East

Restless, I fell into a light sleep and awoke when Suvdin came to fetch both Flowers and me. We were led to the edge of the camp, where Suvdin placed Flowers with a group of children being taught to fire a bow and arrow. I watched the two of them interact, a little uneasy still by the deal Batu had struck. His logic was sound: if we left to wander the steppes for a while, Flowers should be comfortable.

This just seemed so permanent.

My gaze roamed with my thoughts, and I shielded my eyes against the morning sun to see Ghoajin atop a horse headed towards a tent located a quarter of a mile from the rest of the encampment. I watched her, puzzled as to why she went and why she was alone. She was so fragile at her age, hunched over the horse's mane.

"Where is she going?" I asked when Suvdin joined me.

"To care for the sick."

"I thought they were …" I waved at the tents behind us, uncertain which side of camp the battle injured and ill were kept.

"Not these people." Suvdin's tone grew hushed. "They suffer the Great Plague. They cannot be kept close to camp, so they are tended until death in the ger there."

"Oh, wow." I searched my memory for what kind of plague it might be. It was in the early thirteen hundreds, by all accounts, which was about the time the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. "Are there doctors or … uh, healers who help them?"

"No," she said grimly. "It wiped out many clan members and warriors several seasons ago. It returns to the steppes every summer to claim new victims, and remains a danger at the trading posts."

"We stopped at a post."

"Batu would only have done so if necessary. He knows to avoid such places during summer."

I frowned. I never did ask why we stopped there. He had business to conduct, but I fell to infection after and hadn't thought twice about the stopover. "But why does Ghoajin go alone there?"

"She is one of three who caught the Great Plague and survived. She can be around the ill without falling sick again. The others are with the army to tend any who fall ill there."

A memory stirred, one that made me pause to pull it from the depths of my mind. I swore Carter said something about the Black Death to me at some point …

You are immune to everything from the Black Death to diseases that don't exist yet.

It was too much of a coincidence to assume he was joking. I didn't know that at the time, but he had clearly planned on sending me to this era of time from the beginning, no matter how my trip to the Old West turned out.