Regbi hardly saw the other shaman after that. He left her with a thick bowl of porridge and a promise to return by sundown. When she asked him where he was going, he was vague in his response. “Out to think,” he said, not feeling it necessary to elaborate any further, save to pop his head back through the door to ask her to take the camel out to graze. It was the first time he had asked anything of her; it didn’t bode well for the future. But as Regbi had been asked to do worse things before, she saw no real reason to complain. If all Khadan asked of her was to perform little chores now and then, she considered herself as having come out ahead in their bargain.

The camel’s name was Ulaan. It stank and spit like any other camel, but Regbi couldn’t help liking it all the same. Its long face made her think of a horse that had melted under the desert sun with its drooping lips and lazy, hooded eyes. She reached forward to stroke the shaggy, reddish fur that covered most of its body and received a large glob of spit on her boots in thanks. Regbi had learned to expect it; the first time the creature had spit between her eyes.

“Wretched beast,” Regbi cooed, leading it out to the scrub. “One day I’ll make you into a blanket.”

Her feet led as her mind wandered. Khadan was nowhere in sight. It came as no surprise that he wouldn’t be. He had taken his horse with him when he left. Regbi didn’t doubt that he would return: he had left all of his belongings behind in the ger after all. She only wondered where he might have gone off to and why. She suspected it had something to do with their new arrangement. There hadn’t been much ceremony the first time she became an apprentice, but then again Setseg was never one for big displays. Her grandmother had simply ushered her into the house, given her a pair of new clothes, and ignored her until the following day.

Regbi sighed to herself at the memory of it. There was a reason she hadn’t wanted to be anyone’s student again. Not only because she had failed so spectacularly in the end, but because of everything that went with it. The work, the pain, the frustration. Though maybe things would be different with Khadan. Maybe what she needed was a master who wasn’t so much alike in temperament. A master who wasn’t her grandmother. A master who wouldn’t take her every failure as personally as a dagger to the heart.

There was no use in thinking back to Setseg. Her grandmother had been clear with her when she had left: if she did, she wasn’t welcome back. Regbi knew better than to think that it might have changed in the year since she had. Setseg had written her off as a failure, the same as her daughter had been before Regbi herself. She was just another girl who had run away in the old woman’s eyes. Another waste of time. Worse for having reduced a guardian spirit to shreds on her way out. Regbi closed her eyes to block out the memory; she hadn’t meant for her mind to wander that far. Not back to Omol. Not to how happy she had been there. It was easier to think of her grandmother’s scowling face than the lake in winter or Tamzhid’s good natured smile. He had probably written her off by then as well. As the girl who had repaid his kindness by stealing his hard earned money to buy herself a train ticket. As a thief. Regbi felt the guilt ooze across her skin as if someone had cracked an egg on top of her head and let the yolk run.

By the time she returned to the ger it was nearly sundown. Khadan was waiting inside for her by the fire. It looked as if he were polishing something in his lap. Steel reflected the firelight into Regbi’s eyes. She raised her hand to shield herself from the glare.

“What are you doing?” she asked, plopping down next to him. Her eyes widened when she saw one of his ceremonial knives resting in his hands. The same one that Osol had had his eye on. “You weren’t out hunting were you?”

“Just thinking. Why, were you hoping for rabbit stew?” Khadan held the knife up, catching the evening light in its blade. He shook his head ever so slightly and returned to his work.

“I wouldn’t say no to it…”

“Maybe tomorrow then. Tonight we have business to attend to.” There was a determined light to his eyes that put Regbi ill at ease. She looked to the knife and back to him; his eyes did the same, only in reverse.

“What are you going to do with that?” Regbi demanded, taking a step back from him.

“Just give your arm a little nick,” Khadan said. “It’s very sharp: you’ll hardly feel it.”

“I can see that it’s sharp. That doesn’t make me feel any better about it.”

Khadan ran the blade along his thumb to test it. It left a thin streak of red in its wake. Satisfied with what he saw, he sliced it through the fire.

“And now you’re heating it too!” Regbi cried.

“Purifying it,” he corrected. “It won’t be hot when it touches your skin. There’s no need to panic.”

“You want to cut me with a knife: of course I’m panicked.” Her eyes darted to the door. This was what she got for being hasty. She should have known there was some catch to his offer.

“Was your last master someone from your own family?” Khadan asked, glancing up from the fire. “A parent or a grandparent, perhaps?”

