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touching it.’ Her nails, long and curly like pig’s tails, drummed against the thread-bare carpet which covered the floor.
    He ran his fingers over the string until he felt a slight abnormality. Then he took a deep breath and squeezed the tiny knot.
    ‘Nothing,’ he said after a few seconds, and slumped down onto the cushion. Raim thought he caught the smallest frown on Yasmin’s face, but decided it was just a wrinkle fidgeting – every line on her face seemed to possess a life of its own.
    ‘Think of something else,’ she said. ‘Think of the Yun.’
    Instinctively his hand went to his apprentice blade, and memories of the Yun induction ceremony flooded in front of his eyes. Almost eight years ago he had been chosen to train to join the Yun, along with a host of other young boys and girls. They were all given an initial test. They were each given the chance to shoot with a Daga bow – the second greatest weapon in the Yun arsenal after the signature sword. Raim had shot the target – an apple balanced on the tip of a post – straight through the middle.
    It was the first time he had ever met Mhara. She was the Khan’s Protector, and therefore the most powerful person in the Yun, someone to be feared and admired. He remembered the first words he ever heard her say: ‘I will take him on.’ And then it was settled. He was to be apprenticed to Mhara.
    He distinctly remembered her coming up to him, and his hands trembling as he held them out and she placed the ochir blade in his palms. Next to him, solemn and rigid as a board, was a young girl with thick black hair braided in pigtails that reached down to her waist. Her name was Erdene, and she wasn’t trembling softened. ‘You should n from the dyse f – she was beautiful and serene. Her bravery had made Raim bite down on his lip and focus on showing the same courage. The memory faded.
    ‘So it must work,’ mused Yasmin. ‘Try again, this time, focus your mind back. And’ – Yasmin smirked – ‘don’t you dare start thinking about a girl.’
    Raim grimaced, but he was already focusing on the vision he had seen during their last session. The last time they had tried to figure out the promise within the knot, they hadn’t used memory tea, but rather a series of exhausting meditation sessions. Yasmin had posed Raim in a series of awkward body positions designed to open hismind to the universe. At the end of the sequence, cross-legged and with his eyes closed, he had only seen one image: a woman’s hands gripping tightly around his own.
    He pressed down hard on the knot while trying to create a clearer picture of the hands. Their colour could only be described as wet sand, until they opened and they were lighter, like dry sand. Around these two images of wet and dry, more of the picture came together. Wet – wet was important because the woman was sweating, she was shivering and afraid, no, terrified. Dry – he was dry, his mouth was dry and his eyes were dry and no wonder, as he gnashed his teeth together and tasted gritty sand. Were they near the desert? He heard shouts, felt shoves, started falling. A voice yelled his name and then spoke other words in a language he didn’t understand.
    He then said a word in this strange tongue, the only word that still made sense to him: ‘Mother.’
    He saw her eyes, dark as chewed grass, visible though the rest of her face was covered, and saw those eyes being dragged further and further away. Then he was wet again. Wet. Water.
    Raim opened his eyes and saw Dharma, his adopted younger sister, splashing water on his face. He s

5
    Raim spent the rest of the morning packing down his tribe’s yurts: the duty of the young and strong. He started with the one he shared with Dharma and his grandfather, and – before yesterday – with Tarik. As he loaded the lattice work frame of the yurt onto a cart and creased giant folds in the felt that served as the outer walls, he realized that when he, Sola willing, joined