Wendell scoffed. What did she know? “Bird brain,” he spat, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “If you think you will do any better alone, go, take your chances.”

They rode a way before he spoke again. “Besides, I asked you to find traders, not cut throats. If they had murdered me in my sleep, where would you be now? Certainly not on the back of a horse.”

Granted, neither would he if the woman hadn’t ended the life of the third and final man. “Perhaps you should get off that horse and walk a day in my shoes,” Wendell said, suggesting the woman suffer the heat and long walk in the sun just as he had the day before. “If only I could fly away from all of my problems.”

This journey was insufferable enough without spending it tied to a woman who made it ten times worse, he thought. Wendell found comfort in the fact that at least he had the humility to thank her, rather than point out her every downfall. “You’ll watch your tongue or I’ll eat you as well,” Wendell warned, without jest.

It was easy to miss the coast in the midst of the desert, even hot air, he imagined, was better than no air at all. It had been many years since Wendell had sat on the back of a horse. For the first hour into the journey, there was a certain sense of excitement to being back in the saddle. This soon passed, however, as familiar aches and pains resurfaced and the man was reminded why he had taken to the sea all those years ago, rather than remain in the saddle, serving some foreign lord unworthy of his loyalty.

How different would his life be, he wondered, if he had chosen to stay in his hometown, serving the lord of the land, just as his father had before him. Wendell wanted more than that for himself. He wanted adventure and stories to tell his future children. What did he owe some entitled lord? Nothing, but if he ever returned home, he knew the only thing waiting for a deserter was arrest.

It had taken some skill to trade his black tunic for white, something he did mid-ride. The heat of the day was unbearable. It made no sense to encourage the sun’s attention by wearing black. Wendell’s arm throbbed. He knew the bindings were too tight, but could think of no other way to stop the bleeding. The tips of his fingers tingled, numb, as if no longer apart of him.

By the time night fell, though the lack of sun afforded them some reprieve from the heat, the air remained hot. Even the sweat on his brow seemed to boil as if they had walked a path of burning coals. The horses were glad for rest when it came time to stop. The black gelding lay down in the sand, head slumped against the earth. The saddle had been removed, the reins, however, remained. Wendell had tied them to the saddle. There was nothing for the horse to eat and thus, little to tempt it away from their camp.

The idea of sleep was unsettling. What else would find them in the night? “You’re on first watch,” he said, tucked against the sand on his good arm. “Wake me if you get too tired.”

Bird brain? Kes watched the man, laughing at his foul mood. Right up until he threatened her. It was then that she paused and tilted her head to the side as they rode. He sounded serious, he looked serious. Truly, did he feel no sense of companionship or loyalty? Perhaps he didn’t realise that she chose to remain with him, that it would have been easier to fly away and find herself food, water and shelter. However, leaving the man in the desert wouldn’t surely resign him to death. Why did she stay? Kes knew she owed the man nothing. Curiosity perhaps. The woman enjoyed an adventure, and this was more fun than spending her days on a ship. She lifted her shoulders, rolling them back and clicking them.

Perhaps it was his arm, the wound that caused him to be so bad tempered. Silence had fallen between them and she studied the endless dunes as they passed. They were quite beautiful really, the shifting sands like water beneath the horses. Ironic, as there was no water to be found. The canteen that hung from her side did little to quench her thirst, and she worried for their horses. Darkness gave little reprieve.

He curled up on his side and the woman approached. She knelt down beside him and touched his shoulder. “I can help your wound,” she told him, leaning forward to stare down into his face. “It hurts you, infection will kill you here. Where there is no way to clean it.”

Kes sat back on her haunches then, holding her hands to him palm up. “Take off the tunic?” She asked, leaning a little to the side as she watched him. He was taller than she was. Which was unusual in her experience. But he was broad, with wide shoulders; something that was not unusual.

Wendell flinched, not having expected the woman’s advance or touch. He sat up, having done his best up until now to ignore the throbbing pain in his arm. The unbearable heat of the desert had almost made that easy. In fact, he was dizzy with dissolution. This vast wasteland had been nothing like the romantic stories told by poets and bards, the types of people and creatures, he imagined, who had never stepped foot in such a place. Wendell would not be kind when he retold such tales.

