Tævarnavasi brought his pair of speckled camels to a halt alongside the tiny frantic woman standing in the dust between the road and the scrub, but she continued to wave her arms at him like she thought he wasn’t going to stop. She was tanned and sturdy-looking. Her baldness, which he’d first attributed to an inscrutable fashion choice, upon closer inspection looked like her hair had been burned off. Her scalp was red and tender, and her left hand was scorched deformed.
“You need help?” He looked down at her from the lopsided cart as she squinted up at him.
Her eyes were a penetrating green under the slits of the lids. A foreigner, he realized with a start. She stopped flapping her arms, but she still held them above her head. One shielded her eyes against the glare of the mid-morning su
