‘That is at least your third curse today in my presence, Lord Edward Edgerton. You should keep your distance from me henceforth, I am clearly a bad influence.’
He grasped her other arm and for a moment they stood there. Inside she could hear Poppy on the pianoforte and her mother singing. Familiar and horrible. Nothing would ever be the same.
‘Yes,’ Edge said at last. ‘Yes, you are. I am leaving for Cairo at dawn tomorrow. I shan’t see you again. I wish you happy, Sam. Will you wish me the same?’
‘Always.’ That was the truth, whatever the pain.
‘God in heaven, how...’ He actively strangled the words, his fingers pressing into the flesh of her upper arms. There was such confusion in his voice she sank her fingers into his immaculate coat, crushing the lapels as if she could knead the very fabric of time and space and force it to her will. She rose on tiptoes and touched her lips to his cheek. He had not shaved and the stubble caught on her lips and this sign of imperfection filled her with such need she gave a little cry, a puff of a wail against his flesh. He turned his head, just catching it briefly with his mouth, his lips covering hers, drawing her breath from her.
His mouth fit perfectly, she thought. Two pieces of a warm, tingling puzzle. It was so right...
And then she was free again.
She forced herself to speak the dreaded words, proper at last. ‘My congratulations on your upcoming nuptials. Godspeed.’
This time he didn’t answer as she left the veranda and made her way back to her room. In the morning he was gone as he had said.
But then Edge had always been a man of his word.
‘No one passes through the Valley of the Moon and emerges unscathed.’
— Lost in the Valley of the Moon, Desert Boy Book Three
Qetara, Egypt—eight years later
Sam stopped at the rim of the Howling Cliffs above Qetara. Below lay the ragged rock-strewn valley and beyond was the gleam of the Nile, a grey-brown ribbon nestled between green swathes of reeds. The sun was hanging low and already tinting the hills beyond the Nile in orange and mauve and touching the white building of Bab el-Nur with pink. She could just make out the edge of the garden where the trees shielded her mother’s grave.
Could it possibly be three years since her mother’s death sent her back to Sinclair Hall in England? The last three months here in Egypt felt more substantial than those three years. More substantial even than the long years that had passed since she married Ricki. As if she’d not truly been awake from the moment she returned to Venice and set out on a quest to mend her tattered heart and pride by finding herself a home.
Not that she knew what a home was. Living on sufferance with her mother’s family in Venice or even as a valued and loved guest at Bab el-Nur with the Carmichaels did not constitute a home. Perhaps those two years in Burford in England when she’d been barely six—she remembered a vague feeling of being safe. Sometimes she wondered if she’d chosen Ricki from all her suitors because she’d discovered his father had a property near Burford, as if that created some magical link between him and her last memories of carefree happiness. They’d both expected the other to be something they weren’t—no wonder they’d both been disappointed.
If only they had been older they might have weathered that disappointment and perhaps even built something on its ashes. And then poor little Maria might still be alive. She would be almost ten years old now had she not drowned. Sam rubbed her face wearily, trying to chase away the dank taste of the canal water. Thoughts of Maria always brought back pain.
She scuffed at the pebbles with the tip of her boot, kicking a few over the ledge and hearing them snap against the stone as they bounced into the valley below.
Egypt wasn’t her home, but she loved it here. Thank goodness Chase and Lucas had all but forced her to return. It had woken her and the thought of slipping back into the half-existence she’d fallen into since her marriage to Ricki was unacceptable. She’d made a terrible mistake marrying him, but she was older and wiser now. Poppy and Janet knew many people in London with ties to Egypt. It was not in the realm of the fantastical that among them she might find someone who would wish to wed her and yet be a good, kind man and father. Someone who would watch the world transform from one magic to another with her. Perhaps even agree to howl with her.
How many times had she and Lucas and Chase and Edge scrambled up these cliffs as children, imitating the night yowling of the jackals? Well, not that Edge howled with them, he had always been too aloof for that, but he’d come none the less. Then they would watch the hills across the Nile turn from ochre to orange to purple and then fade into the indigo of night.
She tilted her head, baring her throat to the rising breeze, and breathed deeply, trying to chase away the murky taste of the canal waters of Venice that always followed thoughts of Ricki.
She chased away all those ghosts, even her own. She was no longer Lady Carruthers. Not even Lady Samantha Sinclair. Only Sam.
I am Sam.
She raised her arms to the world, tipped back her head and told the world that truth at the top of her lungs.
‘I am Sam!’
Edge was viciously thirsty. His heart was beating and his legs burned from the climb, but none of the many physical discomforts concerned him as much at the moment as what he would see when he crested the sandstone cliff.
If he was wrong, if he’d made a single mistake on the crisscrossing camel and goat paths from Zarqa, there would be nothing but more desert—an endless, taunting ochre grin. Even the faint but distinct scent of the Nile could be nothing more than a sarab, a desert illusion like the shimmering trees and water that danced on the horizons until they were sucked under as he approached.
If he was wrong, he might end up like the jackal’s carcass he’d passed hours ago. He should have taken into consideration that eight-year-old memories of terrain were not necessarily reliable. He was older, slower, less alert. But the path had looked so very familiar...
He stumbled a little as he crested the cliff, pebbles skittering under his feet. He stopped, narrowing his burning eyes against the glints that splintered along the broad green scar of the Nile. But it wasn’t the Nile that held his gaze. Or the sprawling city of Qetara on the far side of the bank. It was the green gardens of Bab el-Nur tucked below the cliffs.
Home.
The word shivered in the air like a sarab threatening to disappear. Home. Not any more and not for many years since he’d tried and failed to build his own. They said third time lucky, but he didn’t believe in sayings. Or in anything much any more.
He closed his eyes and heard nothing but air moving up the cliff below him, a distinctive hollow presaging the rise of the afternoon winds. He’d once loved this time of day when the sun finally showed signs of exhaustion from its brutal assault and the desert began changing, all kinds of new forces entering its stark stage. New colours, new animals, new sounds.
It had been so long since he’d just...listened. Absorbed. It had been so long since he’d felt like listening. Since he’d felt anything much at all.
He didn’t know if this was a good sign. He liked not feeling.
At least he’d finally made it. More or less in one piece.
A very tired, aching piece.
Edge