Amber looked up. “You’re going to the Resource Tent? Why?”

“It’s not…you know, what they were saying. It’s just…” Nicci looked away and then fiddled with the hem of her shirt a little and looked back at her. “I don’t want to be alone right now, okay?”

“Yeah, I understand. Of course it’s okay. You don’t need to ask permission,” she added, even managing a little laugh. She felt like throwing up, as much as she knew that would hurt her already aching guts. “Sleep wherever you want, just as long as you get some rest, okay?”

“Okay.”

The wind gusted, covering the little sound of Nicci walking away. A short time later, another fire was struck out past Scott’s tent. She could see people moving around it, some bedding down, others standing close and talking. Looking at her.

Amber moved over to the fire and numbly rearranged it for roasting. Smoke got in her eyes. The tears came streaming out. She tried not to be too conspicuous about it. She didn’t care if they hated her, but she didn’t want them to see her cry.

* * *

All things served Sheul. Meoraq had often mentioned his increasing difficulty keeping the many lazy humans fed when at his prayers, and so came meat, directly into his camp. That it came in the form of hunting tachuqis was surely a divine comment of another kind, and one which Meoraq humbly acknowledged as he butchered them and gave his thanks.

He did not try to glean every strip of meat on the beasts’ bones. Tachuqis, particularly those with young, were aggressively territorial and he could not imagine there could be others close enough to be a threat to him, but the blood on the wind was sure to bring ghets eventually. Meoraq stripped the first corpse of its breast, flank, and tail meat, took the legs for meat and marrow, and hacked the spines away to get at the tender strip of dense, salty fat it carried. For organs, he took only hearts, kidneys and livers, and left the rest behind for the inevitable scavengers.

When he returned to camp with the first load, he was not surprised to see that the humans had withdrawn themselves beyond the borders of labor, and that Amber tended the roasting coals alone. She took the meat without asking instruction and he moved rapidly on to the next animal, annoyed with her for no reason whatsoever.

But no, he had reasons. She’d stood her watch, had carried back a timely warning, and had acted swiftly and well to preserve the lives of her people. All fair and good. And then she’d run off alone into the dark with her spear and stabbed it blindly into a damned tachuqi.

Except that she hadn’t been alone, truly. She’d begun, at least, with Scott.

And that made him…so angry.

That she had gone with Scott out after the tachuqi was bad enough, but he thought he could forgive it in time. What he could not—would never—forgive was the blood in Amber’s hair, the broken end of the human’s lamp, and Scott himself safely back at the fire telling him he did not know where Amber was. Even these thoughts in Meoraq’s mind put such heat in his throat that he could not swallow; he was actually drooling through his bared teeth like an animal. Again and again, he tried to count his breaths, but thoughts of Scott and blood broke every scrap of peace he found. The butchery of the tachuqi gave him only pale gratification, but at least it occupied his hands.

He brought the second beast’s bounty to the fire. Again, Amber took it without comment. The first tachuqi was roasting well, save for the salt-back, which she didn’t seem to know what to do with, and the marrow-rich bones, which she’d set aside as trash.

“Save those,” grunted Meoraq, pointing. He’d show her how to cook them when he was done with the butchering.

She nodded, silent.

He went to deal with the last tachuqi, musing as he went on her uncharacteristic quiet. Women should be quiet, of course. A good woman should be all but invisible in her man’s House. Or her father’s, rather. Then her man’s. It was unnerving to see Amber as well-behaved.

Then again, she had just faced down a hunting tachuqi. Courage and stupidity may have helped her wield the spear, but perhaps now that it was done, she was reflecting on her actions and how badly things might have gone.

Her shirt was torn. Had the spear been a hand’s width shorter…

“Idiot,” grumbled Meoraq, and began to cut the dead tachuqi out of its skin.

Midway through this difficult process, it occurred to him that he had called her an idiot to her face. She’d embraced him anyway (he was not going to think about that) but she still might have heard it. Perhaps he’d bruised her feelings.

Bruised. The image of Amber’s stomach behind the tatters of her shirt intruded, scratching across his mind and raising that fighting urge once more. It was light enough yet, but by dawn, her colors would be in as dark as thunderclouds. Fell on a rock, she said. Running in the dark after her tachuqi. And blissfully forgetful of all the fragile human organs she carried in that soft belly that could be split as easily as they could be bruised. She might have been seriously injured. She might have been killed.

Or she might not. He had to remind himself that a wound was not the same from human to dumaq. No creature he knew of showed injury so vibrantly or so easily as humans. Dumaqs bruised when they were young, before their skin thickened and scales grew in dark and hard. Meoraq could remember carrying the colors of his warriors’ training as proudly as if they were priestly medals, at least up to his fifteenth year and the beginning of his last growth. He’d come to it no earlier than the other boys in Tilev, but he’d had time since then to see boys outside the warrior’s caste. The sons of farmers and cattle-hands, the sons of craftsmen, the sons of priests—they were still grey and thin-scaled well into their seventeenth, even their twentieth years…

He thought about that in a distracted, brooding way as his hands went about their work uninterrupted, waking back to himself to find that he’d cut the tachuqi’s middle talon from its foot. He studied it there in his hand, his head cocked, curious and amused. He was still in his boyhood mind. Hunt-Master Takktha had taken his best students out into the wildlands occasionally to hunt tachuqi. If anyone managed to take one, it was his habit to award the boy the talon for a prize. It was not bladed and so stood fair in the sight of Sheul, but made a good knife for a boy, and a damned good story in the envious eyes of those who had to stay in Tilev. On the shelf below his sleeping cupboard at home, Meoraq probably still had the three talons awarded him over the years.

And was this Amber’s? Here she was behaving properly for the first time in all the days he’d known her, and he was making her a boy’s knife to go with her spear.

“I am a terrible influence,” Meoraq declared, tucking the talon through his belt. He could make her a hilt if they ever found decent wood to craft one from.

He went back to the humans’ camp in much smoother spirits than he had set out from it, hauling the last of the meat behind him and thinking ahead to the hilt he would make and the trick of sizing it for a human’s hand. Amber was still at the fire, alone. There were the tracks of tears on her face, although her eyes were presently dry. She did not seem to see his approach, although he made no secret of it. She saw him only when he flung his load of meat onto the heap, and it was with a start that she turned away to poke at the fire and the roasts and covertly rub at her cheeks.

He probably should not have called her an idiot.

‘Well, it was an idiotic thing to do!’ he thought defensively, and went over to have a better look at her. “Stand up.”

“Why?”

“Because I told you to.”

She huffed a breath out through her nose, not loudly enough to be a true snort, and looked away.