He rather wished right now that his eyes could actually see something besides sparks and great foggy swirls. His thorn-pricked arm hung heavy and useless from his shoulder. He staggered a few steps and leaned against an oak tree. On his finger the ring that had belonged to Azzad al-Ma’aliq, tawny topaz carved with a leaf, seemed to pulse with the pounding of his blood against swollen flesh. Dimly he perceived he was about to be captured and all his possessions stolen—stupid to have worn the ring to war, and the pearl ring of his great-great-grandfather al-Gallidh, but he’d promised himself he’d never take them off—indeed, the swelling would make them impossible to remove . . .
Ayia, of all the silly things to think! These barbarians would simply cut off his fingers. But before or after they killed him?
Another, deeper voice: “Let’s have a look at him.” His accent was excruciating, but he was comprehensible. Qamar saw two shapes, one tall and one shorter, approach through the trees, and wondered blurrily if he would ever see home again.
“Eiha, poisoned,” said the man. “Come, Raffael, help him.”
An unknown time later, Qamar came back to consciousness with no memory of passing out. He was propped against a wall beside a doorway, a hard pillow at his back, his left arm and shoulder bare and tingling.
“Never touch fire nettles!” scolded a woman’s voice, and he looked up to find a face framed in dark hair above him.
“Woman, into the house!”
That tone of voice, that curt a command, would have almost any woman in Tza’ab Rih lunging for the nearest blunt instrument. Qamar’s mother, his sisters, his cousins would all have reached instantly for their belt knives. And thrown them most accurately, too.
Alone in the sunshine with the man who had saved his life—an odd thing for an enemy to do—Qamar took the cup the man proffered, and drank. “Thank you.”
Evidently his pronunciation left much to be desired. It took the man a moment to stop frowning and nod his understanding. But then he frowned even more deeply. “Tza’ab. Your army, it moves.”
Had Qamar the use of both hands, he would have applauded the brilliance of this insight. “Yes.” There was no point in denying it.
The man sat on his heels, head tilted slightly to one side. “We know.”
Qamar shrugged and blinked in surprise when his left shoulder moved just as usual, without pain or stiffness. He looked down at his arm: normal size, the topaz ring fitting his hand again, with only a pink flush on his skin and a few darker pinpricks of red to show he had been poisoned. “Are all your healers as skilled as this?”
“We know plants to use. Your land is desert, so you know nothing.”
“Nothing at all,” he agreed cheerfully. “Our own healers have different ways.” He sat up straighter, glancing into the cottage. Humble but clean, replete with flowers—where had they found flowers in this dryness?—and more comfortable than anywhere he’d been in the last month. But he had to leave. “Ayia, my thanks again, but I must go.” He pushed himself to his feet—and remembered that he hadn’t the vaguest idea where he was.
“Your army,” the man told him, pointing to the western hills.
Qamar gulped and nodded. Then, curiously: “You won’t try to stop me?”
“Why? Your army, your Empire, your Acuyib—these are nothings.”
That stung his pride. “You won’t think that way when we’ve conquered your land!”
A sound that Qamar supposed was laughter rumbled from the man’s throat. “Ours. Not yours. Never yours.”
We’ll see about that, Qamar thought.
His expression must have invited further comment. The man said, “The Mother gives, the Son protects. This is all, and you are nothing.”
It took Qamar a moment to understand that he was speaking of religion. How unutterably uninspiring.
The wife returned then, with a little tin pot of salve for use this evening as instructed. She eyed Qamar with interest—though not entirely in the manner he was used to from women: she was more intrigued by his strangeness than his beauty. He thanked her politely and went on his way.
If he half-expected to be felled by an arrow in the back, he was disappointed. It seemed the man really had no interest in what went on in the world beyond his house. Qamar could empathize. He didn’t want to be anywhere but at home, either.
He slept that night beneath a shrub carefully chosen for its distance from anything that looked even remotely like that bush of stinging nettles. Perhaps sleep was the wrong word. He dozed, jerked awake, dozed again, and finally rose before dawn no more rested than he’d been when he lay down.
“I want to go home,” he told a small reddish-brown rodent that eyed him from a clump of twigs obscuring its nest. “I am a Sheyqir of Tza’ab Rih, and I do not belong in this Acuyib-forsaken wilderness!”
If he was being honest with himself, he would have to admit that he was no more impressed by this than the rodent. What irked him was that the creature obviously considered him no more of a threat than the insects that flitted past. He was nothing against which anything, man or beast, must defend his home.
His waterskin was empty, but he didn’t dare fill it at any of the sluggish streams he crossed. That he had absolutely no idea where he was did not prevent him from putting one blistered foot in front of the other. That the most beloved grandson of Alessid al-Ma’aliq should be reduced to this gave him the energy of anger. Besides, he knew his cousin’s men would be looking for him, and he was determined to greet them on his feet and not huddled like a coward beneath a tree. It wasn’t his fault the damned shrub had attacked him.
It was well after noon before he limped toward a sentry tent on the outskirts of the Tza’ab camp. He was hungry, thirsty, hot, exhausted, and his arm was throbbing again. Within the hour he was with the healers, who exclaimed over the nettle wounds and the salve as they tended him. Their learned discussion of local plants and indigenous medicaments interested him not at all, and especially not compared to the cool water assuaging his dry throat and his sore feet.
“Can you describe the exact shape of the nettles?”
“Was there any smell? Sweet, sour, pungent—”
“What was the length of time between touch and pain?”
“Was the pain sharp like a knife or acidic like a poison—”
“—or burning, like a—like a—”
“Like a burn?” Qamar narrowed his gaze at the little knot of Shagara healers. “I don’t remember, and I don’t care. I want to see my sister’s husband.”
“This salve,” one of them said, sniffing at the little clay pot. “Do you know what it’s made of?”
“If I had only brought my apparatus!” another mourned. “I wish I was back in my own tent, with all my instruments—”
Qamar scowled. “And I wish I was back in Hazganni! My sister’s husband Allim! Summon him now! And give me that damned stuff, my hand hurts.”
Rubbing the smooth cream into his arm, he smelled things he could not identify, odd pungencies that repelled him. He didn’t belong here; he had nearly been killed by this land. Yet the thorns that had poisoned him had been counteracted by plants that also grew here, and perhaps Ab’ya Alessid would have found meaning in that. Qamar simply knew that this land wanted him gone, and he was most willing to oblige.
He was still rubbing the cream into his wounds when Allim arrived—through no effort of the healers. Word had filtered up from the sentry all the way up through the various levels of qabda’ans to the Sheyqir himself that his wife’s wayward brother had finally returned.