“I remember thinking that night how blessed I had been. A few shallow scratches, a knock on the head—hardly worth the mention.” His spines flicked. He glanced at her, smiling in that severe, lizardish way. “Come the morning bell, I felt as if I’d been nailed into a crate and thrown down the stairs.”

That was such an apt description of what she feeling that Amber managed a thin, strained smile.

“But the following day was tolerable, if not pleasant, and the day following that, I decided I would live after all. Every day, Soft-Skin.” He tapped her companionably on the shoulder. “A little better.”

“In the meantime, I’m making things worse.” She stopped walking while they still had some privacy, leaning heavily and with shaking hands on her spear. “Look at me. I’m not going anywhere today.”

“No.”

“You don’t get it.” Amber looked into camp, where more than a few faces were turned toward them, watching. “We’ve used up all our screwing-around time and they all know it. Now they all know I’m going to slow us down even more. Acting like it doesn’t matter doesn’t make me feel any better.”

“It matters,” he said mildly. “But if Sheul wills that we are on this side of the mountains when the snows come, so be it. Xi’Matezh will wait for us.”

“We’ll starve to death if that happens.”

He thumped her lightly on the forehead with one knuckle. “You forget that I have wintered in the wildlands before.”

“With fifty people to feed?”

His expression did not change in any way that she could see, but it became more thoughtful all the same. It was not, however, a good-gracious-I-hadn’t-thought-of-that kind of thoughtful, but more of a how-can-I-dumb-this-down-any-further? “God has set me on this road,” he told her. “And God will see me reach its end.”

“I’m sure he will,” said Amber, rubbing at her eyes. “But God has made it pretty fucking clear that he doesn’t care if the rest of us die.”

“Do not be blasphemous.”

“Don’t be a zealot,” she snapped back, and rubbed her eyes some more.

“Come.” Meoraq tapped at her carefully with his knuckles. “I have tea for you.”

“I don’t want it.”

“I know. Come anyway.”

Amber raised her head. One of the women was pointing at her, saying something unheard to the rest of them while they all stood outside the Resource Tent and shivered in their worn-out Manifestors’ uniforms. One of the others shrugged and, looking Amber right in the eye, made a crude circle of one fist and rammed her finger into it a few times. A riot of ewwws and Oh Gods drifted toward her on the wind as they laughed.

Nicci was with them. She didn’t laugh, but she didn’t walk away either.

Meoraq put his hand on her back and gave her a little nudge.

She looked at him, wishing she was the old Amber, the tough Amber, the Amber who could just walk away. She dropped her eyes back to the toes of her resoled boots and let him take her to his fire.

* * *

After his own encounter with the tachuqi that had kicked him to the ground, a young Meoraq had been on light detail a total of fourteen days. He wished he could give Amber the same, but he simply couldn’t.

On his frequent patrols, taking careful note of each fresh ghet-track and gnawed tachuqi bone, Meoraq found himself thinking of the road they had crossed outside of the ruins. The Gelsik road, he thought, although the particulars didn’t matter. It would lead to a city where Meoraq could declare conquest and demand enough cuuvash from its provisioners to make the rest of his pilgrimage without worry. He would have to demand a cart and a young bull to pull it, and since it seemed wasteful to haul two or three hundred bricks of cuuvash in an otherwise empty cart, he would demand enough tents and blankets to keep all the humans out of the weather. Warm clothes for Amber…and maybe even a new wristlet.

But as tempting as the thought was, he knew he would never do it. If pressed to give reasons, he could have said that this was a holy test set before him by Sheul Himself, and if the only way he could come through it was to cheat, he had already failed. That was a good reason, one that left unsaid the far more honest facts that if he took the humans with him to a city, his pilgrimage might well end there, and if he went alone, Scott would leave Amber to her own care, which was no care at all.

So Meoraq thinned the tachuqi meat as much as possible by stewing it with all the edible roots and leaves he could forage, and on the morning of the third day following the attack, when the last bitter drop was taken (given to Amber, fed to Nicci), he gave the order to strike camp and move on.

They walked, and if Meoraq had wagered his own left foot against the making of three spans distance in the course of that day, he would yet be walking. Even the humans complained it was not enough—there had to be some black joke in that—and Amber’s name was in all their mutterings.

She had begun well enough but soon flagged, dropping further and further behind until she and her Nicci were only two dark points on the very edge of the world. At first she carried her spear, then dragged it behind her, and finally began to lean on it. Meoraq spent much of the day looking back from some ridge or another, watching her struggle, thinking of himself limping along just that way, and the fourteen days he had been given for healing. But that was fourteen days within the walls of great Xeqor and this was the wildlands. He knew she was driving her exhausted body to the very edge of collapse so that she would not be a burden to them. He knew also that she was a burden anyway.

Meoraq had been the tool of Sheul’s judgment all his adult life. The unfairness gnawed at him.

That evening, after his camp was made (if it could be called evening while the sun was only half-fallen from its highest point), Meoraq went alone into the plains on the pretext of hunting. There, he removed his harness and his tunic, and bent his neck before Sheul. He prayed, reciting the Deliverance through all twelve invocations, and meditating until his heart was clear and all his clay was numb with cold.

When this was done, Meoraq bent yet further, gathering a palmful of wet earth to daub over his mortal heart. The wind dried it to a gritty shell against his bare skin in moments. He bowed low, shivering, to press his hands flat to Gann. His prayers were not ended, but only begun.

“O my Father,” he said, “hear Your son. I cry out to You from the darkness where I am in desperate need of succor. Great Father, the cold season is almost upon me and I can see no way for all the humans You have given me to survive such a wintering. I know that the lives of these few humans are a small measure of the hundreds of families who would depend upon me if I am called to be steward of Uyane’s line in Xeqor and I am ashamed to show my face to You and admit that even so, the burden is too great. I must cry out to You, merciful Sheul, for shelter in the wild places, for food in the hour of famine, and for strength in the bodies of the weak.”

Meoraq paused to reapply humility in the form of mud on his exposed chest. He could not feel it anymore. His shivering had become a constant tremor throughout his limbs. It took great effort to bend back to the ground without sprawling across it—effort that made him think of Amber fighting one foot down in front of the other, where his thoughts had been since this prayer began. Now he must come to it.

“Great Sheul, O my Father, You have called me to this pilgrimage and given me the honor of this ordeal. My heart is sick with shame that I cannot steward these humans without Your intervention, but I must be shamed, O Sheul, or I must see them die. We have been too long in the wildlands and with this new attack upon my camp, we will be there longer still. A woman was injured…” Meoraq trailed off, painted more mud onto his numb and aching chest, and said, “A good woman was injured, but by Your mercy, she lives. Now I bend on her behalf.”