“Which way do we go to evade them?” Samara whispered.

“How should I know?” he hissed back.  “You’re the guide, remember?  It was your idea to come up here instead of staying in the pass.  It was a brilliant decision,” he conceded, softening his voice.  “But I do not know my way up here.”

“That’s enough,” she said, shushing him by putting two fingers on his lips.  She touched him often, considering that he didn’t like it.  “I’ve had time to think it over, and we have to go down the mountain.”

“That will put us in the pass,” he reminded her.

“Not that side of the mountain,” she said, pointing in the opposite direction.

“Not that way!” he resounded, almost forgetting to lower his voice.  “I’ve never climbed or descended on that side of the mountain before, but I’ve seen it plenty of times.  It’s not safe.  There are cliff faces and drops.  In the dark, it will be impossible to perform a safe descent.”

“We don’t need to go all the way down the mountain.  We need to find a place to hide and rest.  Surely, we can find that.”

That was a sound plan.  “As long as they’re not coming this way because they’re tracking us,” he pointed out, looking downward.

“Do you know who they are?” she asked, peering questioningly at the line of torches in the valley.

“They’d have to wait until tomorrow morning to track us.  They’re too far away.  Why?  Do they look like the King’s men to you?” he prompted.

She rolled her shoulder, rubbing it against his.  He moved away, but she didn’t seem to notice his distaste, and she answered, “They look like the kind of maniacs who would love to kill a tiger.  God’s eyes point down.  If we follow his gaze, we’ll be somewhere we can rest, maybe until tomorrow night.”

“The world will be completely different by tomorrow night,” Leonidas thought skeptically.  “You didn’t say, are you worried about the life of your husband?”

She stood up and brushed herself off.  “If he dies, another path will be opened for me.  As for now, God is my shield and you are my sword.  Look alive!  We have further to go.”

The tiger sprang to his feet and joined Samara as she trod down the wrong side of the mountain.

“Have you ever tramped through snow?” she threw the question over her shoulder at Leonidas as he attempted to keep up with her.

The strength he had felt after her blessing had dimmed and he was back at his normal stamina levels.  He was ready to move, but not exhilarated.

“No, never,” he replied.  “I’ve heard of snow, though.  Crystals that fall from heaven.  It doesn’t seem like a real thing.”

“It’s a real thing,” she reassured him.  “But it comes at a price.  Snow comes when the world is wet and when it is very cold.  Sometimes it comes in such great quantities that it buries things.  The world is blanketed in a thick covering of snow.  When that happens, it’s important to follow the exact footsteps of the person walking ahead of you.  It will be less cold, less wet, and less awful all around if you can step exactly where the person in front of you stepped.  Even if you don’t have any experience with snow, you can follow me, can’t you?  Step exactly where I step?”

“It’s too dark to see your feet,” he complained.

“Say a prayer that you’ll be able to follow me,” she said and moved ahead.

Leonidas did not know how to pray to her God.  He could not see her properly.  He wanted to just follow along and do his best, but she was quick in her steps, and his confidence waned.

He did not want to touch her, hold her hand, or follow her steps.  He did not want to be anywhere near her.  He did not want to feel her skin under his fingers.  He wanted to find his brother, but he did not know if the people in the valley were friend or foe, and Samara offered him a way to survive until morning if he could just believe that she was being led by a god.

There was plenty of evidence, but he did not want to be convinced.

“Will you let me hold your hand as we walk?” he asked, discomfort spreading through him like a disease.  “Will that be close enough to 'following your footsteps in the snow'?”

She stopped and turned.  When he felt her skin on his, he felt sick immediately. Why it felt so wrong, he couldn’t exactly say.  Perhaps it was because something unlike love had been bubbling inside him, and her showing him concern and trust made him feel more disgusted with himself than he felt for her.  Perhaps, it was his old concern because she was a harem girl, and who knew what she had done with her hands?  Perhaps it was because her faith in a God made him feel unworthy.  As a harem girl, she had technically not broken a law of any God that he knew.  It was just that a harem seemed like a method to turn a princess into a whore and to make every taxpayer in the kingdom pay for it.

“You’re very tense,” she said, rubbing the back of his hand with her thumb.

“I shouldn’t ask, but what did you and the King do on the night of your wedding?”

She let go of his hand and stopped moving.  “Is that what’s bothering you?”

He didn’t answer.

“We’re here,” she said.

It was then that he realized she had brought him right to the mouth of a cave.  He didn’t know if he’d seen it in daylight from the pass, but she led him right there like she had always known the way.

“Let’s rest here,” she said, guiding the tiger onward and setting him down.  She sat down with him, resting between his front and back paws with her back against his stomach.

Leonidas sat down too.  The ground was cold.  He wished he had a warm tiger tummy to rest against.

Samara sighed in the darkness.  “My family had already gone home, so they were not there for the wedding.  I had a maid-servant I had brought with me, but she caught an unknown fever when I was in the middle of my purification ritual.  She died in quarantine.  I was not allowed to be there when they burned her.  She was a very good maid.  For whatever reason, the King did not offer to replace her, so I was left to care for myself the rest of the time of my purification.  I learned many things I had never known.”  She paused.  “Do you still want to hear about the wedding?”

“Desperately,” he said aloud when he meant to say something showing indifference.

“It was a formality.  His first wife was angry.  Apparently, at some point in their shared past, he had promised her that he would take no more wives, yet he was taking another.  She fought with him all day the day of our wedding.  Her tantrum brought her nothing because the King was more concerned with my uncle than with his wife.  In a ceremony lacking any sort of affection or kindness, he married me.”

“What happened after that?” Leonidas asked with a dry tongue.

She turned her head away.  “He sent me to his room in the harem.  He returned to the palace and fought with his head wife for another few hours.  When he joined me in his room, I was asleep.  He woke me, did his duty, and retired to a different bedroom.”

“I thought…” Leonidas stuttered.

“It would be more glamorous than that?” she said sourly.  “Look, I don’t know what you imagine the harem to be like, but our King’s harem is mostly filled with his daughters.  He has dozens of them.  People like your brother are not there to protect his little concubines.  They’re there to protect his daughters.  The other harem wives don’t see the King because the Queen is a lioness who cuts off the fingers of the women who displeased her.  I was never going to see the King again.”

“Are you with child?” Leonidas dared to ask.

She shrugged.  “It is a little early to say.”

“Aren’t you angry that this was the way your marriage turned out?” he asked bitterly.

She stroked the tiger.  “I believe that the path I was on was the correct path for me.  If I am pregnant, it is undoubtedly with a daughter, as the man only fathered three sons and so many girls, the harem was like a beehive.  My life was never going to be ‘fair’, and neither will your life be fair.  Go to sleep, Leonidas.  Dream of girls with dark hair and covered faces.  Dream of sheep that give you wool and don’t ask for blood.”

He felt like a scolded child when she said that, but he couldn’t stop himself from asking, “What will you dream of?”

“I’ll dream of a bow and arrow in the arms of a man who knows how to use them.”

The mention of a bow and arrow made Leonidas’s mouth fill with the taste of iron and salt… blood.

“Goodnight.”

She stopped talking to him.

She turned away from Leonidas and back to the tiger.  She put her forehead to his and whispered the prayers that kept the tiger under her command.  Maybe they were the same ones she used on him.  Maybe they were different, but whatever the words were, Leonidas found himself drowsy.  If he slept on rocks, they felt like feathers.  If a scorpion bit him, it felt like a kiss.  And if he found himself dreaming, he dreamed of things so holy they had become dangerous.