“Yes…why?”

“Then there was no need for a ceremony like this. You were born into their udam; I have to invite you into mine.”

“By stabbing me with a great, vicious knife? Couldn’t you just send me a card instead?”

“I never learned letters,” the desert shaman said with a tight smile. “If you want to be my student, then it can’t be by any half measure, Tuyana; it will be by blood or not at all.”

“Tuyana?”

“No? I thought maybe that was it. How about Ayagma? Or Chabi?”

“Wrong on all accounts,” Regbi said with a derisive snort. “Chabi, indeed.”

“You’ll have to tell me yourself then. I need to know your name if I’m going to take you as my student.”

Regbi hesitated. She felt as if the situation were spinning outside of her control. Blood magic was a serious thing. If he had her name to bind her with it, there would be no changing her mind later. She would be giving him power over her that he could choose to wield however he wanted.

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Reading the indecision on her face, the desert shaman said, “If the arrangement doesn’t work for you I’ll release you from it. You have my word.”

“How do I know you won’t break it after the magic is done?”

“I’ll swear it on the blood. If after you take in your spirit you don’t want to be my student anymore, I’ll release you.”

“Just like that?”

He nodded. “There’s no sense in keeping a student by force. My aim is to help you, not hamper you.”

“And you need my name for that?”

A light sigh escaped from Khadan’s lips. It looked as if a headache were building in his temples. With more patience than she expected from him, he said, “Yes. Call it a first test of trust. You can rest assured that I won’t use it to levy any curses against you.”

She was tempted to ask him to swear that in the blood as well, but she suspected he was reaching the end of his patience already. You didn’t accuse a shaman of speaking curses. It went beyond bad manners to even suggest it. And strange as he was, Regbi didn’t take him for the type to do such things. She had learned to search for kindness in a person like water in the desert and it only took the one look to see it rippling behind his eyes. Even if she didn’t understand why, it was clear that he wanted to help her.

“It’s a stupid name,” Regbi muttered. Nothing exotic like Khadan, which breathed from her lips like a wisp of sand and smoke. Her mother hadn’t had a shaman’s name in mind when she thought of one for her. Probably the furthest thing from it. She was surprised that her mother hadn’t simply scrawled “Normal” across her certificate of birth and dared anyone to contradict her.

“I doubt it. It’s probably a perfectly pleasant sort of a name. Something pretty even. I keep leaning towards Sayana. Or even Solongo or Sagadai. But it seems you were about to tell me yourself, so I suppose there’s no more need for me to guess.”

“It’s—Regbi,” she said, spitting out the word like she would a bad taste.

“Regbi,” Khadan repeated, sampling the sound of it for himself. “Regbi…that was my next guess.”

“No it wasn’t.”

He chuckled to himself, making no attempt to deny it. “It suits you I think. A charming little name for a charming little shaman. I can’t think why you would prefer Magpie to it.”

“You were the one who chose that name, not me,” Regbi said, scowling up into his smirking face.

“You could have corrected me whenever you chose,” Khadan replied with a shrug. “Regbi is a much better name for a girl though. Thank you for sharing it with me. Now…” His eyes flicked down to the blade curled beneath his long fingers. “Roll up your sleeve for me.”

“Is that really necessary?” A blade as sharp as the one winking up at her was bound to carry a bite. She didn’t relish the thought of letting its teeth sink into her skin. “Couldn’t we just…prick our fingers?”

“Pricking your finger won’t give me what I need to bind my magic to yours. And if I can’t bind my magic to yours, I can’t anchor you to your body or find you if you’re pulled too far from it: it defeats the whole purpose of helping you.”

“Oh.” The word hung in the air like the tolling of a bell. It marked the end of all discussion. She would either do it or she wouldn’t. Like Khadan said, there couldn’t be any half measures. Not with so powerful a magic. Choking back the urge to flee, Regbi bared her wrist and held it out over the fire. She could feel the kiss of the flames against her flesh and knew it would pale in comparison to the pain she was about to experience. Even so, she couldn’t prevent herself from asking in a small voice, “It won’t hurt very much, will it?”