Kes’tral had offered to help with his wound. Everything about the offer put him on edge. It was magic she would use, he suspected, the one thing he feared more than death. Magic, after all, had never held a place in his heart. He had little trust for such things and even less for those who were able to conjure spells. Kes’tral had saved him, led him to water and followed him this far, Wendell reminded himself. If she intended to hurt him now, it would make little sense.

The pirate bent his legs to anchor himself in the sand as he leaned forward, folding his arms to free himself of his sweat-drenched tunic. The fabric smelt terrible after two days in the sun and a rough night sleeping on a bed of sand. A low grunt escaped him as he pulled the tunic away, the left arm loop of the garment catching against the makeshift bandage he wore. He lay the top across his legs once free and picked at the knot of his bindings. The fabric didn’t come away easily, putting up more of a fight the closer he got to the wound. His blood had seeped into the material and caused the layers to stick together.

“Careful,” he warned, exhaustion and pain a bad mix on even the most tolerant of people, of which he was not.

Wendell couldn’t see the wound on the back of his arm, but once exposed, he realised it had not yet pulled itself closed, with fresh blood oozing down the back of his arm. The first signs of infection had set in, parts of the flesh mottled yellow and black with bruising. It seemed the heat of the desert was doing them little in the way of favours.

“How bad is it?” He asked. “It certainly feels bad,” the pirate admitted. “I’ve had worse,” he added. The woman only need look to realise that much was true, his torso and back riddled with silver scuffs and scars. There was a large scar that wrapped over his left side, from belly to backbone. It was ugly and pale, stark against his bronze skin.

“Where are you from?” Wendell asked, curious. Was her ability something she had learned or a trait of her people, he wondered. “I grew up in a wasteland of extremes, much like this one, only it was cold and always snowing.” Wendell looked out across the dark, rolling dunes. “It’s easy to say now, in this place, that I prefer the cold, but nothing in the world could tempt me home… nothing.” He would never go back. He had promised himself that long ago.

Kes stood when he gave his reluctant acceptance. She scooped up her canteen from the sand and moved to kneel behind him. She sat back on her heels, patient as he pulled off his outer layer and exposed a mess of scars and rough treatment to her sight. There was little light without the sun, but even by the glow of the moon and stars, the abuse his body had faced was clear. She frowned, brows narrowed as she inspected the different marks without touching them.

How bad was it? She lifted a brow, touching the edge of the wound with her fingertips, her hand cool against the hot skin. “Looks bad, smells worse.” She replied. Kes curled her hand around the mans arm, the upper part beneath the armpit. He was sweaty, smelly and she didn’t seem to mind. Her expression impassive as she squeezed the muscle tightly and poured out the contents of her canteen over the open wound. Magic could do a lot, but it was always worth trying to assist a spell with basic attention first.

With the water gone, Kes closed her eyes. She held his arm firmly; and he would struggle to pull it from her grasp. She sensed the wound, exploring it with her ability rather then her gaze. She could almost feel the blow as it landed, his body remember. His body remember more then perhaps his mind wanted to. The touch of infection made her feel queasy, as though she’d hit her head. Kes drew in a breath, listening to him speak and smiled.

She pulled at her own essence, the strength within and she used it to clear the wound, scouring away the infection that lingered despite the water. Satisfied that at least it was clean, she worked to close the muscle together. Silent as she worked, she frowned, wrestling with tissue that was as stubborn as the man it belonged it. Wendy would have felt a pinching at first as she wrestled with the infection, before the sensation might have been replaced by something close to pins and needles. The blood stopped seeping over her hands and she sat back. The flesh knit together before the final layers of skin spread and closed, leaving the man with a scar to match the rest of the marks on his body.

Kes released his arm gently, sitting back. She drew in her breathe with care, expecting to throw up again. Finally, she found her voice.

“I am from many places, my people travel often; wherever the adventure calls, we roam.” She wiped a hand across her brow, trying to ease her own headache. “We roam, we learn, we heal.” Kes smiled and opened her eyes.

“Lucky for you…” she paused a moment. “I should have done that before. I should not have delayed; but I did not realise how amusing I would find your company.” The woman say back in the sand and rested her hands on her knees, with no way to clean the blood from them.

“What are you doing?” He asked, as the woman threw away what little water she had. “We’ve no idea how long we will be stuck out here, you just threw away another day at least.” Wendell could not see the state of the wound, but she was right, it smelled bad, the water doing little to lift such a smell.

