“Look, I’ll just say it,” she said suddenly. The color was high in her cheeks, very bright against her sickbed pallor. “What do you want from me? Because I realize I’m in no position to bargain, but I need to know.”

He studied the question, knowing it was trapped, but unable to see the trigger. Cautiously, he said, “I want you to be well.”

“And after that?”

He did not know how to answer that. There were answers—I want things to be the way they were. I want to talk the way I talk when I’m with you. I want to stand at Xi’Matezh and see your face filled with wonder when our Father receives us. I want to take my pilgrimage and share it with you. I want you to want to share it with me—but nothing in Meoraq’s life had prepared him to speak any of them out loud. He hesitated, hunting for some true thing he knew how to say, and said, “I wait on Sheul’s will.”

She leaned slightly forward and searched his eyes while he held very still and kept them open for her. Wind shook the walls of the tent and carried smoke away. The tea, half-gone, cooled in his hand, but he didn’t notice. Her eyes were so green and all he could think as he stared into them was that moment when she had opened them from the thick of her dying sleep and seen him.

Amber drew back, frowning. “Okay. But I’m sleeping out here from now on.”

He grunted assent, still thinking of her eyes, then abruptly snapped his spines up in surprise. “Why?”

Her jaw clenched. “Because.”

“That’s a word, not a reason,” he said mechanically and smacked a hand over his snout. “I can’t listen to myself anymore. You’re turning me into my father.”

“Because I’m not your pack or your spare shirt or whatever it is that your god told you I was. I don’t belong in your tent!”

“You’re not two days yet out of a killing sleep, you lunatic! A strong rain would wash you away!”

“Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve slept in the rain.”

Meoraq rubbed his snout, his brow-ridges, his throat…but in the end, he had to laugh just a little. “I asked You to restore her,” he admitted. And to Amber: “I’m not going to sit here and argue with a sick woman. Drink. I have meat if you think you can eat. Rest as much as you can—wherever you like,” he added generously. “And we’ll talk again when it rains.”

He rose and took up his empty flask, already planning to turn the next pouch of heated water into a bath. They could both use one, although he already knew she wouldn’t want to share. He wasn’t sure he wanted to, either. Amber naked and white with fever at his side was one thing; Amber naked and rubbing soap into his scales was quite another.

Meoraq stopped at the edge of camp and looked back. Amber was still sitting in the mouth of his tent, holding his cup in both hands like a child. Her hair, like trampled grass, bent crazily in the wind. His shirt on her body was oversized, loose enough at the neck to show a dark, tapering line—like a guiding arrow, he thought vaguely—pointing down between her swelled teats to her belly.

The second thought that came to him was relief so profound as to be prayerful that she was here at all—awake, alive, and arguing with him. Weak yet, but with sleep and warmth and decent feeding, she would soon be strong, he was sure of it, and when he made his prayers tonight, he would make them upon his belly in humility before the merciful God who had lifted her out of the ashes and set her again in his hands.

But that was his second thought. His first made it plain that he was not ready to share her bath.

3

So she rested and even if it was the right thing to do, she still hated it. The days took forever with nothing to do except eat and sleep and watch Scott’s trail fade away. The nights were even longer, lying alone next to the fire, often with Meoraq on the other side of it, staring at her. Two days. Three. Four, just to pace around the camp and work the stiffness out of her joints. And on the fifth, after she woke up to a few drops of rain tapping on her blanket, she rolled up her mat and packed her pack.

Meoraq, already awake and drinking his morning tea with his back to her, sighed and poured what was left into the flask he carried around his neck. He gestured at the waterskin, lying empty next to the fire. She took it away to fill it, knowing he was watching her and looking for the slightest weakness—if she stumbled, if she panted, if she shivered a little in the rain that was already coming down like pellets—any excuse to make her stay another day. She didn’t give him one. He helped her take down his tent without speaking and they were on their way.

It rained all morning and they walked in it. Amber kept her head down, holding onto Meoraq’s pack like a baby elephant to its mama’s tail. She didn’t think. The cold had numbed her brain as much as her body, but her eyes were open and as long as she could see the trampled path left by Scott and his pioneers under her feet (only trampled, the panicky part of her would cry, not muddy or tore-up, but only trampled), she felt okay. The rain finally stopped, but the wind kept blowing, chapping her face and stinging her eyes, but drying her clothes, so that was all right. Meoraq kept trying to make her rest and she didn’t argue with him, but she made sure she was always the first one back on her feet again and when he started in with his passive-aggressive observations on where she thought would be a good place to make camp, she managed to put him off three times with a casual, “Let’s try over the next hill.”

The fourth time she said it, however, he stopped, turned her roughly around, took her pack and her spear, and dropped them both on the ground.

“I can keep going,” she said.

“Stubborn idiot!” he snapped, throwing his pack on top of hers. “This is not a contest to see who can go further!”

“Meoraq—”

“No! You will go over that hill and over the next and over the next until you can’t walk and can’t think and then the tachuqis will come or the ghets or a pack of raiders because there is always something to watch for, damn it! These are the wildlands and surviving here means stopping before you exhaust yourself!”

“Maybe you’re right, but—”

“Maybe?!”

“But we have to catch up!” she insisted. “We’re just getting further behind!”

“We will find them in God’s time, not yours. Now, you rest.”

“But—”

“Rest, I say! No one but you would argue with that!”

Amber bit at her lip and followed the trail the only way she could, with her eyes, through the plains and eastward out of sight. “Maybe—”

“No.”

“I didn’t even say anything!”

“And I am not going to hear anything! You are resting!”

“Maybe you should go without me.”

He threw down a half-assembled tent pole and leapt up.

“I’ll rest right here and you can go find them!” she said, trying very hard to sound reasonable while speaking loud and fast to stave off his inevitable interruption. “I’m just slowing you down and we both know it!”

“And we both know my answer, so stop asking!”

“You can find them and bring them b—”

He thumped her hard on the forehead with one knuckle and pointed severely at her trembling mouth to make her shut it. Those yellow stripes were coming out on his throat. “I am not leaving you,” he said, not shouting, not even hissing. Somehow, that was worse. “I am never leaving you. If it is our Father’s will that we take the hateful S’kot and his hateful servants back into my camp, so be it, I serve Him in faith. For now, it is my will, human, and I will have your obedience. How do you mark me?”

“My sister is out there,” she whispered.

He broke the hold his hot, red eyes had on hers and stared over her left shoulder for a long time. Then he stepped back, rubbing at his throat until it cooled to black again, and went back to assembling poles without speaking.