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populated with water hens; Hagarlat had no doubt summoned her allies weeks ago and word of my arrival would soon reach her spies, if it had not already. Word had already traveled between outlying settlements, from which tribesmen came to eat at our fires or summon us to theirs for “fat and meat,” curious for news or a glimpse of the returningprincess, the would-be queen. The richest of them slaughtered goat and lamb—sometimes up to a dozen animals to feed a portion of our number even as they ate nothing themselves—one of them sending his four sons to join us in the morning, yelling, “Remember your servant Ammiyatha! Remember Ammiyatha with favor!” Meanwhile, smaller wadis had become watercourses nearly overnight from the lowland rains, rivers running toward the waiting fields where workers labored to shore up breaches in canals.
    We were followed by widows with naked children, old men with bent backs and one tooth left in their heads, boys wandering with young, hungry siblings, their loincloths no more than tatters. They, too, came to eat by our fires, these poorest and forgotten kinsmen of tribes afflicted by sickness or wells gone dry through winter. I assumed each time that they were given something to eat—a bowl of frothing camel’s milk, at the least—but when I saw several men turn away a young mother and her children, I was incensed.
    “Saba is flowing with frankincense worth its weight in gold,” I fumed at Wahabil. “How is it possible that anyone living in the envy of nations goes hungry?” I went after the young woman and her children and brought them to my tent.
    “The men turn them away as their supplies run thin,” Maqar said to me later, in low tones. “Already some of the men of Urramar have had to slaughter a camel.”
    “Give her my portion if no one will feed her, and one of my blankets as well.”
    Despite my words, I did not go hungry that night. I later learned Wahabil and Maqar both had given their food to the woman, who slipped away before dawn.
    The initial trek inland had felt like one unending cycle of back strain from riding and stony beds within a snarling landscape of camels hobbled and couched for sleep. I failed to feel in those first,stunned days more than the mounting spring heat beneath the stifling clouds, the hardness of the saddle, the chill through my cloak at night. And the flies, which were relentless, biting camel and human alike.
    But as the sky descended over the western highlands, heavy and pregnant with rain, I realized that I no longer fell into the sleep of the exhausted when I lay down, but lay awake listening for the cough of nearby cheetahs in the evening, the violent squawk of the peregrine at dawn.
    And as the distance to Marib tightened like an invisible cord, I found myself strained not by the weeks of travel behind me, but the crucial days before me.
    If we were defeated, I knew very well what would become of me. These kinsmen and allies staked their own lives in ready gamble for the benefits they might reap. But what of my priest, Asm, who had come with his acolytes at my request? Of my eunuch, Yafush, who slept outside my tent, and Maqar, who discreetly joined me within it? What end awaited them if we failed?
    Almaqah deliver us all.
    But it was not just the question of our fates afield. I had already been fighting, since the shores of Punt, a war of oppositions. Gone these six years from Saba, I was a queen who did not know her enemies or the true loyalty of her allies. A queen whose nobles meant to broker power in my council until one of them married me and I was queen in name only.
    I had had to fight even to ride alongside them if only to be privy to their discussions—to ride at all, in fact, threatening to set fire to the litter brought for me. Clearly, I had been meant to accompany them like the sacred ark my grandfather’s army bore into battle—a symbol by which those who carried it proclaimed sovereignty . . . but a thing with no