down to the river and not be retained anywhere.

  Even compared to the savannah they’d just crossed, which had a similar problem in terms of being elevated compared to the woodland and the coast, ekhok koll was perfectly shaped to shed water.

  The shyolg, and Ulvaer, would be opposed to the idea, but Wirrin wondered if the burning sand could be irrigated to retain a bit more water. On the other hand, there wasn’t much point in doing it, was there?

  ‘How long do you think it’s been since someone came here?’ Yern wondered on their third day into ekhok koll.

  ‘Start of winter, probably,’ Wirrin said, sitting in the sand.

  As much as she would probably be recovering faster if she’d spent the two weeks laying around at the hetavatok or something, Wirrin was doing much better than she’d been when they left Fauvaushok. It had been about a month, she supposed.

  ‘I meant Ishok Tesholg’s statue,’ Yern glared.

  Wirrin shrugged, which didn’t hurt even a little. ‘No way to know,’ she said.

  Yern kept glaring.

  ‘What was her name? Tassa said only some of Vonaer’s mages even knew where it’s statue was,’ Wirrin started. ‘I maintain that the statues are kept secret so that not too many people know they all bear similarities. So it depends on how Azavaer treats its mages, right?’

  Yern was nodding along, but she switched back to her glare in a moment. ‘That’s not proper speculation.’

  Wirrin shrugged. ‘I reckon it hasn’t been all that long, in the grand scheme of things,’ she said. ‘But that’s still measured in years, at least.’

  ‘I was going to say it was basically as long as the Fiends,’ Yern said. ‘They buried their statues, same as they buried the Fiends, and left them there.’

  ‘I reckon that’s only true of Raerna,’ Wirrin said. ‘The Fiends said that Azavaer thought of itself as above the rest of the Tesholg. Not like Vonaer, who thinks in terms of progress or technology, though. So I think, if Vonaer considers itself better than the others, it has to think of its mages as better than the rest too, since they’re basically extensions of it.’

  ‘So it’s mages visit more often than the other Thausholg?’ Yern frowned. ‘I can see it. That’s some good speculation.’

  Wirrin did a little, seated bow, which did pinch in her injured lung, but wasn’t too bad. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I still think no one’s visited since maybe a hundred years after the end of the war,’ Yern speculated. ‘Having to hide their images gave the Thausholg confidence issues and now they don’t want anyone to see them.’

  Wirrin chuckled. ‘I hope you’re right.’

  Yern did the same little, seated bow. ‘I probably am.’

  Early the next day it seemed very likely to Wirrin that Yern had not been right. She felt a stone structure under the sand, with a statue in its centre. While it was buried in the sand, including the entrance, it wasn’t full of sand. Some kind of barricade, wooden from the feel of it, blocked the sand only a few steps into the temple.

  Only a couple of hours later, Wirrin spotted the only tree in ekhok koll.

  ‘Well, that seems obvious,’ Yern frowned.