He let Kes’tral work without complaint and only flinched when he experienced a pinch as the poisons were drawn out of his body. “I don’t imagine their blades were clean,” Wendell said. “Thank you,” he told her, once the healing was done.

Kes’tral spoke of a life of roaming, with no real place to call home as such, no place she had run from to which she could refuse to return. How unsettling, the man thought, to grow up on the move, like a herd of cattle wandering from place to place. He imagined she had seen a lot in her lifetime, though he could not be sure how long that lifetime had been, for she appeared far more youthful than he.

Without a word, Wendell pressed the dirty sash into his backpack and lay down on the sand once more, using his bag as a makeshift pillow, topped with the folded, dark tunic he had kept for shade. The heat of the night was exhausting, even in rest, making sleep difficult to come by.

He closed his eyes and wondered why the bird woman had not offered her help sooner. She wouldn’t have needed to waste her water then, he thought. What was it about her that irked him so, her youth? Perhaps it was her brutal honesty.

“I preferred it when you were a bird,” the man said, eyes closed, though his features fashioned a smile of sorts. This time he was teasing, even if there had been an element of truth to his words.

Eventually, sleep found him and the hours passed like seconds in his recollection, upon waking. It seemed Kre’tral had not disturbed him as he had requested to allow her to find rest while he sat guard. Maybe, he thought, she had tried and he had not stirred. It didn’t appear that there was much night left, however, he encouraged her to sleep all the same.

The sky was a midnight blue, dotted with a vast array of tiny stars, like pinpricks in the sky, letting through whatever existed beyond the dark blanket of night. What curse had befallen the land long ago, he wondered, to make night day, even without the aid of the sun.

He raised his right hand to run his fingers over the fresh scar on the back of his arm, measuring about two inches across. The cut must have been bad, he thought, to leave such a scar. Kre’tral had done a fine job of healing him. Wendell knew things would have gotten far worse before they got better, if things had improved at all. Infection was nothing to mess with or take lightly. He had seen such claim its fair share of men and women alike.

Come dawn, Wendell saddled his horse and called Kes’tral to rise. The pair set off again, finding once more that they had strayed northwest, as if the sands had carried them in the night, closer to something and further from their starting point. Returning to his boat seemed like a distant dream, one Wendell knew he would need to put on hold until he had the means to retrieve it.

“North,” he pointed, having studied the compass for a long, quiet moment from the back of his horse. “We go north.”

Kes’tral hadn’t had time to respond to his initial question about the water, focused as she was on cleaning his wound and seeing it sealed from the elements. “You are welcome,” the woman responded to his thanks and moved to sit before him once more, hands resting on her knees as she sat cross-legged. Her hair trailed down her back, before she pulled a long thread forward and started to braid it. Some of the blood from his arm staining the pale strands and woven into the pattern as she went.

He lay down and she looked out across the otherwise empty desert. The horses she could hear, still moving around behind her. They worried her the most, it had been a long day without opportunity to quench their thirst. She grinned at his comment, “I preferred you as a pirate,” she retorted and stood. She turned her back to the man, pausing to look over her shoulder, “A girl cannot be a bird forever.”

Wendy slept and Kes kept busy. Tired herself, she focused her attention on digging a small dip in the hot sand. There had been a wide shallow bowl in one of the bags and she lay in the hole. The woman closed her eyes, hands pressed to the sand she concentrated. Far, far below the sands and the long lost seeds of life, plants that had died and been buried, there was rock. The rock was ancient, cracked and further, further down almost beyond her reach, there was water.

Losing track of time, she coaxed the water forth in a trickle. She eased it forth through rock and ancient ash. Kes called the lifeblood of the world forth, gentle in her attempt to coax it. Finally, after hours, when her legs and arms were numb from stillness, she was rewarded. A tiny trickle of water appeared beneath her hand. A hand that had been scorched by the burning sand, skin peeling away in pale flakes from the palm. She tipped the bowl, letting the water run in and fill it. It was then that she gathered up the canteens, holding them till they too were refreshed.

