The dawn this morning is gray and makes me unsure of anything but my own two hands. I am hungry and cold, but that’s as usual. Desert nights are cold, desert sands are hard, and desert food is barren at best. I have been crossing these last three days and if I keep up my pace, I will reach the city by dusk.

One more day is about all I can take, one more day without people and sound and life. Oh I guess there’s life enough here, the plants twisting strangely out of the sand, the skittering lizards and ants and occasional jackal in the distance. My robes are full of sand. It is time to start walking again.

Most people who cross the desert from one city to another do so in a caravan, on camels or mules or horses, along the longer but safer route of the trade roads, stopping to camp by a spring or sharcas settlement, paying the blighted settlers well for the safety of their numbers, their fires, and their dogs.

The sharcas are no real people; they are the collected refuse of many people. They are prisoners who have traded time in jail for an uncertain freedom in the desert, or bastards with no history and no money, cast out, or prostitutes who are too old to be worth anything to their masters. None of the violent prisoners are sent to the settlements, only the thieves or gamblers or debtors. Sometimes slaves too unruly to be useful, if they are not killed by the beatings, are sent here too. It gives their masters some feeling of retribution.

The sharcas are not allowed to have animals bigger than goats or dogs, so they could not make a long journey anywhere. The cities nearby know and will reject any who approach. They are as captive in the desert freedom as they ever were in a prison, but still many prefer it. There is less disease, less filth, and some can indenture themselves as servants to the passing caravan masters after they have spent their many years in the settlement and received the brand of release.

No one will take a sharcas without the brand, a circle with a snake through it burned into the flesh of the right arm, just below the wrist. Many sharcas never take the brand, even when they could; some have no desire to leave. They have come because they are welcome no other place.

Some hope to make their own way without the brand that seals them as sharcas for the rest of their lives. Futile hope for most. The desert is large and unkind, the caravans will not take them, the cities know them, and they can never get far enough away to be unknown.

I am not sharcas. I have served many short terms in the prison but none long enough to tempt me to the desert outposts. I am no fool; the settlements are an end, not a beginning. I am only beginning. I am still young, and though I am a thief I will not always be. I will neither rot away in a camp with deserted soldiers and old whores nor take a brand that will set me in a scorned place for the rest of my life.

My father was sharcas, after I was born. He had debts too great to pay and a market stall of no value, a wife beautiful but frail, and two young children, my sister and me. Serei is older than I am by two years. She was ten when he went to the settlement, leaving us in the city to make what we could from the market until the season ended and then join him in the settlement for winter.

The desert has no real winter, of course, but the mountains and plains around the cities do. Once winter came to them there was nothing to forage, nothing to gather, nothing to sell. Nothing to eat. The desert would house us all until spring came to the cities again.

We lived thus for five years, my mother and sister and I in the city, selling what we could to survive, hoarding up anything to help us through winter in the desert. When the rain fell for more than a week at a time and the air grew chill, we closed up the market stall, fastening every stick or lumber scrap we had collected over the season to the open front and back to discourage the vagrants from living there during the winter.

They always did anyway, and we had to wait for help from the market guards with a hundred other returning sellers every spring because the vagrants were too strong for us, just me and my sister and my mother. It took days sometimes to get to a guard, because the other sellers were wealthier and garnered more attention. They could give good payment for the guards’ time, while we could only promise something later, and thank them humbly for the help they provided, taking it as it was supposed to be: free.

When finally a guard made it to our stall and drove the vagrants out, we had the cleaning to do. Some of the vagrants were lepers and if customers saw any sign that they had housed themselves in your stall over winter, they would buy nothing. So every surface of dirt floor and wood walls, both inside and out, must be stripped or scrubbed or swept until as flawless as a two-sided, thirty-year-old wooden market stall could be. Sometimes there were stinking piles of refuse in the corners, barely covered with straw.

Always there were fire pits, ashes, half-burned sticks, usually lewd charcoal drawings on the walls and ceiling. Many times the wood we had so carefully saved and secured to the front and back had been torn off and burned in the fire pits. The stupid vagrants were too lazy to gather enough wood so they sacrificed the only shelter they had, literally tore it down around themselves to warm one half while the other half stiffened and froze in the wind and snow that they had welcomed back in.

