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"I didn't know this kind of heat existed in the world."
"Have a fig."
I shook my head. Naji sighed. "There's energy in them," he said. "They'll help make the evening walk easier."
"What! This ain't us stopping for the night?"
"Does it look like night to you?"
I didn't bother to respond. The tent's shadow seemed to be shrinking, burning up in the sun. Sand blew across my feet, stuck to my legs.
When we set off again I did feel a bit better. I guess the air was cooler, but as the sun melted into the dunes, the heat still shimmered on the horizon like water, which set me to daydreaming about Papa's boat, first during calm weather and then during a typhoon, wind and rain splattering across the desk, drenching me to the bone. I would have given my sword hand to be stuck in a typhoon instead of creeping across the desert.
Naji finally let us stop for the night after it got too dark to see. He set up the tent again, making it wide enough that we could both lie down. I stripped off my scarf and bunched it up like a pillow.
Naji brought me some water.
"Two weeks from now, we'll be at the canyon," he said.
"Two weeks!" My mouth dropped open. "Two more weeks of almost dying?"
"You didn't almost die." He looked at me. "And surely you've gone on longer journeys? I understand that Qilar alone is almost a month's trip–"
"That's on a boat!" I wished I had something to throw at him. "You ain't walking the whole time and you got the shade from the masts and the spray from the sea – Kaol, have you ever even been at sea?"
He didn't answer.
"I can't believe this," I muttered, cradling the skein of water up close to my chest. "Two weeks in the desert all on account of some assassin who doesn't know how to look out for snakes."
"If you hadn't killed that snake," Naji said calmly, "I would have killed you."
"Oh, shut up." I took a long drink of water. "Are you going to tell me where we're going?"
"I told you, to a canyon."
"Anything else?"
"No." He looked over at me. "Stay here."
"I ain't moving. Gotta rest up for the next two damn weeks."
He disappeared out of the opening of the tent. I drank the skein dry and set it aside and lay back and listened to the wind howling around me and to the camel snuffling just outside the tent. At first I was thinking about how awful the next few weeks were go
And then Naji was saying my name, over and over, and shaking me awake. It was completely dark save for a reddish-golden glow just outside the tent, and after a few bleary seconds I realized that Naji was sitting outside, tending to the fire and not touching me at all. My body was just shaking from the cold.
I sat up and pulled my scarf around me, trying to get warm.
"Ana
"Why in hell's it so cold?"
"It's night time," said Naji, like that answered it.
Now, I knew it got cooler in the desert at night. Lisirra certainly does. But I felt like I'd spent the night on the ice-islands. So I scrambled out of the tent and pressed my hands out to the fire, keeping my scarf drawn tight around my shoulders. Naji handed me a tin filled with salted fish and spinach cooked down to a sludge. The minute I smelled it my stomach grumbled and I scooped it up with one hand, slurping it off my fingers.
"Be careful," Naji said. "Don't eat too fast."
I thought about what happened with the water and slowed down.
It didn't take me long to warm up, what with the fire and the food. When we'd finished I walked over to the camel, who had folded himself up all elegant in the sand. I scratched him behind the ears and rubbed his neck, and he blinked his big damp eyes at me, and for a moment I felt weirdly content, even if I was surrounded by nothing but sand and sky and scrubby little desert trees, even if I was traveling with an assassin who wouldn't tell me nothing.
But the next day, during the absolute blazingest part of the late afternoon, I started tottering around on the sand, and I couldn't see straight. My head was pounding like I'd been in a fight. The sky kept dipping down into the sand and the sand kept swooping up into the sky, which was so hot it was white, and I couldn't even remember what clouds looked like.
The next thing I knew Naji had his arms around me. I blinked and looked up at him, at his dark eyes and the part of the scar I could see above his mask.
"You're going to ride the camel for the time being," he said.
"What happened?"
"Sun sickness."
He scooped me up, one hand beneath my knees and the other under my shoulder, and I got real dizzy, though if it were from the heat or from him carrying me I don't know. His chest was sticky with sweat, even through the fabric of his robes – he wasn't wearing his armor – and I kept thinking about it later, the way his chest felt against my cheek.
He set me on the camel and pressed one hand against my waist while I steadied myself. He took hold of the camel's rope and tugged on it and the camel pushed forward.
"I'm sorry," he said, not looking at me. "I should have listened to your complaints about the heat."
I squinted down at him, feeling a little smug and also a little touched that he'd bothered to apologize. He didn't say nothing more about it, though.
The next morning Naji let me sleep longer, and he made me drink twice the usual amount of water before we set off.
"Did it hurt you?" I asked. He was packing up the tent, folding it over on itself.
"Did what hurt me?"
"When I got the sun sickness."