"I'm cold," his mother said to him, as the heat of the midday Salem sun baked their backs.

Hasan had wanted to be off this wasted island hours ago, and for him there was no time better than now, when his wilting body ached for the relief of the sea. Yet Evren had seemed to shrink into herself as the day progressed, and now she was a huddled old woman with trembling knees, her copper eyes glazed and far away as they trekked along the boundary line between the Salem territories.

Hasan flicked a single ear back, half-processing what she had said. Since he had found her yesterday, scrounging among the brush in the middle of nowhere, she'd had little to say that was coherent, other than muttering her brother's name over and over—and, occasionally, Persephone's—until Hasan had never been more glad the bastard was long dead.

His sides were foaming with sweat as they crested a rusty red hill, and it was then, as he picked his way round a scraggly bush, that it happened. There was a thump as Evren's frail body hit the earth, the snap of shrubbery breaking beneath her weight. Hasan whirled round to see her sliding back down the hill they'd climbed, rocks clattering and soil turning her white markings red. She came to a stop, mercifully, after only a few meters, with the rest of the hill stretching out below her in ominous silence, as if waiting to consume the last of her.

She did not rise again.

For the next few days Hasan stood by her side in a fugue state, his throat raw from calling her name, until the scavengers arrived. One by one they circled and watched, dancing closer and closer, growing bolder, until one of them chanced a snap of their beak at her tobiano hide. He chased them away at first, but dehydration and hunger and heat exhaustion sapped his strength till he could do little else but stumble away into the blinding sunlight so that he did not have to watch them pick her bones clean.

It's what she would have wanted, he told himself: to die in her homeland. To become the very sand she was born on.

Another part of him physically ached to think of her body rotting there on the hillside, as lonely and abandoned as the legacy she'd tried to build. Friendless, alone. Forgotten.

It was hours before he smelled salt and realized he'd automatically walked in the direction of the ocean. He stopped then, his head hanging just above his knees, and stared blearily out across the endless sprawl of desert to where the twinkle of water danced on the horizon. What was he doing? You're going to die of dehydration, you stupid fuck, he thought. There was something poetic about it, almost—to grieve so intensely you shrivelled away into nothing.

Then the wind shifted, and he turned his head to follow a new scent: a scent full of life. There, half-hidden behind a hill not far to the west, was a small herd of horses clustered around a green oasis.

He was saved.

With the last of his strength, Hasan lifted his head and shuffled in their direction.