Sharcas and vagrants. I will never be one. I am a thief but I have a home, I work the market stall still, I take what I must from those too rich to need it but I never cheat the customers, I am clean, I am quiet, and I never go to the settlements for winter.

The fifth year was a better selling season for us than before. The rains and snow had been plentiful; the mountains were green all the way down to the lush plains below when we reached the city that spring. Serei was fifteen and I was thirteen, skinny but tall, up to my mother’s head, taller than Serei. She was becoming beautiful.

She wore her thick dark hair in a braid, sometimes curled in a bun above her neck, sometimes coiled like a crown on her head, sometimes hanging down her back to her waist. She only took it out of the braid at night to use the wooden comb on it, pulling it through over and over until her hair hung smooth and shiny. Then she rebraided it, tightly, for sleep. She must not have moved when she slept for every morning, though I woke before she did, her braid was as smooth and tight as it had been when she laid down the night before. She always smoothed the top with her hands, checked that there was no straw anywhere. There never was. She was immaculate without trying. My mother was like that too.

We had no land of our own, a secret we guarded carefully. Every day while my mother and sister tended the stall, I went to work the land we did not have. That was the story we told.It was out past the first plains, we said, a far walk, too far for us all to go there and back every day, that is why we stay here in the stall. Besides it is just small land, and my son does all the work himself, and then comes to us each night. He is young and strong, he can do the walking and then be with us for safety in the night.

People believed us, though the more intelligent must have wondered at the variety of products we somehow produced from our small land. We sold acorns, mushrooms, bouquets of still-unopened flowers fresh with dew, eggs, silky young ears of corn, bundles of tender wheat grass, tiny green tomatoes for preserving. Everything we sold was delicate, young, fresher than at any other stall, but always in limited supply.

I got up two hours before dawn every morning and crept out. I knew the best farms, the fastest paths, where the dogs lived, where the guards were, how long every venture would take, how much I could carry without damage. I stole very little from each place, always taking the youngest, the slightly unripe or immature, a handful here, three or four pieces there, two warm eggs from one farm and three from another. Never enough to be noticed and missed. Never from what was already packed and loaded in carts to take to their own market stalls that day.

I usually made five trips in and out of our stall before dawn, carefully depositing my finds along the south wall. My mother and sister got up at dawn when I returned with my last load, and we ate a breakfast together before they began arranging our goods in the front of the stall.

By the time market opened, an hour after dawn, and the farmers were setting out their own goods, my mother and sister were welcoming the very first customers, urging them to feel the warmth of the eggs or the tender stalk of the asparagus, to smell the fresh bundles of herbs or cassia bark, the see the cold moisture just beginning to evaporate from the leaves.

I was away from the stall again right after breakfast, ostensibly on my way to our small land. I did walk, a good way, into the plains and to the edges of the forest. I did not steal then, I foraged, for the forests were open land and anyone with the sense to gather from them could do so without punishment.

I gathered everything I could find that was useful: straight young branches we would polish into walking sticks; soft mosses and ferns for poultices; edible flowers; tree bark for astringents and healing tea; willow branches, freshly fallen and pliable, to be coaxed and braided into baskets and trays; sweet-smelling twigs that we would strip and dry and curl into shavings for bags to sweeten a fire’s aroma; perfect glossy leaves to line the baskets; berries and their longest thorns to make into kitchen tools; even the dirt, if it had enough clay in it, could be sifted and cleaned and pounded with water to make beads.

I did my foraging through the morning, until the sun began to break through the branches over me. Then I ate some portion of whatever I had found that was good, or resorted to the piece of oatcake my mother always sent with me, then curled up in the shady overhang of the rocks, my treasures carefully hidden behind me, and slept.

Hunger woke me every afternoon. I bundled all my finds into my long cloak that became my farmer’s pack and began walking home. Sometimes, if my pack were not too heavy and the sun was still high enough, I would ease into the edges of the farms I passed to collect some feathers for our bedding or a few ripe plums for us to eat that night.