Meoraq studied him as the humans around them offered their own promises, bargains and pleas. Their voices meant nothing to him. There was a blackness inside him and he thought that if he closed his eyes and let it out, he might open them again to find an hour gone and every human dead, and that was, in this moment, a very fine thought. Instead, he took six breaths with his eyes open and Scott as full in his sight as Meoraq himself was in the sight of Sheul, and then said, calmly, “I should have killed you long before this.”

Scott said nothing. What was there to say?

“I’ll pray,” said Meoraq. “And so should you. Hear Uyane: If Sheul tells me to end her, I will build the pyre and see her to His eternal embrace.”

Scott nodded once, his face straining with the effort of showing so much concern.

“And then I will kill you,” Meoraq concluded thoughtfully, “and leave you to lie on the open ground with your blood rotting in your veins. But I will take your people on to Xi’Matezh. For her sake.”

Scott’s mouth worked, but no sound came out.

“However, if Sheul allows me the hope of her life, I will give you yours and let you lead your people out of my camp. And if she dies, so be it. I will not follow you. I will take no more vengeance. I will go to Xi’Matezh alone and if I see you there, I will not even draw this blade—” He patted the hilt of his beast-killing kzung. “—and gut you like the ghet you are. So. I will pray.”

He turned around and immediately Scott retreated, hissing at his people to get away from here before the crazy lizard started killing them. Some obeyed. Some protested. Some even followed Meoraq away, but he ignored them all. He entered his tent and knelt in the darkness there and picked up Amber’s limp, heavy hand. He shut his eyes on the sight of her white, waxen face. He counted off six breaths listening to the thick, laboring sound of her own. He prayed.

Between the hated living and the beloved dead…

But she wasn’t dead. She wasn’t dead!

Meoraq rubbed at his brow-ridges, but they hurt, so he stopped. He looked at Amber and then he reached down and pulled her up onto his knee, holding her to his chest and forward some, so that she couldn’t choke on her saliva. He fit his hand to the flat place between her soft, swollen teats and just stared at the top of his tent for a while, feeling her heart struggle at its work.

Amber needed him, of course she did, but so did all the rest of them, and while it was true that Amber might recover with his care, it was also true that the chance to spare one life did not and never could balance the risk to forty-seven other lives. If he did this solely because it was Amber, then he would carry every death of every other human as if it were murder. He would be Sheulek no longer. He would be damned in the eyes of God.

I do not want to leave her, Father.

He might have said it aloud. He might have only thought it. Sheul heard all prayers, no matter how they were spoken, and this was the most fervent prayer of all his life. He asked for nothing, sought nothing. He was scarcely aware of thought at all, but Sheul burned in his mind and Amber burned brightest of all against his heart. He sat and stared and held her and might have remained so for hours had not the flap of his tent lifted.

There stood Eric, with his woman cringing against his side. Seeing shame in their ugly faces did nothing at all to cool the fires charring at Meoraq’s heart.

“The thing is,” said Eric after a long silence, just as if he were continuing an argument and not beginning one, “this is it for us. We’re all there is. We need this stuff and she…doesn’t. So you can hate us if you want to, man…I kind of hate us too…but what else are we supposed to do?”

“You are supposed to be people!” snapped Meoraq. “How dare you crawl in here and whine at me because I will not allow you to pick carrion from one who isn’t even dead! Get out! Get out and go back to your murdering master!”

His woman retreated. Eric lingered,.

“It’s nothing personal,” he said finally.

Meoraq was on his feet and face to ugly face with the man in an instant. “It should be!” he hissed. “It should be very fucking personal when you leave someone to be torn apart by wild beasts…her bones…scattered!” Rage briefly blinded him. He fought it back, but his color was up and throbbing in his throat, and he knew the blackness would take him if he couldn’t calm down. “You don’t even have your own hate to spur you to murder her! You use his!”

“She started it,” said Eric.

Meoraq leaned back on his heels and just stared at him.

“She’s the one that made us pick sides. She’s the one who wouldn’t just let anything go!” Eric backed up a step, his neck bent and his eyes in constant motion, looking anywhere but at Meoraq. “She was always on us about how we had to do this and we had to learn that…It’s her own fault no one wants to be around her.”

“She wanted you to live,” spat Meoraq. “And you let him punish her for it, you bastard son of Gann. Damn you and damn all of you.”

Eric’s face darkened. He mumbled something more, but Meoraq could hear no words in the sound. Perhaps there were none. The human let the tent-flap drop between them and Meoraq returned to the watch he kept over Amber and her terrible sleep. She gasped when he brushed at her brow, but lay still as clay even when he lay down beside her and tried in vain to press his living warmth into her. Only the fluttery feel of her failing heart, throbbing from her flesh to his, told him she lived at all.

They were leaving now. He could hear their many feet drumming on the wet earth, moving away into the east. It was not too late. He could make it quick and easy. She would never waken. He could build the pyre, pray while she burned, and catch the rest of them before nightfall.

“Are you with me, Soft-Skin?” he murmured, stroking at her cold, damp brow. “Open your eyes. See me.”

They did open, and Meoraq let out an unmanning shout of relief, but they only rolled back and shut again. She had not seen him, did not know him.

But she had opened her eyes.

“Uyane Meoraq is with you,” he told her, and put his hand over her heart. “Hear me where you are and follow. Sheul, our Father, has set you in my path. So did you come to me and so you belong to me. Do you hear me, woman? You are mine! I found you, I own you, and I forbid you to die!”

His voice, risen to a shout, was a thunder in the tent, a whisper in the world. She did not answer. The heart that beat beneath his hand beat no stronger.

“I won’t leave you,” he said softly. “Please don’t leave me.”

Nothing. She did nothing.

Meoraq curled around her as close as his separate clay could press and closed his eyes. “O my Father, I cry out to You. You gave her to me and if I have not been as grateful as a son should be, I am sorry. But You gave her to me. Now…please…give her back.”

BOOK VI

GANN

Thunder, falling like a hammer into her brain, knocking her out of her nice, safe sleep and into reality. She heard screaming, her own, and then felt hands, not her own. She fought them, but the hands were thunder, inescapable, pressing her down and holding her fast in this world of cold and fear and hunger.

It hurt. Amber tried to scream, but she couldn’t find her voice and didn’t have much breath anyway. She managed a hoarse groaning sound, utterly swallowed by the pound and roll of the thunder, and after that had to just lie there under the hands and feel her heart racing in terror because she didn’t know where she was or why or even who.

Flapping. The world was made of leather walls close around her and those walls were flapping. The wind had its jaws around the world and was shaking them, shaking them. The thunder was its voice and its fists. At each new crash and roar, she screamed and struggled, but the hands owned her. They pushed her down, they held her, and the thunder opened its throat and breathed her back inside it.