‘This’ was a pack, smaller than her duffel bag and designed after his own back-pack. He had done all the necessary cutting and stitching already, and was mid-way through sealing the seams with the same smelly gunk she’d used on her boots. Amber found the jar and picked up where he’d left off, trying very hard not to feel cheated.
“I wish you’d waited until I could watch you do this,” she said finally.
“So that you could make your own,” he agreed, watching her work. “But this one is yours and it should last several years, so there seemed no reason to teach you.”
“Mine?” It wasn’t entirely unexpected, but she wasn’t comfortable accepting it either. As a kind of compromise, halfway between thanks and protests, she said, “My bag’s still all right.”
He wasn’t fooled. “Did I ask if you wanted it? I said it was yours. Insufferable human. Hold.” He stretched again, then ducked into his tent. He came out with what appeared to be an armload of grass bundles. Each one was roughly the length and thickness of her arm; lashed together, with the second saoq hide stretched over the top, they formed a mat that Meoraq unrolled to an impressive length.
“Good God, you were busy,” she said, capping the resin-seal to touch the mat. “What did you use to wrap them together like this?”
“Lhichu stalks, split and soaked.”
“Really? And that’ll hold for…?”
“Eh.” His spines shrugged. “Travel and hard use will wear them down in a brace or two. Fortunately, there’s plenty of grass in Gann’s world, and the hide itself will last you for years, once you’re done preparing it. Take this.”
She reached for the small pouch he held out to her, but drew back with a start as she realized what he’d said. “Hang on, last me for years? You can’t give this to me too!”
“You sound very sure.”
With a growing sense of unease—because unease sounded so much prettier than panic—Amber looked around. People were waking up and the sight of a bed, even a little roll-up job like this one, had everyone’s attention. “Meoraq,” she said softly, urgently, while she still had a chance of saying anything privately. “This has to be yours, okay?”
He continued to hold the pouch out. “I have one.”
“This is going to make all kinds of trouble, you have no idea.”
He bent down and slapped the pouch into her hand. “It was inconvenient for me to wait until you were awake to assemble your pack, so I proofed it myself, but it is for you to prepare your mat. Yours, I say. I have no interest in arguing with you, so we will pretend that you fought bitterly against it until I forced your obedience. Now pay attention.”
She gave up, picking unhappily at the simple drawstrings to open the pouch. “Okay,” she said, shaking out the hard, oily block it contained. “What is it and what am I doing with it?”
“Proofing wax, and you are going to rub it over the surface of your mat—”
“I really wish you wouldn’t call it that.”
He thumped her hard on the head. “Don’t interrupt me. The proof has no color. If it leaves a residue, you are using too much. Use your hand to thin it out if that happens. How do you mark me?”
“It goes on clear.” She gave the bottom corner a rub and frowned at the nothing it left on the saoq’s scales. “How will I know I got the whole thing if I can’t see it?”
“It has a shine.”
“Oh.” She rubbed a little more. “Okay, I see it now.”
“Two layers,” he warned her. “Don’t rush. Give it a chance to rest between layers.” He glanced behind him. “Take my tent down and fill the flasks while you wait.”
“And what will you be doing?”
“Watching you take down my tent and fill the flasks.”
“I see.”
“Finish sealing your pack first. The mat can rest as we walk, but your pack needs to dry before we move on. There’s tea in the pot if you want to finish it. If not, rinse it and my cup and pack them away. Will you wear my spare tunic?”
“No.”
“So be it. I will not make it my order yet. What do you want?”
Amber looked up and there was Nicci, with a small crowd of Manifestors watching from a resentful distance. Her stomach tightened. She put the wax down on the mat—on her mat—and started painting sealant onto her pack’s stitches again.
“Nothing,” said Nicci. “I’m just talking to my sister.”
Meoraq looked at her, then at Amber. He grunted and began to fuss with his many belts, making entirely unnecessary adjustments and glaring at both of them.
“Hey,” said Nicci. She sat down on the mat. “Wow.”
Amber’s stomach clenched tighter, but she made her mouth smile. She didn’t feel it and doubted she looked it, but she had to give Nicci the benefit of the doubt. They were sisters. “That nice, huh?”
“It’s amazing how much difference it makes.” Nicci ran her hands over the hide, making a twin rasping sound. She smiled. “Remember our old beds?”
“Yeah.”
“You were always so uptight about having pillow cases on the pillows and clean sheets every week. Yours and mine. Always taking care of things.” Nicci thought about it and shook her head. “I remember once you woke me up and made me change the sheets at, like, two in the morning.”
“I did?”
Nicci nodded, still stroking the mat.
“I don’t remember that.”
“It was a long time ago. In the Holland Mills apartment. We were still sleeping with Mama.”
Holland Mills…She couldn’t have been more than eight. “Are you sure I wasn’t changing the bed because she puked in it?”
“I guess she could have. I don’t remember that part, just you waking me up and making me move. You could be a bitch sometimes, even then.” Nicci ducked her head and gave her a crooked smile through a curtain of dirty hair. Her cute smile. Bo Peep’s smile. “I guess it’s been my turn lately, huh?”
Meoraq, boldly watching all this, said, “Yes.”
Nicci’s back stiffened. She threw him another of Bo Peep’s looks—the haughty fuck-you one—and wiggled around on the mat so that her back was fully to him.
Amber said nothing, just painted more resin on the seams of her pack.
“I know you’ve been trying to make up. I’m really sorry I’ve been so snotty.”
‘I’ll bet,’ thought Amber, and wished she believed she’d still be hearing this even if Nicci wasn’t sitting on that fucking mat. “It’s okay.”
“So we’re good?”
Meoraq opened his mouth and hissed silently at the back of Nicci’s head.
“We’re good,” said Amber, glaring at him. “Don’t you have some hunting to do or something?”
“No.”
“Can you at least go lurk somewhere else?”
“No.”
“This is really nice.” Nicci petted the mat’s scaly top a few more times, all her attention on her hands. It looked even less natural and casual than before. “Maybe we can share it. We could take turns. Like, you could have it every other night.”
Amber turned the pack and continued painting, feeling Meoraq’s eyes like honest-to-God coals on her face.
“Or you know what? Since I always go to bed earlier than you, maybe I could get it for the first part of every night and you could wake me up.”
This, not even five minutes after telling her how Amber had woken her up in the middle of the night when she’d been, what? Four? Three? But she’d remembered it all these years so that she could use it now as proof that Amber had always been a bitch. Still, she hesitated, and in that hesitation, Meoraq slapped a fuel-bundle down into the fire hard enough to blow out sparks and ash, and stood up.
“No,” he said, advancing on Nicci with his head so far on one side that it looked like he’d gone and hung himself in the night. “It belongs to me and if she will not have it, I will take it back!”
Nicci shrank down a little, but only a little. She hadn’t scooted back off the mat. She hadn’t even stopped petting it. She just waited, avoiding his eyes and pretending the touch of saoq scales was the most fascinating and hypnotic touch in the whole world.
