he is a child of the markets, but she is a child of places like this, too, of far-reaching grasslands that feel like forever, like you can walk through for centuries and never find the other end. Standing in the prairie is like standing in history: her ghosts move ahead of her as if they are the wind, bending the sea of grasses before them with their smoke and their songs and their weary sighs, and she, choking on the way homesickness squeezes her heart, steps forward to follow the phantom trail. Her voice curls in the back of her throat, ready to call out. Instead, she replaces that dark hoof, a movement filled with much regret and the small stabbing hitch of anger, and she stops, her greeting dead there on her tongue. The caravan is gone when she blinks; it's just her, alone, rudderless. She's losing herself here, not the way she loses herself in the Market - to the Market, where the noise drowns out the memories of her father's hammer ringing bright on an anvil.

The rolling Sideralis calls to her worst fear: that she will always be homeless, and as fast as Rivane decides it was a mistake to come here, that it is time to go back to more civilized places, as quickly as she remembers, she loses the strength to return.

It's so much easier to run.

What is she running from? Nothing, everything, herself - not a one escapable - but she is galloping without realizing, racing the plains blindly, her eyes still searching another time, unfamiliar territory leaving her lurching and stumbling and grunting. The Tyrian girl runs until her skin is so dark with sweat she seems more black than violet, faintly dappled. She runs until the whites of her eyes are as red as the irises, as red as that flash of bright flesh inside the seashell curl of freckled grey nostrils. She runs until her chest is heaving and her heart beats so fast that she barely feels the way it bleeds.

Her haunches are burning when the gallop finally slows, sides flecked with white foam and thin sweetgrass seeds, and the sky is turning from its clear, smiling, blue to the slow creep of evening. A single star marks the eastern horizon, and though it leads to nowhere but the wild sea, she follows it there, follows it until the salt air breathes life into the heady perfume of sun-warmed grass and dries the sweat like sea-brine on her skin. The waves beckon as if something beyond them belongs to her, but two years of searching has taught Rivane that there is nothing to find but the hole inside herself, infinite and ever-hungry.

So close to the sea, to this place that means nothing to them, the ghosts release their hold on her memory and the white-sand beach comes into focus softened only by dusk's blue glow. Someone else has already claimed this slip of the coastline. Shadows cling to him, familiarly, fondly, and she starts to leave except that the turn of his ear says he has already heard her and she stops again.

"Ah," her voice is anything but smooth, it scratches her raw throat, "I didn't think anyone would be here. I'm sorry."