The gyrocopter dropped her on a strip of beach that someone had already decided was a town.
The heat hit her in the face before her boots touched the sand. Mei Lin had spent the last weeks in a country where the wind came off Deathwing's mountain with edges on it, and her body had set itself for that wind. Now the air arrived warm out of nowhere, full of dry dust and salt and the smell of fuel and engine grease. She was wearing three coats. Tavish had said three. The Highlands had said three. The desert was now telling her, very politely, that two of them needed to come off in the next half hour.
Schnottz's Landing was somebody's idea of a war camp dressed up as somebody else's idea of a holiday. Wooden palisades, crates stacked four high, a great long bird-shaped boat lying half on the sand with goblins clambering over it like beetles. Down by the bigger tents a small green person was standing on a crate and shouting at a workforce of bigger green persons in a thick accent that did interesting things with the letter V. Commander Schnottz, presumably. He was demanding, at volume, that something arrive in a count of nine.
She walked the long way around him.
The folding table was set up in the shadow of a rigged-up tarpaulin, away from the shouting. The man behind it had a pack open in front of him and a piece of pottery in each hand. He was holding the two halves of a broken bowl up to the light the way somebody else might hold up two halves of a letter, frowning at them like they owed him an answer. The hat was on the table beside the pack, brim up.
Mei Lin stopped a polite pace short of the table.
He looked up over the shards. His eyes widened for a Pandaren, then reset into the smile of a man who had decided she was a tourist.
"If you're lookin' for the gift tent, ma'am, it's east of the sphinx. Past the second row. You'll know it by the goblin tryin' to sell you a hat."
She let him have the assumption for one beat. Then she took her air totem off the loop at her hip and set it down in the sand at the corner of his table.
The wind in the Landing changed.
It was not a big change. The breeze that had been pushing dust along the canvas wall picked up on her side of the table by half. The pennant on the nearest tent, which had been hanging slack like a wet rag, snapped once and then settled into a steady flutter. The two pottery shards in his hands made a small tac as he set them down on the canvas.
He looked at the totem. He looked at her. He picked the hat up off the table and put it on, slowly, like it was part of taking her seriously.
"Well. That's not a tourist."
"Sometimes I am. Today I'm working."
"Harrison Jones." He did not stand up, but he tipped the hat. "Not the gift tent."
"Mei Lin. Sykepleier when the Alliance is feeling formal."
"Sykepleier." He turned the word around in his mouth. "Healer."
"Roughly. The Norse get there faster than the rest of us."
He waved her to the empty crate on the other side of the table. She sat. The pennant kept fluttering. Somewhere behind them Commander Schnottz hit the number nine again with both feet.
"That's a good hat," she said.
"It's done a lot of miles."
"It looks like it. I have a soft spot for things that have done a lot of miles."
"Then you and I will get along." He sat back, fingers laced over his middle. "What brings a working Pandaren to the wrong end of a beach with the wrong number of coats on?"
"I went where the work asked me to go. The work asked me to go south. South kept being south."
"South does that."
"And you?"
"Pottery." He gestured at the table. "Three thousand years old, give or take a dynasty. Somebody dropped this bowl in a hurry. I'd like to know what they were in a hurry about."
"Bowl me over. That's my whole guess."
He looked at her flat for one second. Then he laughed. He laughed dry, like a man buried alive twice and not fussed about it. "Oh, ma'am. I'm gonna get a lot of mileage out of you."
"Try me."
"You shard not have said that."
"I clay-aimed it on purpose."
He held up both hands like she had pulled a knife. "Truce. Five minute truce." He sipped from a metal canteen. "Word of warning. There's snakes south of here. Pits of 'em. I prefer almost any other animal."
"Noted."
She filed it for later.
"And the fellow on the crate?" She did not have to point.
"Schnottz. He thinks he's running this stretch of desert. Officially he is. Unofficially he's about to find out the desert has opinions." He looked at her sideways. "You'll be useful around him."
"That a job offer?"
"That's a forecast. Job offer's the next caravan out. I'll be on it. Come and find me at the table tomorrow if you want a piece of what's actually happenin' under all the shoutin'."
"I might."
"You will." The hat went back on the table, brim up, the way she had found it. "Good to meet you, Sykepleier."
"Good to meet you, Mr Jones."
"Harrison."
"Harrison."
She walked the long curve of the camp back toward the water and shrugged out of the outermost coat as she went. The heat that had been pressing on the layers got onto the wool of the second one and sat there like a hand on her back. She tasted the air properly for the first time. Salt, fuel, warm canvas, something further off that was either incense or a spice she did not know yet. Her water spirits sat up under her ribs and looked around the way a cat looks around a new kitchen. Awake. Curious. Not running.
Grandmother would have told her to drink twice as much water as she thought she needed and to mean it.
The wind off the bay came in from a different direction than she expected, and somewhere behind her the pennant on Harrison's tarpaulin was still fluttering on the strength of a totem the size of her forearm. Tavish had said the world would keep asking. She had filed that one too, the way she filed the snake. She thought she might be starting to believe him.
She decided, very quietly, that she would come back to the table tomorrow.
— Mist