Though his words were strained and weak, he spoke in unaccented Bedine. Ruha wondered whether he knew the same magic that Zarud and his purple-robed companion had been using to communicate, or if he had learned the language from some other tribe.

Without replying to the stranger, Ruha went down the slope, then rolled him onto his back. He had cracked, bleeding lips and a face haggard with the effects of dehydration. The wound was more serious than it had appeared from atop the ravine, for the berrani had torn both his aba and his flesh trying to pull the barbed shaft from his shoulder.

"Who are you?" she asked at last, filling her hands with water from the tiny stream.

The wounded man allowed her to pour the water into his mouth, then said, "I'm called Lander." The effort of talking drained his strength, but he continued to speak. "I've come to warn your tribe-"

"The Zhentarim are here. There is no need to warn us."

Looking alarmed, Lander summoned his strength and gasped, "They have already wiped out one tribe!"

"Save your strength," the widow said, holding her fingers over the stranger's mouth. "We know."

"But you don't-"

Ruha used her fingers to close his eyes. "I said to save your strength." With her free hand, she took a pinch of fine sand and sprinkled it over the man's face. "Sleep," she whispered, following her order with a spell that guaranteed he would obey.

After filling her waterskin, Ruha rolled Lander onto his side and whispered an incantation. The man's robe flapped as the breeze grew stronger and slipped beneath his body. Soon he hovered a foot off the ground, his weight buoyed by the wind beneath his back. The widow took the stranger's arm, then pulled him up the gulch in the general direction of camp. When she judged they were roughly even with her khreima, she left him floating in the bottom of the gulch and climbed to its edge to peer at the camp, a hundred and fifty yards away.

From what she could see, the women were busy with their weaving and the children were either with the camel herds or playing inside the main circle of tents. Neither Zarud nor any of the men were anywhere in sight, and everyone else was studiously ignoring her tent.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Ruha went back to Lander and towed him out of the gulch. The last thing she wanted was to get caught using her magic, and she suspected it would also be better if Zarud remained ignorant of Lander's presence. Keeping a wary eye cast in the direction of camp, she pulled him to the back side of her tent, raised the camel-hair wall, and pushed him inside. Only then did she cancel the spell and let him drop to the ground.

Ruha entered the tent from the front, then dragged the stranger farther into the tent, where she could attend to his wound. Even in his magically induced sleep, Lander's face was drawn and contorted with pain. Ruha had the urge to look beneath his eye-patch, but resisted the temptation. If she were the one lying unconscious and wounded, she would not want him to lift her veil, so it only seemed fair to respect his privacy. Instead, she pulled the berrani's dagger from its sheath. Unlike her own jambiya, it had a straight blade that would be more useful for the tasks at hand.

Ruha cut the dirty robes away from the wound and removed a diamond-shaped amulet of gold from around his neck so she could inspect the wound. The featherless arrow had entered just below the collarbone. The flesh surrounding the black shaft was puffy and red. Lander had tried to work the arrow out by himself, and the edges of the wound were torn and raw. He had enlarged the puncture enough so that Ruha could almost see the head, buried deep within the sinews that held his shoulder and collarbone together. The flesh surrounding the head oozed pus and deep red blood.

The widow tugged gently on the shaft and saw why the berrani had not been able to extract it. The end of a barb poked its sharp tip through a muscle. Lander did not stir at all, and the young widow was glad his stupor would spare him the pain that would accompany what she had to do next.

Ruha had never before extracted an arrow from a man's flesh, but she did not feel queasy or hesitant. Like all Bedine, she had learned to clean game and butcher meat at a young age, and human flesh was not so different from that of a hare or a camel. Moreover, during her years with Qoha'dar, she and the old woman had had no one but each other to rely upon in the event of trouble. More than once, Ruha had set a bone or sewn up a gash for her mentor.

Grasping the shaft with her left hand, she used the other to tug gently at the arrow. When the barb appeared beneath a large sinew, she gently pushed the arrow back into the flesh and turned it a few degrees, then pulled up again. This time the tip showed through a mass of mangled red flesh. She guided the tip of the dagger down the arrow shaft until it reached the barb. With a quick flick, she severed the strands of meat holding the arrow in Lander's shoulder.

Ruha pulled the shaft free, and the berrani gasped in his sleep. She tossed the grisly arrow aside and pressed her palm against Lander's lips. He immediately returned to his stuporous sleep, and the young widow ripped a piece of cloth off the hem of his aba. She soaked it with water from the skin she had filled at the spring, then wiped the blood and grime out of the wound. The flesh she had cut to extract the dagger was still oozing blood, so she rolled the cloth into a small ball and pressed it into the puncture.

The widow ripped another piece of cloth from Lander's robe, soaked it, and cleaned the flesh surrounding the wound. Where it was not inflamed and red from the trauma of the injury, the berrani's skin was as pale and milky as the moon. Had anyone told Ruha that a man could be so white, she would have imagined a grotesque, inhuman disfigurement. On Lander, however, the color seemed a creamy complement to his blue eye and golden hair. The young widow had to restrain herself from laying a hand on his chest to see if his skin felt as soft as it looked.

Disconcerted by her unexpected surge of curiosity, Ruha dressed the wound with the cloth she had used to clean it. When she removed Lander's cloth belt to use as a bandage, she heard something jingle in the pocket of his robe. She reached inside and found six glass vials. Five contained a thick golden liquid, but the sixth was empty. The widow had no idea what the fluid was, but she feared the unconscious man would roll over and shatter the containers, so she laid the vials aside.

After Ruha finished bandaging the dressing into place, she laid down in a corner, pulled a sleeping carpet over herself, and closed her eyes with her veil still covering her face. Later, when her father was not surrounded by the gossiping elders on the council, she would go to him and tell him of the berrani.

At dusk Ruha awoke. For a few minutes, she laid beneath her carpet, listening to the doves coo and the quail chatter as they watered in the gulch. From the camp came the roars of thirsty camels and the shrill voices of tired mothers ordering neglectful children to fetch the evening's water.

Lander lay just as the widow had left him, on his back, with his belt holding his blood spotted bandage in place. He remained so motionless that Ruha began to worry her surgery had killed him. Finally he drew a great deep breath, and Ruha knew that he was alive.

The widow rose and rubbed the sleep from her eyes, then took a long drink from the waterskin. When she finished, she placed it next to her patient in case he woke, straightened her aba, and left the tent.

Ruha went straight to her father's tent. As she passed through the camp, she could see that it was an unusual evening. The camel herds were tethered close to the tents, as if they were going to be loaded at any moment. The women were not quite packing, but they were arranging their possessions in neat bundles, as if they expected the order to leave at any moment. The eldest sons were sharpening their father's scimitars and testing bowstrings, casting anxious glances in the direction of the sheikh's khreima.