She refused to speak to him that night. When he tried to put her mat in his tent, she pulled it out and sat rebelliously with the fire between them and her spear over her lap, just like she thought she could hold a watch.

Meoraq went to his tent and meditated. When he emerged, she was soundly sleeping, still sitting up. He put her to bed; the Amber he had always been able to wake just by walking past her did not stir even when he carried her into his tent and took her boots off.

She slept through the night, past dawn, and deep into the day. When she finally emerged, Meoraq had just finished the last of the hot tea. He grunted a greeting and began to brew more.

Amber sat down there in the mouth of his tent and watched him change stones and meditate. Neither spoke as the water heated. Meoraq could only hope that was a good sign, because she wasn’t showing him any expression to gauge her mood by.

“When will you be ready to walk?” he asked finally.

She stared at him dully for a long time and then said, in a voice still rough from yesterday’s screaming, “Two or three days, I guess.”

Relief struck him like a slap—a short shock and a spreading glow. He grunted again and filled the steeper with some of the redsash leaves. She didn’t want to be told that was the right decision. A brace or two ago, Meoraq had known nothing at all about women, but he already knew that much.

“Where did you get that?”

The lifeless question held no clues. Meoraq followed Amber’s incurious gaze to the tea box in his hands. Odd…he’d never really looked at it before, beyond determining that it was sufficiently lavish to satisfy his spite. Now its inlay reminded him in an uncomfortable way of the mosaic on the wall in the ruins—a lost world, a flying ship.

He flicked his spines and tossed the steeper into the stewing pouch. “From a man in Tothax.”

“A man?” She took the box back and inspected it more closely. “Hunh. It doesn’t look like something a man would give.”

“He didn’t have a choice.”

Amber opened and closed a few drawers, sniffing disinterestedly at the various blends. “I guess you like tea a lot, huh?”

“Better than I like boiled water.”

“Please go after them.” The hoarseness of her damaged voice robbed it of all passion. Her face showed no more emotion than her voice, but her eyes saw him, he was sure. She was very close to death (he would never admit it, but Meoraq had begun to wonder if she might be dead already, her unburnt clay going through the motions of life and no more), but she was not speaking from grief now. She thought she was calm, reasonable. She thought she could convince him.

“I swore I would not leave you,” he said.

“I’m asking you to go.”

“I didn’t swear myself to you.”

Amber put his tea box back in his pack and his pack back in his tent. “It’s the same as killing them, you know.” Her voice was still calm, still reasonable. “Scott can say anything he wants about his imaginary skyport, but if you know they’ll die without you and you let them leave anyway, you killed them.”

The Sheulek in him judged that uncomfortably close to truth, but not entirely so. “I gave them a choice,” he told her, which was also not a whole truth.

“We aren’t leaving tracks.” Amber turned her head to look back the way they’d come, but there was nothing to show their passage. “Every day, the ground is getting harder and the wind is always blowing. When I woke up, we were five days behind them. Now we’re seven, because I can’t get myself together. And we’ll be ten days or more before I can make a real effort here, and by then, their trail will be gone.”

“They will go east,” he reminded her. “They will go on to Xi’Matezh the same as we do. He thinks his ship is there.”

“They’ll starve.”

“Starvation is not a quick death.” He hated to give the thought, plausible as it was, any more validation, but it was only truth. “Their strength will flag long before they fail. They will den down and we will find them.”

“Thirst, then. They don’t know how to look for water.”

“They won’t have to look too hard after all this season’s rains, and they have nearly all my flasks to help them carry it. Apart from which, even before I found you, S’kot had sense enough to make his camp by water.”

“They’ll freeze. Animals could eat them. The storms will come back. Another starship could crash on top of them! A thousand things could happen, damn it!”

“The tea is ready,” said Meoraq, dipping his cup. “Come and have some.”

She did not come, but she took the tea when he offered it. She drank, wiped her eyes, then drank the rest. He refilled the cup. She held it and stared at him.

“They made a choice,” he said again. “So did I.”

“And that’s it, huh?” She shook her head side-to-side, started to drink, then breathed out a harsh sigh and put the cup aside. “Do you have a family, Meoraq?”

The question took him aback. He could not imagine what had prompted it and dreaded where it would lead. He felt his spines lower and had to force them up again in feigned nonchalance. “Two brothers. Some blood-kin in other cities. Why?”

“How would you feel if they were out here? How easy would it be for you to just sit back and say God will keep them safe?”

“Nduman is out here,” he replied. “At least as often as I am. And Sheul keeps him safe. Salkith…You may have a point about Salkith, but I feel I ought to observe that not even he would be out here following S’kot.”

“All right, so she made a mistake. You don’t just give up on family!”

‘She did,’ Meoraq thought. To keep from saying it—and oh, but his whole heart and soul wanted to say it, even knowing how deeply it would stab her—he said instead, “Have you any other family but that…but N’ki?”

“No. It’s just me and her.” The words faltered as they left her mouth. She looked away. “I guess it’s just me now.”

“I am with you.”

“Yeah.” But she stayed quiet for a time, just staring into nothing. At last, while he struggled to find something to say to bring her back from wherever she had gone, she stirred and looked at him. “What about you? Where are your parents?”

“My mother died years ago. My father…very recently.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, just as N’kosa had done.

“Thank you.” He still wasn’t certain that was the right response. “He served well, died well, and dwells in our true Father’s Halls now.”

Her brows creased. “How do you have a good death?”

“He died in judgment and Sheul was with him.”

“That makes a difference, huh?”

“Yes.”

She fell into a silence, which should have been welcome enough, but oddly wasn’t. At length, unable to think of what else to say and loathe to let the conversation die, he said, “Your mother is dead also?” and wanted to hit himself for saying it almost immediately. When was that ever good conversation?

Yet Amber merely said, “Yeah. But I don’t think God was with her.”

It was a startling thing to say on its own merit, and doubly so for the dry way in which she said it. “Why not?”

She did not answer, only stared into the fire and was silent. The light had a way of playing about her face, making her seem a stranger—too hard-worn for his Amber.

“How did she die?” he asked.

She sighed and rubbed at her face. “Christ, I don’t even know how to answer that. I guess some people would say she was sick.”

“What do you say?” he asked cautiously.

“I try not to say anything. How did your mother die?”

He frowned, but answered readily enough. “She was probably childsick. I remember she complained of feeling overtired for a few days and that she felt heavy. My father offered to send for a surgeon, but she said she was sure it would pass. Then one night, she just started screaming.”

The walls of House Uyane were strong. It had not been Yecedi’s screams but that of her dressing-maid running to Rasozul’s chamber that woke Meoraq and his brothers in the room they shared when home from school. Too big to share a cupboard, too young to have earned a room of their own, they sat up in huddles on the floor, looking at each other in the light from the lamp that stupid Salkith couldn’t sleep without and listened to the thunder of their father’s feet racing to the other end of the house.