She fell silent. He didn’t speak.

Searching for something to say, Liyana said, “My little brother loves that story.”

“In the absence of truth, a story will do,” Korbyn said.

“What is the truth?” she asked. She wished she could suck the words back in. It wasn’t her place to ask to hear divine truths. She wondered what sort of secrets were in his mind—and what kind of horrors. He had seen generations of humans with their flaws and their failures. She wondered how she measured up against the thousands of lives that he had seen come and go.

“Once, there was a lizard who was obsessed with the truth . . . ,” he said.

She knew this one, about a lizard who learned the value of a delicate lie and thus mastered the art of camouflage, but she let him tell it anyway. If he did not want to share his thoughts and secrets with her, that was his right.

But if he had a nightmare again, then god or not, she would wake him.

At dawn Liyana rolled up the tent. She didn’t speak of dreams or wolves, but she watched Korbyn as he stretched on top of a dune. He folded his body over, laid his palms in the sand, and balanced himself in a handstand. She checked over their supplies.

“Our food won’t last more than two days,” she commented. She shook the waterskins. Some water sloshed in one, but the other was empty. “Water won’t last the day. That has to be the priority.”

He flipped upright and executed a bow. “Your wish is my command.”

She blinked. She hadn’t meant that as an order. Oh, goddess, have I offended him? She thought of how familiar she’d acted with him last night, waking him from his sleep and swapping stories in the darkness. Had she overstepped then, too? Liyana dropped to her knees. “My continued lapses in discretion would be a source of vast embarrassment to my family and clan if they knew. Please pardon my behavior.” She bowed her head and hoped that had been enough to cover the myriad of offenses she was certain she’d caused over the last day.

When he didn’t answer, she raised her head. He looked amused. “There is a fine line between deference and sarcasm,” he said. “You leaped over it.”

Liyana winced. “I was never supposed to meet a deity! I don’t know how you want me to behave.” She noticed that he had packed the tent and was hefting the pack onto his shoulders. “At least let me carry that.”

He refused, skipping backward as she reached toward the pack. “This body is as strong and healthy as yours.”

“But you’re a god!”

“I never asked for your deference, Liyana. So long as you do nothing to hinder our goal, you may behave however you wish. If you want to howl like a wolf, I won’t stop you. If you want to cross the desert on all fours, please be my guest. If you want to pass the journey by telling bawdy stories . . .” He paused. “Do you know any bawdy stories?”

She couldn’t help smiling. “I don’t know you nearly well enough for those.”

“Aha! So that means you do know some!” Carrying the pack, he began to walk across the sands. She scooped up the waterskins and followed. “So, what will it take to get to know me well enough? Do you want to hear about the first time I inhabited a vessel and how I failed to take into account the urgency of certain bodily needs?”

Liyana laughed. “Oh no.”

“Oh yes. Almost all deities pee themselves at least once in the middle of performing a miracle.” He strode across the dunes, and she matched his pace.

“Even Bayla?” she asked.

“She was summoning water from deep underground to create a new well. It is a difficult task. It’s far easier to fill an existing well because the water is already present. Far more difficult to coax water into the bedrock of an area without it. At any rate, the task required fierce concentration over an extended length of time.” He paused. “It is a blessing that you won’t be able to tell Bayla that I told you this. She is far more concerned about her dignity than I am.”

Her smile faded. “What is Bayla like?”

“Glorious! Also punctual.”

Liyana nearly smiled again, but it was difficult when she couldn’t help thinking of how Bayla should have come the night before last. She had not been punctual then.

“She values order and cultivates precision. Her section of the Dreaming has smooth, unblemished sand, and she does not tolerate imperfection.”

“She sounds like my mother.” Liyana tried to keep her voice even, as if this were an ordinary conversation, but she failed. She wondered what Mother would say if she saw her daughter trekking across the desert with Korbyn, and she felt an ache inside as sharp as the sand wolf’s claws. Mother must think I am dead.

“Our clans often come to value our characteristics,” Korbyn said. “In many ways, I am her opposite. I am imperfection personified. I am the rule-bender. I am the trickster. I am—”

“The raven,” Liyana said.

“Yes.”

“And proud of it?” It was a gentle tease, just enough to test the waters and see if he meant what he said about not needing deference. If so . . . Well, she had never been very good at deference. It would be a relief to abandon it.

“Justifiably,” Korbyn said. “Do you know of the time when the raven—”

“So if she’s so perfect and you’re so imperfect, how did you fall in love?”

He weathered the interruption without blinking. “Bayla loves to laugh. And I can make her laugh.” His voice was soft, as if he were filled with memories. Liyana wished she were filled with memories like that, ones that could fill her voice with warmth. As a vessel, that had never been possible. In a cheerful voice he asked, “Do you want to hear how I won her heart?”

“Of course,” she said. She thought of Ger and Esti and the warmth in their eyes. She wasn’t destined to ever experience that. She had another purpose, she reminded herself, and with each step across the sand, she walked closer to it.

She continued to walk with purpose as Korbyn launched into an outrageous tale of how he’d impressed Bayla by rearranging her carefully laid out constellations in the sky above her portion of the Dreaming. Bayla had retaliated in kind until all the stars were woven together in a bright path across the sky, which they then walked upon.

Chapter Eight

In the mornings, as the sun slowly cooked the air, Liyana and Korbyn covered as many miles as they could. Once the desert reached what felt like fire pit temperatures, Liyana pitched the tent. She waited in the shade while Korbyn coaxed moisture from the nearby desert plants. He returned with full waterskins, as well as tubers that shouldn’t have been ripe yet and clutches of lizard eggs that shouldn’t have been laid yet. He then collapsed inside the tent while she took a turn outside, shredding the tubers and frying the eggs over a tiny fire. In the late afternoons, when the air didn’t sear their lungs as badly, they continued on, trading stories as they walked. Liyana laughed so much that her ribs ached, and the dunes rang with the sound of Korbyn’s laughter. They followed this routine for nine days, leaving the sand dunes and entering an area of caked earth pockmarked by patches of yellowed grasses and barrel-shaped cacti.

On the tenth day, Liyana saw the silhouette of date palm trees. They clustered in a grove of seven or eight with narrow trunks that curved up to crowns of leaves. “Real or a mirage?”

“Real,” Korbyn said.

She squinted at the oasis, and the palm trees wavered and stretched. “How can you tell?” He couldn’t have used magic. Even though he was a god, he had to be in a trance to work magic like any magician, and she didn’t think he could enter a trance while he walked.

“I used my divine wisdom and superior intellect.”

Liyana shielded her eyes and spotted a plume of sand. It billowed around three figures on horseback who were riding toward them. “Or you saw them.” She pointed.