I am halfway through shouting three different orders when I see her among the women.
Keandra.
No basket. Cloth over her mouth. Hair already roughened by the wind. Too late in the field. Too close to the storm line.
My whole body goes cold with fury. Not at the weather. At the timing. At the fact that she was still out there when the first signs were already too visible for anyone born on this ground to miss.
Then I see more. The half-second lag in her stride. The look on her face when she reaches camp. Not only fear. Shame. Defiance under it. The ugly hard set of someone who already knows she has done something wrong and is preparing to protect herself from what comes next.
That makes the anger more dangerous.
Because now I know this will not be simple.
I close the distance to her in four long strides. The women peel away around us. Smart. Even Oshara does not stay between a glass storm and a Kai in the first beat of danger.
“What did you not see?” I demand.
The words come out harder than I intended. There is no time to soften them.
Keandra jerks the cloth down from her mouth and meets my stare with too much heat already in her face. “I was coming back.”
Too slow. Too late. Not the answer.
“The storm turned while you had hands in the dirt.”
I can smell the root soil on her. I can smell the delay. I can smell the moment she should have already been running and was not.
Her chin lifts a fraction. “I was finishing the row.”
There.
How stupid it is hits me so hard I nearly stop thinking straight. Not because she is foolish by nature. Because she does not understand the scale of what this land can do. Does not understand that glass storms are not weather here in the way humans mean weather. They are stone-made wind. Enough to skin flesh, blind eyes, shred cloth, tear weak shelters apart if theangle is wrong and the warning is missed. Tigris does not forgive ignorance just because the ignorance is innocent.
And she stayed for the roots.
I grab her upper arm. “Inside. Now.”
That should end it. A female who does not understand the danger obeys the one who does. The matter is simple. There is no room here for pride or wounded feeling or argument about usefulness when the horizon is moving like a blade.
Keandra does not move.
The camp swirls around us in fast purposeful motion. Children rush past. A warrior hauling two water skins over one shoulder. Someone yelling about the east tie lines. The wind kicks harder, driving more grit against skin and tent hide.
Still, she does not move.
Something hot and sharp in her scent tells me why before her mouth does.
“I’m not useless,” she says.
For one heartbeat, the words make no sense.
Then they do.
And the fury shifts shape.
This is not about roots. Not really. Not about a half-finished row. Not about gathering. This is about all the deeper nonsense human fear has built in her. The need to prove. The need to earn every hand that feeds her. The fear of being kept and not needed. Of being protected and therefore lesser. Of being loved, perhaps, only in the places where she is useful.
I know all of that now in pieces.
