Amber burst out crying, puking out tears fast and hard and very loud for the few mortifying seconds it took to swallow them down again. She took her hand off Meoraq’s unmoving back and stumbled away, swiping at her face.

The wind blew over them, stirring the grass and pushing smoke in a hot curtain between them. Meoraq’s eyes on her were unblinking, hot as live coals. She couldn’t look at them, had to look at his dark blood on the sleeve of her last clean shirt instead.

“I’m so sorry.”

He did not reply.

“I should have seen it.”

Still no answer.

“Please…” don’t leave me. Amber bit down on that until her lips stopped shaking, but as soon as she unlocked her jaws, it found another way out as a trembling, “Please don’t be mad at me.”

He broke his gaze at last, turning his terrible eyes and whatever furious emotion was in them on the sky. “I’m not.”

“I didn’t see that thing or I never would have gotten so close.”

“I know.” He glanced at her, scowled, and rubbed at his brow-ridges. “A sleeping kipwe is well-hidden in the wildlands. I didn’t see it either. And you…”

She waited, twisting her wet, bloody sleeve between her fingers.

Meoraq hissed something under his breath impossible to catch. He rubbed at his brows again, then at his throat, then dropped his hand to his side and yanked a quill out. He glared it down, tossed it away in the grass, and looked at her again.

Without speaking, he unbuckled his sword-belt. It and the hooked sword he carried landed on the discarded heap of his tunic.

“What are you doing?” Amber asked, and hated the little whisper in which she asked it.

“I, nothing,” he said brusquely, sitting down in the grass to unfasten his boots. “You are tending my wounds. And you can bathe me while you’re about it.”

“Oh.”

“Such wounds,” he grumbled. “There will be songs sung of it one day, surely. Meoraq and the Kipwe.” He lay down and bucked his hips up (Amber felt a blush like a physical slap to both cheeks) to push his breeches down. He kicked them off indifferently, still muttering, and unbuckled his metal panty-panel.

Then he was naked. Completely naked. Wearing nothing but his scaly skin and his favorite knife on a cord around his neck, he stood up again and beckoned her to him.

“I’ve never…bathed anyone before,” she stammered.

He stared at her like he thought she was kidding. “Well,” he said finally. “I think as long as you don’t use mud, you’ll make a good effort of it.”

She hesitated forward a step and he turned around, raising his arms like a scarecrow, muttering under his breath about the absurdity of a land where women got paid to carry food but didn’t know how to bathe a man.

Amber dipped the rag in warm water and dabbed at his back, just under the scored place where the porcu-bear had scratched him. “What was it? The thing you killed. You called it something.”

“Kipwe. They come over the mountains every year to winter in the plains. We must be close.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Eh?”

“I just stood there.” Amber looked at the torn scales under her hand and then at the dark blood staining her rag. “I just stood there and watched you get hurt.”

“I’m beginning to take that personally,” Meoraq said, tilting his head to a dangerous angle.

“What do you call it when you get stabbed with hundreds of bony spikes?”

“Shameless exaggeration.”

“So, what? You’re going to stand there and tell me that thing wasn’t dangerous?”

“Anything can be dangerous under the right conditions.” Meoraq held up his hand to stop the bath and went to move the roasting kipwe off the hottest part of the coals. When he came back, it was to lie down in the grass at her feet. He gestured vaguely at himself and tucked his arms up behind his head, closing his eyes. “You seem to think yourself a coward for not leaping at the thing with your naked hands. Whereas I would think you a fool if you had.” He snorted, then added, “For all the rest of your life.”

Slowly, Amber knelt down beside him and began to clean around one of the fresh scratches on his arm. Her fingers made a rasping sound as she moved over his scales, a sound that made the gooseflesh pop out on her arms and her stomach want to shiver. “Does this hurt?” she blurted. “When I touch you?”

He was quiet for so long, she thought he’d dozed off, but then he said, without opening his eyes, “My flesh is not fragile. A Sheulek feels no pain even when he is broken. When he is not, he feels nothing.”

He had more quills stuck in him. She could see two of them now, tucked up under his armpit—just two nubs, scarcely discernible against his uneven skin. They had been lodged deeper than the last one and both took some work to worry loose, but Meoraq neither moved nor made a sound when she told him they were out. She looked at him, but he ignored her, lying splayed and by all appearances asleep, and after a while, she put her hands on him again and began to sweep them in small circles over his body, washing with one hand while the other quested ahead for more lost quills. The shush-shush sound this action produced summoned a tangle of images too dim to grasp, but she didn’t try to alter her rhythm. Her hands kept moving—her hands on his body—over his shoulders, over his chest, up along his throat and down again.

The quiet was crushing her, filled with nothing but that sound and the reality of his flesh under hers. How could she be thinking like this? Now, of all times! Looking at him stretched over the ground so silent and still was like seeing him dead and it could have happened, regardless of what he thought, it could have happened just like that and then she’d be out here alone, which she deserved to be, because she just stood there and didn’t do anything.

A sob rose in her throat and she had to cough it out, but she swallowed the rest of them. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to breathe herself calm the way she’d seen him do so often, but it didn’t work for her. When she opened her eyes again, all she could see was Meoraq, sleeping.

There was another spine between two of the long plates of his abdomen, so tightly lodged that she had to bend over (please stop thinking please stop not here not now not me) and bite it out. His blood tasted bitter on her tongue and had a smell curiously like cloves. She had to fight not to bend down again, fight not to press her lips against those scales that couldn’t feel her anyway, fight not to lick the way he’d licked at her neck once. She wanted him to put his arms around her. She wanted to be all right, dammit, and to know she was all right just once more, just once!

“You saved my life,” she heard her voice say. It broke on the last word. “Again. I keep…making you…save me.”

She stopped, gulping air to keep herself from openly crying, but he did not reply. His breathing was deep and even; his body beneath her hand, perfectly relaxed.

“Are you asleep?” she asked, now in the plaintive, scratchy, sing-song way that said tears were coming no matter how hard she tried to breathe them back in. “Meoraq?”

Nothing.

She patted his stomach timidly, found a quill and pulled it out, then looked at the bloody sliver pinched between her fingers and that was it. Her mouth cramped. Her eyes swam. Her head began to pound and her chest began to heave. She folded over, choking on breaths that wanted to be sobs, until she was curled against Meoraq’s warm side in a small, shaking ball. She had become an expert in the fine art of quiet crying; the only sounds she made beyond a hoarse huh-huh-haaaaah were intermittent mousy squeaks and they weren’t enough to wake Meoraq.

At length, the storm passed, but she huddled there for some time anyway. Her eyes were open, but unfocused, processing nothing beyond light and shadow, grass and sky. When she finally raised her head and looked, Meoraq was still asleep.