“I have been listening to you talk all night!” Meoraq spat. “If you look into my face and tell me you were sleeping, I will stand you up and have judgment for the lie!”

“I wasn’t!” Scott said at once. “But other people were and—”

Meoraq swung around and raked his eyes over the whole of them. “Who dares order me to silence?”

“I do,” said Amber. “Shut up.”

“Oh my God,” said Eric, very quietly, almost respectfully.

Those were the words that hooked at him, not Amber’s. Which was not to say that Amber’s passed serenely through him, but it was Eric under his burning stare next. Meoraq could feel himself sway, as if his metaphorical precipice of control had caused him to physically teeter, but when he fell, it was on the side of seventeen years of training. Because God indeed was with him and His eyes were always open.

Meoraq closed his eyes. He took a breath, held it, then let it slowly out again. He looked at Amber and said, “Come here.”

Human heads turned all through the room. Human eyes watched, solemn and staring, as Amber stood alone among them.

She did not move for a long time.

But when she did move, she came toward him.

Meoraq waited. She came within his easy reach and tipped her head back just a little, a combatant no longer but only an exhausted and unhappy human in torn clothes waiting to be struck so she could go to bed.

Meoraq left her standing there and went to his tent. He found the mending kit and brought it back, taking her firmly by the wrist and slapping the case with force into her limp hand. “When you are ready to apologize,” he said, releasing her, “I may be ready to forgive you. Until then, mend your shirt and keep your mouth shut.”

Her chin trembled, but in the end, she did not answer, only took the kit and left again. Back to her stall, perhaps, and this was just as well. He was willing to take the higher path, but he wasn’t ready to forgive, not quite yet.

The humans were watching, wary. He hissed at them and went into his tent as they scattered. He lay down, tight and angry and itching beneath his skin. He thought of Amber sitting alone in that empty room, mending that worn-out shirt just so it wouldn’t be the last one she had in the world. He thought of her calling him a son of a bitch too, but he tried not to let that be the master of him.

3

Morning came, but daylight did not lessen the storm that blew without the walls any better than sleep had eased the storm of Meoraq’s mood. He kept to himself in a foul humor, hiding in his tent until the humans woke and began to mill about, talking about the rain, talking about food, talking about the building itself and the Ancients who built it…and talking about the ship they imagined they saw in the tilework. As galling as the thought of that ship was, he was glad when Scott took the lot of them away to the other room to look at it, even if it was against his expressed order, because at least it gave him the opportunity to slip out without having to deal with any of them.

But when he opened the fastens and stepped out, there was Amber, leaned up against the wall in her useless human blanket, waiting for him.

He didn’t want to talk to her yet. He wasn’t sure he wanted to talk to her at all. He gave her a grunt of acknowledgement and left her.

Halfway down the first long hall that led to the rear of the building and the hole in the wall, Meoraq stopped and turned around. He folded his arms, hands flexing close to his honor knives, and waited. He wasn’t going to run away from a woman, by hell. If she wanted to thrash this out, they’d thrash. Ha! And she’d know how it felt to thrash with a Sheulek by the end of it.

Time, measured out by his own even breaths and the drumming of rain against the outer windows.

Meoraq waited. Waited. And finally let out a curse and stalked back up the hall and into the sleeping room.

Amber, still leaning against the wall, turned her head and looked at him.

Now he was really annoyed.

Perhaps she could tell. She looked away, fixing her eyes on her own knees without change to her expression. This act bent her neck, making her look very much like a dumaq woman, which did not mollify him in the slightest but was instead somehow grotesque. He felt himself cooling and had to stop and remind himself that she had started all the fighting and it wasn’t over until he said it was.

“I am not angry with you,” he announced, hoping to provoke her.

“Lies,” she muttered, but she looked at him. Glared at him. And that was better.

“A Sheulek is the master of his emotions,” he told her. “I have every right to be angry with you. I choose the higher path. I forgive you and we will say no more about it. Give me my mending kit.”

She reached it out from beneath her pack, but only held it for a while. “I should have thanked you for this last night,” she said finally. “I don’t know how it is with your people, lizardman, but when it comes to humans, you don’t interrupt a girl’s crying jag and then expect her to be grateful.”

He could not believe this.

“Are you criticizing my behavior?” he asked incredulously.

Her shoulders fell. “Sure sounds that way, doesn’t it? Damn it. Here.”

He did not move to take the kit and, after a few awkward moments, she let her offering arm drop again.

They looked at each other.

She said, without heat and without warning, “I’ve never needed anyone before. Never in my life. I hate that I need you.”

Meoraq cooled a little more and this time, let those fires burn out. He went over and took his mending kit from her. “I am not your enemy.”

She snorted without much humor. Without much feeling of any kind, it seemed. “No, you’re my babysitter. Or, what was it you called me? Your runaway sheep?”

“Something of the sort,” he mumbled, scratching at the side of his snout. He bared his teeth briefly, then irritably said, “You ran off, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I did. So that I could have my useless goddamn girly moment in private. You were the last person I wanted to see that.”

The kit in his hands seemed suddenly to weigh ten times what it should. He looked at it foolishly, picked at a loose thread in its side-seam (it ought to be repaired and that was nearly ironic—to mend a mending kit), and put it away. “Why?”

She was quiet for a long time, long enough that he thought she did not intend to answer at all, and he was debating how to handle that when she suddenly, listlessly said, “Because I’m supposed to be the tough one. I’m supposed to be different. And I’m not.”

“You are.” He snorted and came over to give her a forgiving tap. “Hear the words of Uyane. You are without equal in the realm of the very different. I handle it…badly.”

“Maybe I wasn’t at my best last night. But you were pissed off all day—”

He grunted acknowledgement and did not point out that he had every reason to be angry when some cattle’s ass tried to take command of his camp, let alone when the one human he found tolerable turned her back on him and followed said ass into a city of the Fall against the will of Sheul and Meoraq both. He was being very patient.

“—and then you disappear all night, during the worst storm I’ve ever seen—”

“And what exactly did you expect me to do about the weather, woman?”

“Nothing! Just…and while we’re on the subject, what have you been telling Scott about me?”

His spines flared. “This is the subject?”

“It relates,” she said defensively.

“Apart from the usual death threats which he ignores, I try not to speak to S’kot at all. When circumstance forces me to do so, it certainly isn’t man-chat about you.”

She looked down at her empty lap and said nothing. It was not a look of relief. More of a flinch, if anything.