The other cousin—her sister, Temur thought, though he still had trouble keeping the Tsareg clan girl-cousins straight—pushed her down on a rolled hide and waved Temur to sit beside her. “You take care of Toragana. I’m going to fetch great-grandmother.”
The swaddled babe on her back was visible as the girl disappeared between tents.
Toragana seemed not to require any extensive caretaking other than a prop to lean her shoulder against, so Temur did as the other girl had asked. He knew from hard experience that a wound that would not prove fatal by itself could put a chill in the bone that would bring down a wounded warrior—even before the wound could take heat and fester. He shrugged his coat off and threw it around Toragana’s shoulders, adding an arm over it to keep her warm.
Around them, others were straggling to the fireside, some wounded or aiding wounded, some dragging the dead. Temur wanted to close his eyes against the faces of still more people he had known gone lifeless and empty.
Toragana, he thought, did. Or close the one eye that wasn’t torn and swollen shut anyway. After a stiff moment, she leaned against him, burrowing her shoulder into his chest. She sighed, hard, then began to sob. “Edene…”
“I know,” Temur said. “I’ll get her back. Wherever they’ve taken her, I will ride after.”
He said it with the force of a vow, and the vow filled him. Yes, he thought, suddenly certain. I will go after her. To the Range of Ghosts and to Hell itself.
Determination felt good in his mouth, like a round stone. Toragana took his hand; he squeezed.
* * *
When Temur told Tsareg Altantsetseg of his plan, she agreed that he must leave at once. The Tsareg clan, she said, would stay behind and sky-bury their dead. Temur would ride ahead. He would take Bansh and he would take Edene’s rose-gray mare, Buldshak, as a remount—“and because Edene will need a horse, when you find her”—and the clan would give him food.
He insisted they keep their stores of salt in case the ghosts returned. Altantsetseg retaliated by handing him an airag-skin full not with mare’s milk but with salted water.
As he threw a leg over Buldshak’s back—Bansh snorting jealously by his knee—Temur found himself shaking his head at the ridiculousness of what he was about to undertake. Here he was, riding off to rescue a woman from ghosts as if it were as everyday a matter as stealing a kidnapped wife back from an enemy clan.
But they had taken her alive. Her and her only, when they had been killing everything else they touched. Surely if they had a reason to take her alive, they had a reason to keep her that way?
The remains of the Tsareg clan had assembled to see him off. He raised a hand to them; they waved as he made his mare bow. Altantsetseg called out, “May you ride comfortably and tirelessly on the road you travel!”
Gently, Temur reined the mares away.
He hadn’t gone a yart at a canter when he realized that the shadow in the grass behind him was Sube, following at a ground-eating lope. He brought the rose-gray to a halt with his weight, letting a hand rest on her shoulder when she snorted and shook her slender neck. The dog stopped five paces off, tongue lolling, the felted shreds of his matted coat hanging about him like a coat of rags.
Temur’s heart broke a little.
He understood the offer, and he was confident the dog understood it too: They were going raiding, to steal back what had been stolen from the clan. But what the dog didn’t know—couldn’t know—was that Temur had no idea where the trail would take him. To the Range of Ghosts, surely. And then what? How would he feed a dog? If he came to a place where he had to let the horses run wild, well, steppe ponies were half wild to begin with, and after sixty-odd days he had a good opinion of Bansh’s good sense.
Sube would track. He would guard Temur and the mares from ghosts in the night. Temur had already seen that he would fight like a demon. He would be a companion by the fire, a sharp nose and sharper ears and fierce teeth. Temur longed to call him.
The clan needed him to guard their flocks—and their lives. And Temur was leading him into death if he took him.
“No, Sube,” he said. He pointed back along the track, the faint trace of two mare’s passage through the grass that already swished calf-high. “Go back.”
Sube whined. He dropped his head and ears.
“No,” Temur said. “Go back.”
The big dog sat, obdurate.
Temur turned away. He urged the mare on.
Behind him, he was aware of the dog’s eyes watching him out of sight.
* * *
In the morning, Temur glimpsed the mountains, just a dull finger smudge on the horizon. It would only be the front range he could see so far, the smaller peaks called the Range of Ghosts. Beyond them, reached by way of a perilous pass, lay a high plateau and the city of Qeshqer—with the even higher and more treacherous peaks of the Steles of the Sky at its back.