Nobody reached for a weapon while the children were still carrying supper bowls between the carts, which Ysabet counted as the first small mercy of the evening.
Jhevi stopped ten paces down the slope from Sister Osha’s mount, her broad thumbs hooked into her belt where the caravan drovers kept their heavy horn whistles. One sharp blast would bring six adult shellhorns swinging their plated shoulders into a ring around the camp. Osha seemed to know that without being told. She stayed beside a flat boulder below the outer cookfire, both hands visible against the gray wool of her travel coat, the stick with its white rag planted upright in the turf beside her boot.
“You’re off the temple road,” Jhevi said.
“Yes,” Osha said. Her voice was clear and a little hoarse from wind and dust. She looked younger than Edris by twenty years, with ink stains ground into the side of her right middle finger and a dark bruise under her eyes that came from riding too long in a stiff saddle. “My superior is a day behind me on the lower track. I came ahead alone because four guards on horseback make a poor beginning to a conversation.”
