Falling for the Sultan Who Ordered My Death novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Salt

She lays a false trail, hides in a salt crust and outlasts the dogs, collapses on the third day, and is found by a salt caravan whose leader knows the knot on the waterskin: only the Sultan ties it.

Dogs don't follow a woman.

They follow what a woman leaves behind her.

I ripped the musk out of my hem with my teeth.

It was a pinch of black grains in a twist of cloth, worth more than the baker's whole shop.

My father used to say a grain of good musk will still be talking in a month.

I ran north along the rise, dragging the cloth over every stone and every thornbush I passed.

Two hundred steps. Three hundred.

I scrubbed it into the bark of a dead acacia.

Then I hung it in a fork of the branches, where the wind would take it.

Then I walked back on my own footprints, heel to toe, all the way to the cairn.

The dogs were close enough now that I could hear them.

Not barking. Hunting dogs don't bark.

Just the breath, and the riders shouting to each other.

East of the cairn the ground went white.

Salt crust.

My mother called it the dead floor.

It holds no scent, she said, not yours, not a camel's, not a lie's.

It also holds no shade and cuts your feet like broken pottery.

I walked out onto it anyway.

The crust cracked and the salt went into the cuts on my soles.

I bit the inside of my cheek until it bled and kept going.

A quarter mile out, the crust dipped into a shallow pan where an old pool had dried.

I lay down in it on my stomach.

I scraped loose salt over my legs and my back with both arms, and over the waterskin.

Then I pulled my braid across my face, salted that too, and lay with my cheek on the white.

Through the gap at my eye I watched the riders reach the cairn.

The dogs went in circles there.

One of them threw its head up.

Then the whole pack swung north, along the rise, after the musk.

"North!" a rider shouted. "She's running for the hills!"

"Barefoot? She's mad."

"She's dead, is what she is. Go on."

They rode north, whooping.

I lay in the salt and didn't move until the sun was straight overhead and the dust had gone.

Then I didn't move until it went down.

The first night I walked by the stars and the cairns.

Every cairn was a knee-high heap of red stone, a few miles from the last.

My mother said the old salt guides built them so a fool could find the road.

I was a fool with a waterskin. I found them.

In the heat of the second day I dug a trench in the shade of a dune and lay in it.

I talked to myself.

I told myself the ingredients of every oil I'd ever made, in order, from the bottom note up.

When I got to the sleep oil, I stopped.

Blue lotus. Cedar. The resin.

His hand closing on my sleeve, three times in a year.

He'd never said a word about it in the morning.

Neither had I.

I rolled over and said some very rude things to the sky about the Sultan of Qaresh.

It felt good. It used up spit I didn't have.

On the third day the water ran out.

I shook the skin over my mouth and got four drops and some sand.

My feet had stopped hurting, which my mother had told me was the bad sign.

I kept walking because there was nothing else to do with my legs.

Somewhere in the afternoon, the ground came up and hit me.

I lay with my face on hot stone and thought, that's a stupid way to die.

Then I smelled smoke.

Dung fire. Camel. Sweet tea boiled too long with too much sugar.

And salt, a lot of salt, packed in sacks and sweating in the sun.

Bells.

A shadow fell across my face.

"Is it alive?" said a young man's voice.

"It's a woman," said an old one. "And yes. Look at her ribs go."

Someone lifted my head and poured water into the corner of my mouth.

A trickle. Then another.

I grabbed the wrist to make it pour faster.

"No, no," the old voice said. "Slow. You know that, salt girl. You walk like someone taught you."

I got my eyes open.

An old woman squatted beside me, her face as brown and creased as a walnut.

Silver rings in both ears. A man's headcloth.

Behind her stood a line of camels hung with salt sacks and a dozen riders staring at me.

"My mother walked the salt road," I croaked.

"Then your mother taught you well. Nobody crosses the Waste barefoot in three days."

She looked at my feet and made a face.

"Half-crosses," she said.

"Where am I?"

"A day short of Tel Zahra. Lie still."

She picked up my empty waterskin to fill it.

Then she stopped.

She turned it over in her hands and held the strap up to the light.

The knot sat on it, three turns and a loop and a tucked tail like a bird's wing.

Her face changed.

"Where did you get this, salt girl?"

"I found it. Buried at the first cairn past the Sand Gate."

She ran her thumb over the knot.

"That's a falconer's knot," she said. "The royal falconer's."

"I've seen one man tie it. I sold his father salt for thirty years."

She looked at me.

"Only the Sultan ties that one."

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