* * *
The princess had not vanished. The sun rose beyond the canyon walls, waking the insects and charming them into singing the desert’s morning song.
“Eat, Serana,” Alila said, handing the princess a trail cake of dried fruit, fat, and honey wrapped in waxy, purple izgo leaves.
“Call me Yaehala,” the woman said around bites. “What is your name?”
Alila had turned away to lower her headscarf and eat. “Ali,” she mumbled.
“The unicorns are real,” Yaehala said and her tone struck Alila as funny, but it seemed rude to laugh at a princess so she stuffed the rest of her trail cake into her mouth.
“Of course they are real,” she said, trying to keep derision out of her voice.
“I thought I had dreamed them. But they do not like men.”
Alila sighed and took a swig of water from the skin before wrapping her headscarf back around her face and turning to the princess.
“I,” she said, “am not a man.” She said the words coldly, hoping to convey that the princess should stop asking questions.
Yaehala ignored her tone, rubbing her belly as though to reassure herself the baby was still there. “Their legs are so thin but their bodies are muscled more like a lions than a horse. Is it true their beards find water and their horns can close wounds?” She stared at Hezi, who was licking the rock on which Alila had placed a double handful of wheat, her blue tongue catching up the last stray grains.
“Or open wounds,” Alila said pointedly and then she whistled for Gabi to come down and get her breakfast. The princess was wrong about the healing part. Unicorn saliva healed, not the sharp, curving horn.
“Their eyes are like the sea,” Yaehala murmured, struggling up to kneel and leanforward. “Ohah. I think I see waves moving.”
“They came from the sea, left behind in the desert when Wave Mother turned her back on the young god Sahid. That is why they are the color of sea foam and their eyes carry the memories of the depths.” Did this foreign princess really not know anything? Alila stood, wiping her hands on her dajib. She started to pack up her little camp.
“I need to get to the falls at Gwadar, do you know where this is?” Yaehala also stood, planting a palm against a boulder. The lapis beads in her hair jingled and Alila wondered if all the Pashet’s women were decorated so that they made noise wherever they went, like fat lap dogs with belled collars.
She knew where it was, the bay at the end of the Makra river when the water poured into the sea. It was two days’ journey south of the city of Rivah, where Alila sold her frankincense twice a year in the covered markets. If they took a slightly altered route from the normal and cut over to the Sea road, the Falls were almost on the way.
Alila shook her head. She couldn’t take this woman with her. It was madness.
Yaehala misread the gesture and started to explain where Gwadar was so Alila had to hold up a hand and cut the princess off.
“I know where it is. But I must go to trade my incense. I will give you water and point you the way to the nearest village.” That seemed the least she could do, if the most she were willing to.
Desperate fear clouded Yaehala’s eyes again and she clutched at her swollen belly. “Her mercenaries will find me if I go to a village. My only hope is to get to Gwadar.”
“You are a princess, Serana, and look to be carrying the Pashet’s child. Who would hunt you and live?”
Yaehala’s jade eyes narrowed and then stared beyond Alila for a long moment, as though the answer lay somewhere over her shoulder, tucked away on the tree-covered canyon wall. Alila shrugged and started harnessing up the unicorns, loading the sacks of frankincense into their panniers. The enemy of the princess wasn’t her problem.
“First Serana Medb,” Yaehala said, laying a hand on Alila’s arm. “Zwigir mercenaries hunt me. They killed my guards and my horse. They will take me to her and she will cut the child from my belly and claim him as her own.”
“The Pashet’s First Serana hunts you?” Alila mulled this information over. If the child that Yaehala carried was, as she claimed, a boy, it would mean that the Pashet would marry her and raise her up to Pashetta to rule beside him.
Curse her. Alila stared at the jade eyes filling with tears and bit her lip behind her headscarf. Hezi twisted her long neck around and lipped at Yaehala’s arm, catching her dirty silk sleeve in her teeth. The unicorn tugged gently. Gabi came up alongside and tossed her head in the air.
“Seems my friends have already decided,” Alila muttered, not really angry with her unicorns. They had come to her in her time of greatest need and now it was clear they wished to help this desperate woman. She knew she would be a fool to ignore them.
“You will take me to Gwadar? I will reward you there, I swear it.” The hope in the princess’s voice wrenched at Alila’s heart, dragging her into a firm decision. A pregnant woman. Here. The gods, it seemed, had dragged her full circle, offering up a strange sort of amends.
“Yes,” she muttered. “But if there is trouble on the way, I am no warrior.” Killing had gotten her into enough trouble in life. She would not break her vows for a stranger, god-willed atonement or no.