The cold taste of polished steel as it ripped across her wrist was the only answer she received. It wasn’t the nick that Khadan had promised either. Regbi felt it tear deep into her skin, slicing through fat and grazing the bone. She wasn’t sure whether to scream or to vomit. The pain welled up as quickly and with as much force as the blood gushing from the wound. Droplets of it leaked onto the coals and angrily sizzled. Her head spun and her stomach lurched. If it weren’t for the hand that snaked out to support her, she would have swayed into the fire.

Through the blackness building behind her eyes, she felt something warm press against her wrist. It pulsated like a drum, driving a heat into her veins. She pulled against it, but was too weak to free herself. It felt as if a fever were being forced inside of her. Regbi could feel it building under her own skin like a fire being stoked. It was like no magic she had ever felt before. It overwhelmed her own like a gust of air to a dying flame. It was old and it was unfathomable as the depths of a great chasm. How the shaman had come by it, Regbi couldn’t explain. She only knew that it was burning through her body like a plague wind. Her joints grew heavy and ached as if suddenly stricken with age; her mouth ran dry as a bone and her voice came out like the rasping of an old crone. Her eyes blazed with unnatural heat, turned to glass and unable to form the tears to run down her sweat soaked face. It was no magic—it was a curse; it was death. It was too much for one person to sustain. Again she tried to wrench herself from the desert shaman’s grasp, but his grip only strengthened, his long fingers digging into her flesh as cruelly as the blade of the knife. Just as she thought the magic flowing from him would consume her entirely, it broke like a wave crashing against the shore. Regbi felt it ebb from her veins and return to its master, slowly, as if sipped out of her. She felt herself pulled with it and collapsed against him.

She blinked against the fading light. She knew that she was frightened and that she was angry, but the feeling was so distant that she could barely make it out. It sat on her tongue like a half-forgotten word waiting to be spoken. Darkness clouded her vision. Her head felt miles above her shoulders, floating somewhere in the ether. She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look down.

Something cool pressed against her lips. She felt like an infant being offered a nipple and refusing to suck. Regbi clamped her mouth shut in defiance, but was unable to fight against the hands that forced it past her lips and into her mouth. Her tongue was assaulted by the sharp tang of spirits. It scorched her throat on the way down and set fire to her belly. She was ignited back into awareness.

The first thing she thought to do was look at her wrist. Where she expected to find bloody flesh and the glint of bone, there was a scar. It was raised above the rest of her skin, pink as a newborn child. Though she knew that the pain was gone, she could still feel it throbbing in the stretched skin covering the wound. A phantom pain, but just as real as any other. Slowly, she raised her eyes to the desert shaman.

There was a question in his own. Regbi met it with a snarl.

“What did you do to me?” She felt betrayed and sick to her stomach. Terrified too.

“Only what I said I would,” Khadan told her. His face was pale and clammy, but he was otherwise composed. An identical scar was shining on his own wrist in the same place as Regbi’s. She hoped he felt the pain of it too.

“A nick—a nick is what you promised me!”

“If I had told you the truth it would only have made things worse for you.” Khadan massaged the raised skin on his wrist, wincing a little. “It hurts worse when you’re expecting it.”

“How can I trust anything you say when I know you’ll lie to me? You should have told me what you were going to do! At least that way there would have been some choice in it!” She felt the urge to cry, but her anger demanded to be attended to first. She wasn’t sure who she was more angry with; the other shaman for deceiving her and forcing his magic on her, or herself for allowing it to happen. She had been warned of trusting strange shamans. Of giving them any sort of power over herself. She had known what could happen and she chose to forget just because someone had been kind enough to give her a place to sleep and a bowl of warm soup.

“I’m sorry. I only meant to spare you the worst of it—”

“And what about what you did to me with your magic?”

“I told you I was going to bind mine to yours, didn’t I?”

“You didn’t tell me it would be so painful. It felt like you were purging me from my own body…like you were forcing your magic into every inch of me and burning away my own.” Pins pricked in the back of her throat. She felt her voice constricting into an angry hiss. Stupid. She was an idiot for having trusted him. “How do you even have magic like that? It’s not normal. You—you’re probably some sort of malicious shaman, aren’t you? A Curse Speaker or—”

Khadan raised his hands to shield himself from her accusations. “Nothing like that. I’m sorry I frightened you, but you have no need to worry. I’m not a Curse Speaker or a Bone Eater or anything else that your morbid sensibilities have cooked up to accuse me of.”

Regbi eyed him warily. “Then what are you?”

His eyes took on the glow of the firelight as he said, “I’m Teb-Tengri.”