she arrived, there were only a dozen great trees left in an isolated grove, now there were more than a dozen interconnected groves, each nurtured by a man or woman who’d started out a stranger, or a stranger’s child.
Of course, nurturing a druid grove required innate talents. At any time) the greater number of the oasis’s inhabitants were ordinary folk who worked the fields, tended the animals, or provided a brawny escort when Quraite needed to trade with the Lion-King in Urik.
Without prying, which she had not done during the storm and would not do now, there was no guessing why Kashi had wanted to bring a Urikite stranger home to Quraite. Perhaps she’d succumbed to some rough-hewn city-bred allure. Druids certainly weren’t immune to reckless passion: They venerated the wilder aspects of nature. They took risks, sometimes foolishly.
And Kashi was a young, vigorous woman who looked upon the men of Quraite as brothers, not suitors. It was only natural that she might stumble upon her first love in Urik. That was, after all, no small part of the reason why Telhami sent her there in the first place—With Yohan, of course, to watch over her. Two or three human generations ago, the veteran dwarf had been a stranger in Quraite himself. He strode out of the salt barrens in the heat of the day, alone and afoot, guided, he’d said, by an emptiness in his heart, From that first moment she’d trusted his dedication as she’d trusted few others. She bared the mysteries of her grove to him by moonlight but, try as he might, poor Yohan couldn’t grow weeds behind an erdlu-pen. The druids’ path was closed to him.
Still, Yohan had his own gifts. Between sharp observation and a vestigial mind-bending talent, he could measure a stranger’s temper in a single, squinted glance.
If that ragged, ugly and dirty stranger Kashi had hauled out of Urik had harbored a harmful thought toward druids in general or Kashi in particular, he’d have died long before the Fist of the Sun closed around him. Kashi had become Yohan’s focus years ago, when her mother died. Yohan would protect her with his life, or spend hereafter as a wailing banshee.
Thoughts of Akashia and Yohan brought a smile to her lips and energy to her limbs. She sipped the water if of Quraite, giving appropriate thanks to spirits both living and inanimate who made it crisp, dear, and refreshing, then she swallowed the test in two gulps.
“Bring me my hat and veil, little one. They’ve reached the trees. We don’t want to keep them waiting, do we?”
“No, Grandmother,” the child agreed, taking the bowl from her hands before fetching the hat from a peg in the center post of the straw hut.
Telhami bowed her head, but only a little. Once she’d been as tall as Akashia; now she was no taller than a gap-toothed girl-child. When the gauzy veil had been looped around her neck and shoulders, she took up a gnarled wooden staff and left her shady hut. Even with the veil, the burning sunlight hurt her eyes. The girl lead her to the center of the circular village where the travelers and the stranger awaited.
Any journey to Quraite was a strenuous experience. When the journey was compounded by the Smoking Crown storm, which fury Telhami had sensed in her momentary mind-bending contact with Akashia, it was no surprise that the travelers seemed weary to the point of exhaustion. Kashi accepted the steadying hands of her friends and neighbors as she dismounted; Ruari, riding doubled-up behind her and favoring a swollen, discolored knee, clearly needed them. Even Yohan was a shade slow leaping down from his kank’s saddle.
But no amount of hard-traveling, wind, rain, or mud could account for that tattered stranger atop the soldier-kank. He was, as the girl-child promised, a big man—although his cramped position, wedged beneath the cargo racks, had made him seem larger than he was. His face was marred by a much-broken nose. There was an old scar twisting his upper lip and new ones streaked across his cheek. She had to look at him with her mind’s eye to see that he was still a young man, no more than a few years older than Kashi herself—
Where had Kashi found him? Sleeping drunk in some Urik alley?
The stains and tears in the stranger’s clothing were older by far than the storm. His hair and beard hadn’t been properly groomed in weeks. There was a story here,