As Korbyn focused on the child, Liyana sidled closer to Fennik and Raan. The three of them watched the camp. A plume of sand advanced from it. “He’ll collapse after he heals,” Liyana said. “He always does. It’s his worst trick.”

Both of them looked grim. “We are fortunate that the Falcon Clan does not have horses, but even on foot, they’ll catch up,” Fennik said.

“Loan me one of your bows,” Raan said.

“We cannot shoot unarmed people,” Fennik said. The sand cloud obscured the number of people, but it had to be more than a dozen. It could have been a hundred. It could have been the entire clan. “Plus I do not have enough arrows.”

Liyana rubbed her forehead, trying to think. She kept feeling the stones that her clan had thrown at her. If Jidali hadn’t intervened, this could have been her fate, and her clan could have condemned themselves. This baby could have been her cousin.

Fennik checked on Korbyn. “He isn’t finished yet.”

The plume of sand drew closer. It spread out wide, blanketing a stretch of the desert. Liyana heard shouting roll across the desert toward them.

“They’re coming,” Raan said. “A lot of them.”

“Five minutes, and we interrupt him,” Liyana said. If he isn’t finished healing the baby by then . . .

Fennik tightened the saddles on the horses, who pawed the ground and snorted. Closer, Liyana recognized the magician and the chieftess at the head of the horde. At least a hundred men and women fanned out behind them.

“I don’t think we have five minutes,” Raan said.

Liyana knelt beside Pia and Korbyn, but she couldn’t speak. She kept picturing Jidali as a baby. It wasn’t this child’s fault that his god hadn’t come.

Singing the words in the same lullaby tune, Pia said, “Leave me here, and I will deliver the baby to her mother when she comes.”

“You can’t risk it,” Liyana said. “Your clan needs you.”

Pia broke off singing. “I cannot leave a baby alone and merely hope they find her!” Hearing Pia’s agitation, the baby scrunched her face into a knot and screamed. Her cheeks flushed red.

Korbyn’s eyes snapped open. And then he toppled over.

Using one of Raan’s choicest swears, Liyana shook him. “Korbyn, wake up! You need to ride!” She and Fennik hauled him to his feet and with Raan’s help, they hoisted him onto a horse.

Fennik secured him on and called to Pia, “You need to mount now!”

“I’ll take the baby back,” Raan said. She lifted the child out of Pia’s arms. Immediately, the baby began to wail, reaching for Pia. Raan bounced the baby on her hip with a practiced ease. The baby fussed but then settled against her.

The Falcon Clan was close. The chieftess shouted to them. Liyana could nearly distinguish words in the yell. Fennik scooped up Pia and tossed her onto a horse. “Raan has the baby?” Pia said. “I don’t hear crying. . . .”

“I’ll escape north after I deliver the child,” Raan said. “Be there so I don’t die of dehydration.”

Liyana began, “How can we trust—”

Raan flashed Liyana a smile. “You don’t have a choice. Or rather, you do: me or Pia. And which of us has more practice escaping?”

There was zero time left to discuss it. Liyana swung herself onto a horse, and they galloped away, leaving Raan to greet the doomed clan.

Just north of the Falcon Clan, Liyana climbed the branches of a tamar tree. She squinted at the sands beyond and saw no one. The camp was a smudge in the distance. Below her, Korbyn, Fennik, and Pia camped in the tree’s wide shadow, obscured from view by the spread of drooping limbs. The ancient tree covered nearly thirty feet of desert with limbs that reached the ground and then stretched vine-like a hundred feet in every direction. In the heat of the day, its broad leaves had curled into tight rolls, but the branches still sheltered Liyana and the others from the endless hot wind.

So far they’d waited half a day.

Liyana climbed down the tree, negotiating her way through the tangle of branches. She dropped to the ground next to their tent. “She isn’t going to come,” Liyana said. “We should have left the baby.”

At the base of the tree, Pia cried, “Are you heartless? It was a baby!”

“I didn’t say leave it to die,” Liyana said. “The clan was five minutes away. If we’d left it on bright cloth, they would have seen it, rescued it, and taken it happily home. Raan used that baby to flee.”

“She’ll rejoin us,” Pia said. “She has to. She won’t let her clan die.”

Another hour passed. And another.

Korbyn lit a fire, a small fire with little smoke, on the opposite side of the tamar tree. He set the various rodents, insects, and other food they had to cook.

Fennik oiled his bows. He also worked on fashioning new arrow points from rocks he’d collected. Liyana tried to practice her magic on the tamar tree. She wondered if her family had attempted their dreamwalks. Without Bayla, they couldn’t have chosen a new vessel. She wondered if they felt despair. She thought about her mother and father, Jidali, Aunt Sabisa, her cousins . . . She thought of Talu and wondered what she had done when the dreamwalks failed. Eventually Liyana gave up on her practice, and she crawled into the shade of the tent. Korbyn lay there with his eyes closed and his arms crossed over his chest. She pulled her knees up to her chin and looked out the tent flap, through the drooping branches, toward the Falcon Clan. “What should we do?” she asked Korbyn.

Eyes still closed, he said, “I could have been sleeping.”

“You weren’t,” she said.

“How did you know?” He opened his eyes.

“You have a little purr to your voice when you sleep.”

“I don’t purr.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s a divine purr.”

His mouth quirked a little, but the faint smile faded too quickly. “This shouldn’t be my responsibility,” he said without looking at her. “I’m not leadership material. I’m a trickster god. Little tricks. Not this!”

Liyana was silent, considering how to reply. She thought of Jidali crying “Why me?” when he was asked again to card the goats. And she thought of herself after she’d been chosen in the dreamwalk. “Why is it you?”

“I was with Bayla on the day she was summoned,” he said. “Her soul was drawn east, though your clan was west.” East, she thought. At last there was a direction. “No one believed me. It happened again. . . . The Scorpion Clan, the Horse Clan, Silk, Falcon. All drawn east. Still no one believed me, for who would believe a trickster god? I did this to myself. I made myself untrustworthy, and here is the price I pay.”

“Surely they must believe you now,” Liyana said.

“Most don’t watch the world,” Korbyn said. “You can’t affect the world of the living from within the Dreaming, and it hurts to see your clan suffer and be unable to help.”

“How did you avoid the fate of the others?”

He snorted. “Side effect of being a trickster god. Trust no one. When I was summoned east, I suspected a trick. I did not leave until I was certain that it was my clan who called.”

You’re trusting me now, she thought, but she didn’t say it out loud. This was the most truth he’d spoken to her in weeks. “Who’s in the east who would do this?”

He didn’t answer. Instead he watched the sky above the tamar tree. Above, two sky serpents danced. Their glass scales caught the sunlight and reflected it like a thousand jewels as their bodies twisted and intertwined. Their eyes burned like minisuns as their bodies etched through the blue.

Quietly Liyana said, “You don’t know. You don’t know who took the other deities or why they were taken, or even if others have been taken since. That’s why you never answer questions. You have no idea how to rescue them. Just like you don’t know what to do if Raan doesn’t come.”

“You know, I used to be a very good liar.”