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Needing.
Maggie tentatively knelt and reached for a goblet, confused by her own thoughts, for it felt as if he had cast a spell on her. When he spoke, his voice was normal, and she attempted conversation as if there was no turmoil, yet all the time she felt as if she had been set loose on a wild sea and holding nothing but a ship’s rail.
‘Let’s call a truce,’ he suggested. ‘We are stuck here until tomorrow at least. The centre of the storm is close.’
‘How come the walls of the tent don’t move?’ Maggie asked something that had been niggling at her. Just a small thing, but it was far safer to voice that than anything else on her mind.
She looked up at the ceiling, which billowed gently, but apart from the noise of the increasing wind one would never know they were in the midst of a fierce storm.
‘Because we are in the inner tent,’ Ilyas explained. ‘There is an outer layer that takes the force of the storm. If the walls start to move, we are in trouble.’
Maggie was already in trouble, for it felt as if the ground was moving beneath her. Just the low growl of his voice had her fighting not to inch her way a little closer to him.
‘What was your accommodation like on the tour?’ he asked.
‘Well, put it this way—there was no inner tent!’
She liked it that he smiled.
‘There are issues with some of the operators,’ Ilyas said.
‘I could have told you that.’
And she proceeded to tell him how the trip to the desert had started out a little bit shoddy and rather contrived.
‘They want to take the tourists deeper into the desert,’ Ilyas explained, ‘but the Bedouins have opposed it.’
‘What are they opposed to?’
‘They resist all change,’ Ilyas said.
‘There’s surely a lot the tour operators could do without upsetting them.’
‘Such as?’
And he surprised himself now, for usually he would not ask an outsider.
‘I don’t know offhand,’ Maggie admitted, and then smiled. ‘You’d have to ask them!’
‘Pardon?’
The wind howled outside and with thequanoonplaying, conversation was proving difficult.
‘I said, you’d have to ask them.’
Ilyas stared at her. Her response surprised him, not that he let it show, but it had been so attuned to his own thoughts that he was a little taken aback. He wanted to hear more from Maggie. ‘Come here,’ he said, and patted a cushion that was nearer to him.
Even as she moved closer the truce remained, for he made no move to touch her. Instead, he asked for more of her thoughts.
‘Maybe don’t advertise it as stargazing,’ she suggested. ‘Especially when the operators know there isn’t a chance of stars. It could be a nice bonus but the trip itself could be enough. I know that I loved sitting around the campfire and hearing the stories.’
‘What did they tell you?’
‘About a river under the palace that still runs red.’ She turned and looked at his expression for a reaction but Ilyas gave nothing away so she spoke on. ‘How a prince died of a broken heart and how it’s still bleeding to this day.’
He just stared.
‘Is it true?’ Maggie asked.