Kes summoned the horses to drink from the bowl and was nuzzled with their gratitude. Though they also asked for grass and she was forced to refuse them. Wendy woke, and she gestured to the tiny spring that seemed to rise from the sand itself. He told her to sleep, and she was only to glad to oblige. Simply rolling onto her side, with her face pressed to the scarf. Once she was curled up, sleep found her fast and was a reluctant companion to leave.

North he said next morning, and she agreed.

The pair travelled well enough together. Curious about the man’s past, she tried probing, asking about the frozen land he’d once called home. Perhaps, she wondered, it would be somewhere she would explore in the future. The distant future she thought ruefully.

The desert swallowed them for another day. Their meagre strips of dried meat soon did little ease the nagging sensation of hunger. She warned the man away from the foliage that grew in the desert. Though she didn’t understand exactly what it was she didn’t like about the two main plants they seemed to pass, they both unsettled her. The horses were hungry, but at least when they broke to rest she was able to conjure enough water to prevent dehydration.

The sand was cruel to their skin, and her hands were left blistered from the attempt to summon water from the very depths of the world. It was happy, deep within the rocks and reluctant to come forth to the cursed land above.

It was by the forth dusk they faced since leaving the ship, that the landscape began to change. Mountains rose in the distance and she could smell the earth changing beneath. After exchanging a glance with Wendy, Kes nudged her horse forward as the sun began to set.

It came like air to suffocated lungs. The first touch of coolness that spread with the setting sun. As their journey continued, the sand lifted and gave way to harder ground. There was water nearby, and foliage too. Kes slid down from her horse, striding forward with the animal eager to stay at her heels.

“Life,” she looked back at Wendy, “there is life here.” She grinned.

Wendell wasn’t too sure what the woman’s remark had meant. Was a man only a pirate if he had a boat at his feet? Was he meant to act a certain way that he had not? Did she miss the cruel treatment of the crew?

It was strange to awake to yet more magic and though he wondered what else this wanderer was capable of, he dare not ask. There was no profit to be gained from biting the hand that fed him. Magic or not, water was water and they needed it to survive. The horses stood at the pool for a long time, drinking with a thirst that seemed to rival the man’s own.

Wendell took the opportunity to wash while Kes’tral slept, cleaning the bloody sash before using it to lift water to his skin, rinsing the muck and grime away from his face, arms and upper body. It took only moments to dry everything, even the off-white tunic he had twisted and scrubbed in the pool. The air was so hot that he was surprised much of anything survived here. Perhaps, he thought, I will have to learn some magic too.

The days fell away, their routine strengthened by the woman’s magic. With water to fill their bellies, their hunger was almost forgotten for a time, only raising its ugly head when they stopped to quench their thirst again. The change of scenery couldn’t have come soon enough, and though it was not the lush fields or forests Wendell might have hoped for, any escape from the heat was welcome.

“We do not know this place ahead of us,” he said. “I feel it is wise if we spend tonight here where we can watch and listen.” There was something to be said for gaining knowledge, even he knew that.

They travelled as close to the strange, rocky land as they dared, until the sun had dipped down to sit for a spell upon the horizon. The change in temperate was significantly different come nightfall, almost as if they had returned to the coast. Wendell walked to the top of a dune after a short rest and looked out over the scarred land beyond, into what appeared to be a canyon. The rocky mountains ahead were strange colours, though he could not be sure if it was just a trick of the light. Hues of purple, red and white covered the alien landmass, leading the man to imagine all types of things.

What if they were walking towards something worse than the nothingness at their backs? At the very least they knew they would have water wherever they went, as long as he stuck with Kes’tral at least, Wendell knew this to be the case. A couple of skeleton trees dotted the distant land and Wendell imagined that, if there were trees, there was life beyond the hotlands.

They would need to hunt tomorrow before their bodies grew too weak to do so. Wendell had a bow, but without arrows, he knew it was useless to them. His throwing knives and the handaxe would be his best shot at taking anything down within range. The man licked his sunburnt lips to wet them. If there were mountains then surely there existed goats too or other forms of wildlife.

When he returned to camp, he told Kes’tral of what he had seen. He had a plan, but until they knew exactly what they were dealing with, he knew it was not worth mentioning. The best intentions were often undone by the smallest of inconveniences. His stomach tightened painfully, as if to remind him of his hunger. He squeezed the muscles tight, hoping to suppress the pain that followed and lingered long into the restless night.