The Raker had a flying carpet that carried him to this court. In the last few weeks, he began to roll the carpet up, and place the bundle under his head when he went to sleep. Sometimes I heard the fabric of it whisper, as if an invisible wind stole into the room, beckoning me to come out to wide-open spaces. It was such a strange feeling each time—not mine, because I never wandered. Not like the nameway people wander.

“Where does your carpet come from?” I asked the Raker, one evening.

“What does it matter?” he replied. Then after some silence, “It’s sand-made, a carpet of wanderlust called from the heart of the desert by the one with almost no words.”

I make myself stop. “Do you want to hear this story? I do not wish to sway you, and you do not wish to be swayed. I promise I will take the contract as you choose it.”

“My decision is made,” Ulín says, and her voice is firm. “I will write the name of the target on this piece of paper and give it to you. When your tale is done, you will read it, and I will not change my mind, so your tale cannot dissuade me.”

“It’s not my tale,” I say. “It is his. And this is how he told me his story.”

The Raker’s story

I was traveling through the Great Burri desert, the Raker said. I’d been here for a month. An exile. Among the people of the desert, I had already acquired a reputation.

They all wanted something from me—everybody does—but they wanted more from me than my magic. They wanted me to be placating and polite, to smile as I gave what they wanted. When I wouldn’t smile, they said I was frightening. They did not like that I did not soften my power. They certainly did not want me to take lovers among them, regardless of what my lovers wanted. I began to stay away from encampments. It stung that they asked and asked for my magic. “Can you make rain? Can you repair this crumbling building? Can you?—Will you?” I helped willingly, at first. But they wanted me to stay only for as long as I was useful. It reminded me of my father. He, too, kicked me out after the truce with our enemies was sealed, and the magical defenses I constructed could be maintained without me.

And then, at the university—they kicked me out too.

I wanted—I wanted to do violence to them all, to pull their entrails out of their bleeding bellies and relish their screams—but instead I left. Every time.

The desert was not inhospitable to me. When I slept, I dreamt of ruined cities, of round-roof houses of clay, their small circular windows gilded and shuttered with shutters of bone. It was comforting to dream that, but every time I woke up and continued my journey.

One early evening as I was walking the sands, I saw another person approaching. I stopped. I was wary. Desert people tend to travel together, and any trading groups are well-guarded. Was this an apparition? A vision? Someone sent to hunt me?

I called on my deepnames and made a construct of defense. Then I stood there, bristling and warded.

The figure approached me rapidly, but in zigzags, and from the distance I heard a sudden peal of laughter.

It was a youth. No, a child. They were maybe fourteen and almost as tall as me. Their complexion was olive, similar to mine and lighter than most of the people’s I’ve seen here. A crown of dark, loose curls haloed their head, which they tilted to the left side, surveying me with a curious and unwary gaze. They had clothes of bright color—stripes of pink, red, and green—in the fashion of the desert’s in-betweeners.

They approached me and stopped, and their eyes tracked my magical structure with wonder, and fearless curiosity. Then they swung their arms, and small, translucent butterflies detached themselves from their sleeves and dissipated into the air.

“Who are you?” I asked in Burrashti, but the youth only tilted their head.

I wondered if they spoke a local language—Maiva’at, or Surun’ perhaps—which I did not know, but no matter what words I tried, they did not respond.

I was their age when I committed my crime, but we couldn’t have been more different. This child—this youth—they looked so carefree. So cared-for. So trusting.

They reached out, trying to touch the complex, rotating structure of defense I built with my deepnames.

“No,” I said, sharply, in my own language.

“No,” they echoed in my language, and laughed.

I felt bad, and I did not understand why. So I made a shape for them. It was a bird, a white gull I remembered from my childhood. I released it into the air, where it cawed sharply, then dissipated.

“Butterfly,” they said. It was not in Burrashti but in Iyari, a language spoken to the west, in a city which has a cruel ruler. I knew only a little of that language, in which butterflies are called soulbirds.

“I cannot do a butterfly,” I told them. A gull was about as peaceful as I could manage. But I thought of Iyar, that springflower city, and I made a vision of flowers—roses I saw in that land as I’d passed it. They were burgundy and dull orange, and beneath their beauty, there was blood.

The youth reached for the flowers, laughing. A thorn pricked them, and they laughed even more and sucked on their finger, while the vision of the roses dissolved.

All of a sudden, they began to dance. I stepped back, giving them space, and they ran around, swinging their arms. Perhaps it wasn’t a dance, but there was music in it. They called on their magic. It was unusual, this configuration of two deepnames, each longer and much weaker than mine—a three-syllable and a four-syllable. This was not a configuration of blunt power, and one rarely sees such things in the countries of the Central North, but the youth moved their magic now. It was gentle but sweeping, this configuration that spun like a wheel while the youth now spun too, around and around, pulling threads out of sand.

Then the youth stopped. They waved their hands. The desert’s embrace opened for them, and thin long structures of petrified wood rose from the depths of the sandy ground, forming a simple, vertical frame of a loom. Then the thread of sand began to weave itself, while the youth hummed and sang without words. It went on and on, as the sun sank beyond the horizon. I stood there, immovable, witnessing.

When they finished, the loom dissipated into the dying orange light. The youth held out a small carpet.

“For me?” I asked. They thrust it into my hands. Sand, a feeling of motion, and these roses—each petal glowed, and their thorns hung with drops of blood. I rolled the carpet into a thin bundle, not quite understanding the turmoil I felt.

I asked, “What can I give you in return? Do you want—can you even tell me? Do you want magic? Power? Do you want water?”

The youth did not respond.

I dug into a small bag I carried, and offered them treasures I found wandering in the desert—a small, bejeweled scarab beetle covered in ancient letters I could not read, a fragment of cloth woven of silver and beaded with moonstone, a piece of old dried cake I got in the last encampment.

The youth took the cake and was chewing on it when shouts came from the northeast, and a small crowd of angry people ran toward us, their deepname structures blazing in the dusk. There were mostly young women my age; older people trailed them, and at least four lanky and indignant-looking goats.

One of them, a young woman, their leader and seemingly magicless, brandished a spear.

“Kimi! Kimi, come back!! Did he hurt you? I swear, if you hurt him, I will—”

The woman shouted in Iyari, yet others in Surun’. I could not understand much, but gathered that the youth was prone to wandering away, that the angry young woman was the straying youth’s older sister. Her lovers and companions trailed her, all shouting of my criminal intent, how I lured the child out to the desert to ravish them. Kimi—that was the youth’s name—ran back to their side, laughing and speechless. They would not be able to say anything in my defense, or in their own.