“She is improving, you know,” Jolakaia said gently. “Her wounds are healing and the infection has receded. She takes more broth every day and her sleep is far less fitful.”

Fitful. That was one word for it. Nightmare-plagued was probably more apt a phrase. For the first few days, when the fever was at its worst, Suvi cried out over and over again in delirious agony, saying words I did not know but that I thought might be names. Torrance. Elvi.

Perhaps names of the people I’d taken her from. People she still searched for in dreams.

People I had no idea how to find if I’d even had the vaguest inclination to return her to them.

Which I didn’t.

“Who is she to you?”

My inhale was sharp as I once again tore my attention from Suvi to look at my red-robed relative.

Over the past few days, Jolakaia had asked that question a thousand times with her eyes but never once with her mouth. Until now.

I’d asked myself just as many times. Probably more.

“Salvation,” I muttered after a brooding silence, because it was what felt most true.

Jolakaia’s snout pulled in a frown, and one of the guards, a female robed in black, piped up from the doorway, “The only true salvation is in the Mother’s-”

Shoulders bunching with tension and starmap buzzing, I used my power to slam the door shut from across the room, cutting off her words.

Jolakaia sighed. “She is right, you know. True salvation lies not in the fleeting brushes of mortal life, but-”

“Fleeting?” I could not keep the vibration of dangerous fury from my voice. “Mortal? My life is neither of those things. The shadows that consumed me were neither of those things. You yourself said I’ve been gone for generations. Hundreds of years lost in violent darkness. So spare me the righteous blathering when your Mother so clearly chose not to spare me from that. There was nothing in that darkness, Jolakaia! For years I could not even see, could merely fight my way through it with no thought to how much blood I spilled. I went from a prince of this land to a maddened beast and there was no relief, no way to come home, no salvation,” that word came out on a hiss, “until her.”

I stabbed a claw downwards to where Suvi lay in her bed, and Jolakaia rather wisely snapped her snout shut.

“Suvi is my only saviour. The only star left in a sky I’d long since given up on seeing with clear eyes again,” I growled. “I will devote myself to no other. There is no altar I will kneel before but hers.”

If my words offended Jolakaia, she did not show it. Instead, after absorbing my remarks, the corners of her green snout pulled in a slight smirk.

“We do not actually have any altars here, you know.”

Actually, I did not know. I hadn’t seen any other parts of the temple besides the courtyard and hallway on the first night because the only thing that mattered to me was here, in this very room. Jolakaia came and went – she had other duties to attend to in the temple and a wife out there in the city – but I remained.

The lack of antagonism in her reply deflated my anger somewhat, and with a tight jaw I turned and got down on the floor, placing my snout upon my folded fingers on the mattress.

Snout to face, I gazed at Suvi. With hard stone beneath my knees and the exquisite brush of mortal breath upon my scales, I knelt before the only altar in Callabarra.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Suvi

For what felt like an eternity, the only thing that punctuated the sick, sleepy haze of my existence was the pain of fire on my feet. But even that eventually stopped, leaving me in a mind-numbing state of confusion that didn’t get any better even with longer and longer periods of wakeful lucidity. There was no window in this room, and even though there was unfamiliar equipment, there was nothing that looked even remotely like a clock or a calendar. My sense of time was absolutely shot.

Everything was eerily, maddeningly constant.

Especially him.

In the throes of feverish nightmares, I could pretend I’d dreamed him. Maybe even pretend I’d dreamed everything that had started with my abduction from Earth, when military men had come for me and forced me into the service of our original human mission. But every day (at least, I assumed days were passing somewhere out there) I got a little stronger and a little more myself. And reality settled more firmly all around me. I was still here, on an alien planet, with some half-dragon-looking giant staring endlessly at me with his glittering golden eye.

Every time I woke, he was there. Sometimes kneeling, sometimes standing. But always, always there.

And he wasn’t the only one. There was another alien who looked quite a bit like him, with a snout and green scales, but this one wasn’t as tall or broad-shouldered, and it didn’t have wings. This other one wasn’t here all the time, I didn’t think, though it was hard to really keep track. One thing I did notice, though, was that even though I couldn’t understand them, they could clearly understand each other. I caught snippets of conversation in their alien language but didn’t bother trying to untangle any of it. I could barely keep my eyes open most of the time – trying to learn a fourth language was, at least for the time being, out of the question.

One question did crop up, though, what I thought was approximately three days after the sporadic burning torture in my feet had subsided. Where the fuck am I supposed to pee?

It was the first time I’d been lucid enough to even be aware of the sensation of a full bladder. I lay in the bed (which was becoming more and more obviously some kind of alien hospital bed) simultaneously wondering when I’d even consumed enough fluid to need to pee and trying to decipher where the hell I’d been doing my business this whole time, because I was positive I hadn’t left the bed. I gingerly shifted my legs then flinched, noticing something between them. Closer inspection made me think it was a leather pouch, or maybe even some sort of cleaned and processed animal bladder.

Oh God. I’ve been pissing and shitting in a fucking bag.

Thankfully it seemed to be empty, but that just brought up the even more cringe-inducing question of Who’s been emptying it this entire time?

My eyes slid to the alien male. My slight movements hadn’t yet drawn his attention – he was currently too busy staring moodily at some big metal ring thing. But when I fully sat up and groaned, head swimming, he straightened and pivoted instantly, sending white robes swirling around his long, lizard-like feet as he advanced on me.

“Did you always have those robes?” I croaked, trying to focus through the red-tinged throbbing of my head. “I thought you were naked before.”

And then, as if in a horrible anxiety dream and not my painfully real fucking life, I looked down to see that I was now the naked one. I gasped, clutching at the thin white blanket that had slithered down to my hips and yanked it up over my bare breasts.

“Where did my clothes go?” I whisper-shouted in a hoarse voice. Paska, now I remembered I’d already lost my tank top outside, but I’d at least had trousers and panties and a bra, all of which were now mysteriously nowhere to be seen. “Did you take them?”

I took several shaky, deep breaths, heart slamming and cheeks burning. I tried to rationalize with myself. I appeared to be a patient of some sort. I’d obviously been very ill and injured. Maybe it made sense that my clothes were gone.

But those ideas didn’t bring much comfort. My stomach flip-flopped at the thought of being naked and vulnerable and completely unaware of what was happening to me for so long.