Quickburned

Sand

Now...

"We're stopping here for the night," Lysistrata said abruptly. Her camel agreed with a burbling groan, splaying its wide feet and refusing to move.

"What? Dove, why? We got hours o' good traveling time left." Dirt had kept on going, and Caleb stood in the stirrups and wheeled the stallion around to a halt.

His voice was still hoarse from tale-telling most of the last night through, stopping only once the moon had risen and coaxed both of them to bed. Lysistrata was the perfect audience, oohing and aahing in all the right places, watching him with rapt attention and her chin in her hands. It'd been gratifying to spin the story of Shattered Earth into a proper yarn for her.

He'd woken with enough vigor to express his thankfulness for looking out for him to her properly, which had also been immensely gratifying. She'd been just as appreciative of that use of his tongue as she had the other. Afterward, she smiled her Sidereal smile at him, declared they had lazed around her camp long enough, and tossed him his packs to fill. She wouldn't tell him where they were headed no matter how he coaxed and cajoled and tried to charm the answer out of her.

They'd followed no trails he knew, only the pull of a carved bead Lys wore on a leather cord. The plateau with Lys' sanctuary oasis bled down into flat land strewn with broken rock, nothing like the labyrinthine canyons of the Badlands further south. There were more plants, tough woody ones with narrow spiny leaves, big cacti and yucca, and sometimes more exotic flora both Dirt and Lys's camel steered well clear of. Every once in a while, a huge outcropping of dark brown red rock, flint-like with sharp edges and flat planes, would thrust up out of the sandy earth. It was beside one of these Lysistrata had brought her mount to a halt.

"We're stopping," Lysistrata said, coaxing her camel down to its knees, "...because, you, sunshine, are as pale as paper. Neither you nor Dirt are at your usual strength, and you know it— you cannot go straight from my tent back to your longrider ways. Unless you want to end up bleached bones in red sands?"

Caleb opened his mouth to object, glaring down from his saddle at her, and then shut it with a huff of a sigh. "No. I'd likely be searchin' out a good campsite soon if I were by my lonesome anyhow."

He threw a leg over and hit the ground with a thump, wincing a bit as the motion jarred still aching bits of his flesh. It was true he wasn't up to his usual snuff; if only a couple hours in the saddle could make him feel like a tenderfoot again, stiff and sore all over. Dirt whuffed at his shoulder and didn't even make a grab at his hat, a good sign his horse felt much the same.

"This will do," was all Lysistrata said, trailing a hand along the rock with her head tilted, listening.

They'd stopped a little after sunset, after getting started in the late afternoon, and there was still light to see by the violets and red light streaking the western horizon, and the waxing moon painting it all over with silver.

The camp they set up was not Lysistrata's pavilion of luxury and flowing draperies; no piercework lamps filled with colored glass threw jeweled shadows across deep carpets, no embroidered cushions littered silk-sheeted camp beds with a pallet as thick as his hand stuffed with kapok and cotton. Instead she retrieved a light, compact bundle of fabric and poles as long as his arm from her camel. It unfolded as origami, expanding like a paper lantern until it was a half-dome of painted canvas, as tall as he was and half again as wide.

"Well, there's a neat trick," Caleb said, after seeing to their mounts. "Where do I get one of those?"

"They're made by the Quelan people, who live on the Tears of the War Maiden river, some fifty miles east and north of Riven." Lys was furthering the impression of a paper lantern by taking her own plain brass one inside, making the whole thing glow.