But the message had been obliterated. And she’d unwrapped herself but hadn’t taken refuge from the baking sun. After more than five days of ordeals almost beyond human tolerance, it had been a miracle she’d lasted that long. The only reason he had was because he was bound on saving her.
He gathered her tighter to his body, his heart draining of blood all over again as he imagined her waking up alone and finding no explanation for his disappearance.
It had been his miscalculations that had led to this situation. The terrain had changed beyond recognition from the last time he’d been there, and fearing the lethality of the quicksand areas that were the major factor behind the segregation of the oasis, he’d taken a much wider safety margin around their now obscured boundaries. He’d ditched their supplies too late, when doing so no longer meant quickening their progress, with irreversible exhaustion setting in.
He’d stumbled into the oasis’s outer limits a few stages beyond depleted. He’d seen how he’d looked in the horrified expressions of those who’d run to him with water and efforts to spare him another step. Their horror had only risen when they’d realized he was bleeding. In his mad dash, he’d torn Talia’s meticulous sutures.
He’d let the oasis people bandage and clothe him in weather-appropriate clothes, gulped down reviving drinks only because he knew he’d be no good to Talia if he didn’t get repaired and refueled. He’d still given it all only minutes before he’d jumped on their most powerful endurance horse and exploded out of the oasis with their best riders struggling to keep up with him.
It had been another eternity until he’d gotten back to her.
He groaned. Even in the face of death, his Talia had been the essence of composure and grace. And wit. A chuckle sliced through him as her words echoed inside him again. Until he replayed her last ones before she’d surrendered to oblivion in his arms.
You are the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me….
He shuddered, pressed her closer as if to absorb her into him, where he’d always protect her with his very life.
She might have meant those words for her savior. But he’d reciprocated them, had meant them, for her.
After one more interminable hour, he brought his horse to a stumbling stop at the door of the cottage that had been prepared for them.
He only let others support Talia’s weight for the moment it took him to sway off the horse. Then he reclaimed her, folded her into him as if he feared she’d evaporate if he loosened his hold.
Once inside the dwelling that he couldn’t register beyond it being a roof over their head and a door cutting them off from the rest of the oasis, he coaxed the mostly unconscious Talia to drink again, glassfuls of both water and a high-calorie, vitamin and mineral drink the locals had concocted for conditions of extreme dehydration and sunstroke.
With utmost care, crooning encouragement and praise, he undressed her down to those ridiculous men’s underwear, bathed her in cool water, fanned her dry and then sponged her down again, cooling her raging heat. When he finally judged her temperature within normal, he dressed her in one of the crisply clean, vibrantly colorful nightdresses the oasis women had provided.
Throughout, though her consciousness rose and fell like waves in a tranquil sea, she surrendered to his ministrations, unquestioning, unresisting.
He finally laid her down on the soft kettan linen sheets freshly spread on a firm mattress on top of a wide, low platform bed. As he withdrew, a distressed sound spilled from her suddenly working lips, her brow knotting as if in pain.
She couldn’t bear separation from him. As he couldn’t from her.
He came down beside her, cocooned her with his body. She burrowed deeper into him with each ragged breath until he felt she’d slid between the layers of his being, making him realize again that he’d had so many vacant places inside of him, ones she’d exposed. Ones only she could fill.
He stilled, savoring the imprint of each inch of her, vibrating to her every tremor, his rumbles harmonizing with her unintelligible purrs of fatigue and pure contentment.
Then she went limp and silent, her breath steadying, indicating her descent into replenishing sleep.
But he couldn’t take that for granted.
At the tattered periphery of his awareness he thought he should seek the oasis elder and ask if there was still time before the sandstorm to have envoys sent to his brothers. Maybe if they moved fast enough, they’d get ahead of it.
But he couldn’t bring himself to leave Talia. His only concern was to see to her health and comfort. Until she opened her eyes and her beloved personality shone at him through her heavenly gaze, he could think of nothing but her. Even the fate of Zohayd came second.
He’d do nothing but watch over her until she woke up….
Talia woke up.
For long moments after her eyelids scraped back over grit, she couldn’t credit the images falling on her retinas.
She was ensconced in gossamer off-whiteness, drenched nerve-tingling spiciness and sourceless light.
Her surroundings came into sharper focus. She was actually surrounded by a fine mosquito net, lying in a gigantic bed on the smoothest linens she’d ever touched. She’d smelled the scents more than once since she’d come to Zohayd, seemingly a lifetime ago, incense of musk and amber and ood. The light was seeping from openings below a low ceiling blocked by arabesque work so delicate it must be almost as effective as the net.
She hadn’t turned her head yet. She couldn’t. But she saw enough to fascinate her on the side she could see. A wall of whitewashed mud-brick, a palm-wood door and window with shutters, cobblestone floors, two reed couches spread with wool cushions handwoven in a conflagration of color and pattern, with the same distinct Bedouin design gracing a rug and wall hangings. Oil lamps and incense burners hung on the wall, made of hand-worked bronze, simple, exquisite and polished to a dazzling sheen.
Was this another world? Another era?
She should know where she was. The knowledge just evaded her. She also knew she’d woken up many times before. If she could call the hazy episodes waking up. Now fragments of recollection clinked and bounced around like a rain of beads on the ground of her awareness.
Then as moments of wakefulness accumulated, the jittery particles settled, coalesced, stringing together to form a timeline. And she realized what had happened.
Harres had come back for her. Her desert knight had ridden back on a white horse, leading the cavalry. But not before she’d compounded dehydration and heat prostration with sunstroke.