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Nekharat kept close to Fawn as the blood-marked Arabian swam ahead, her attention held to his maneuvering with one ear fastened forward and the other swiveled to the side to mind her golden, young escort. He possessed mannerisms she disliked, his presumptuousness, chief among them, and as much as she would like to not spend another minute under his eye, she felt it her duty to ensure that Fawn would not be swept away in whatever undertow might await her within the bounds of his home. She did not trust the way he regarded her or Fawn with any kind of approachable sensibility. It was all pomp and proper, almost rehearsed.

Yet it was not the mysteries of the Arabian’s intentions that caused her to inhale a sharp breath through her nostrils, but the realization that they had arrived on the shore of the Dunes—of all places—a fact that Antares spoke aloud as though it was anything but obvious. Moreover, her eyes widened when she realized that among his scent and the scents of many others lingering in the warm wind, was one that was very familiar. It rattled her memory like a steel drum, hailing from years past distant but not forgotten. The unmistakable air of Maslakhat.

She pinned her ears and resisted the temptation to snap at Antares, either physically or verbally. He could not know that he was insulting her with descriptions of where and how they might perform their ablutions. Instead, she walked on beside Fawn as they reached the oasis, closer, tighter beside her, as if her scent might cloak her own. Her mind searched for a reason why the golden bay Maslakhat would have come back here—after all, it was barely a year ago she came to the Dunes for the first time in search of Shaydowfax and instead met the veritable ray of sunshine, Shararat, a scent that would have been far more welcome, but instead was long stale.

Nekharat knew that there was nothing she could do now. She was here, and Maslakhat would discover that the girl he had raised, the red child of the sand whose mother was wholly absent from her memory, was a child no more.

NEKHARAT