The caravan was loading on the long dock at Schnottz's Landing and Mei Lin was down to one coat.
She had walked into this beach in three. The other two were folded into the bottom of her pack with a layer of desert in their seams. The sun in Uldum at this hour lay flat across the sand and turned everything the colour of old brass. The bay smelled of salt and engine grease and something warm-spiced from the Tol'vir cooking fires further up the beach.
She had a half-healed cut along the back of her left forearm from a Neferset spearman who had not lived to regret it, a bruise high on her shoulder that her shield had earned for her, and a scar at her hairline that was new enough to itch. Her water spirits sat quiet under her ribs.
The folding table was where it had been the day she met him.
Harrison was packing it down. Pottery shards wrapped in soft cloth, the cloth tucked into the satchel, the satchel buckled neatly, the way he had buckled it in worse weather. The hat was on the table beside the pack, brim up.
"You headin' for the caravan?" he said, without looking up.
"I'm headed wherever the caravan's headed."
"Where's that?"
"North until the dust changes colour."
"Good a plan as any." He latched the satchel and finally looked at her. His face had picked up another line at the corner of his mouth since the day they met, and a sunburn across the nose that was halfway to becoming a tan. "You look like the desert agreed with you."
"It tolerated me. I'll take that."
He undid the buckle he had just done up and pulled out a small flat coin. Bronze, worn nearly smooth. He held it out between two fingers.
"Found it under the floor of the second chamber. Tol'vir. King I can't read the name of. Pre-curse, by the metal. Worth nothing to anyone but the man who picked it up."
She looked at the coin. She looked at him.
"Harrison."
"Take it. I've got a box of 'em. It just wants a pocket."
She took it. Warm from the satchel. She turned it over once. The other face was a hawk.
"I'm not moved," she said.
"Course you're not."
"This is my unmoved face."
"Convincin'."
She put the coin in the inner pocket on the left side of her vest where she kept the things that did not need to come out often. It settled against her ribs with a weight she would notice again the moment she touched the pocket.
"Where are you off to?" she asked.
He shrugged the satchel onto his shoulder and put the hat on. "Don't know yet. Somewhere with a rumour and a bad map."
"Sounds about right."
"Sounds about right for you too, Sykepleier."
He tipped the hat. She bowed half an inch, the polite Pandaren amount for a man who had earned it. Behind her the caravan driver hit something metal twice with something else metal.
"See you somewhere strange," she said.
"Count on it."
She walked toward the caravan with the dust of the desert still on her boots and one hand resting, for one step only, against the pocket on the left side of her vest.
— Mist