8
‘Your camels,’ echoed Yasmine, some half an hour later, when Baradir stood tall and stubborn in the doorway of her sumptuous dining-chamber, refusing to be swept away. ‘You will not leave without your camels?’
‘They are my loyal companions,’ said Baradir, for the second time. ‘I will not leave them in these lands.’ He had been about to say treacherous lands, and remembered at the last instant that these realms were probably her home.
He was prepared to encounter irritation in her, but instead she appeared… curious. ‘More camels may always be got,’ she observed.
‘But these are my camels,’ he said gently.
‘Ah? And they have, I suppose, all your worldly goods loaded upon them.’
‘There is also that.’ Baradir thought of his tent, and wished again that he had kept it somewhere about his
