The Old Woman Who Counted Stars

One of the passengers, an old woman travelling alone, watched the sky the way Idris watched it, and on the fourth night she sat down beside him and said, very quietly, that they were going the wrong way. Idris did not panic. Panicking was for amateurs, and whatever else he was, he was not an amateur liar. "And how would you know that, grandmother?" "Because I walked this road forty years ago, the last time it closed." She did not look at him. She looked at the stars. "I know you're not a navigator, boy. A real navigator would have corrected us on the second night. I've been waiting to see what you'd do." Idris was quiet for a long moment. The fires crackled. A camel groaned somewhere in the dark. "And what have you decided?" he asked. "Now that you've seen." "I've decided," the old woman said, "that you and I are going to get these people to Astrabad together, and that you are going to spend the rest of the journey learning, very fast, to deserve the way they look at you."