"Well?" I said. "You are, ain't you? That's why you have to protect me."
He didn't say anything. The circle was gone, replaced with smears of powders and streaks of drying blood, but he kept kicking at it. The dust made me sneeze.
Naji finally looked at me.
"Yes," he said. Then he turned his attention back to the powders.
I folded my hands in my lap all prim and proper like a lady. Naji wasn't protecting me cause of some stupid oath. He was protecting me cause it hurt him if he didn't.
"When did it happen?" I asked. "During the fight, I'm assuming?" I thought back to that night in the desert, crawling through the sand, flinging my knife at his chest, killing the snake–
"The snake," I said.
Naji stared at me for a few moment. Then he nodded.
"Was it a special snake?"
Naji looked weary, but he shook his head, his hair falling across his eyes. "It was just an asp, in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I suppose it would have bit me had you not killed it."
"Oh."
He stopped kicking at the circle and leaned up against the wall, arms crossed over his chest. "You saved my life. Now I have to protect yours."
"From the snake?"
"Apparently."
"So what you told me was true," I said. "About having to protect me and all? It just wasn't an oath." I frowned. "What happens if you don't protect me?"
"I imagine I would die." Naji turned away from me and fussed with the robes he had lying across the table. "That's generally how these sorts of curses go."
I didn't have nothing to say to that. I'd accidentally activated some curse when I killed that snake and now we were stuck with each other.
This was why untouched folks hate magic.
"So why are we crossing the desert? Is there a cure?"
That darkness crossed his face again. "I said I don't want to talk about it."
"What about the Hariris? You keen on killing me so bad you're gonna march through the desert just to get to do it? You're out of your mind if you think I'm going with you–"
"I told you we are not discussing this matter further."
There was an edge to his voice, anger and shame all mixed up the way they get sometimes, where you can't tell one from the other, and that shut me up at first. But the more I got to thinking about it, the angrier I became. This was worse than an oath, cause oaths can be broken. And I didn't want Naji's curse hanging over my head.
"Well, I think we should discuss the matter further." I stood up. "This don't just affect you, you know. I had plans. And they didn't involve tiptoeing around so some assassin wouldn't get a headache."
Naji glared at me. "There's nothing to discuss. If you try to stay behind with the other sea rats, I'll bind you to me."
"No, you won't."
He stepped up close to me, his scars glowing a little from the faint coating of magic in the room. "All I need is a drop of your blood. And I know I can fetch that easily enough."
I lunged at him, but he'd already whirled away from me and all I did was slam up against the wall for my trouble. He had pulled his pitch feather out and was scratching something across the top of his chest armor, trying his best, it felt like, to ignore me. I leaned up against the wall and watched him. I did still have the Hariri clan to worry about, and if I took sail with even a southern ship they'd probably catch up to me eventually.
"I'll go," I said, as if he'd put the decision to me in the first place. "At least until you take care of the Hariris."
Naji glanced at me. Then he tossed his quill aside, sat down on the floor next to the uman flower, picked it up, and started pulling off its petals in long, thin strips. We didn't say nothing, not either of us. The only sound in the room was a crackle as the petals came off the stem, one at a time, white as ghosts.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Two days later, we left for the desert. It was probably stupid of me, going to help cure a man who had been paid pressed gold to see me dead, but every time I thought about giving him the slip I heard that scream of his from when I tried to leave the inn and felt sick to my stomach. And so it seemed the matter was decided for me. Bloody magic. You'd think they could come up with a curse that didn't have to drag innocent bystanders into it.
Naji got me to buy all the supplies. He gave me a list of a few powders from the night market, but the rest of it was run-of-the-mill stuff, and he wasn't too picky about it. Most of that I stole, creeping into a closeddown day market one night for the food, making off with a couple of water skeins and some desert-masks one crowded, distractible morning. I did pay for the water itself, though, down at the well. Felt wrong not to.
With the leftover money I bought a camel. A real strong, fancy-looking one, with soft brown eyes and an elegant, spidery gait. I marched that camel up to the inn the morning we left. Naji was waiting for me in the shadows, his face covered like always. When he saw the camel he looked at it and then he looked at me and then he said, "You bought supplies, correct?"
"I got supplies."
His eyes crinkled up above his mask. I wondered if he was smiling.
We took off, me and the camel marching through the streets like we were important, Naji creeping though the dark places like a ghoul in a story. He didn't materialize again until we got to the edge of the city and the sun was peeking up over the horizon, turning the light gray.
"We need to head southeast," he said. "You know which way that is? I don't want you wandering off–"
"Don't insult me."
Naji looked at me.
"I'm serious," I said. "It was the first thing I ever learned, how to tell north from south." That wasn't exactly true – I learned east from west first off cause it's obvious – but I wanted to get my point across. I jabbed my finger out at the horizon. "There. Southeast. You look at the shadows during the day and the stars at night, assuming you don't got no compass." Which we didn't.