‘It’s not a sin,’ he’d reasoned, if one could call that shiver-white throb of heat in his brain a reasoning thought. ‘It’s only a sin if I do it. There’s nothing in the Word that says she can’t do it for me.’

So he’d waited, but she hadn’t. He could hear her breathing above him, feel the tremble in her hand, and then, by all the names of God and Gann, she took her hand away. She’d left him there, stabbing foolishly out into nothing, and put herself to bed and the only thing that had stopped him from leaping on her like a raging beast had been the sound of her soft tears. That, and the thin hope that she might come back if he only lay still enough long enough.

But no. She fell asleep. She’d put her hand on him and brought out his cock and breathed on it and gone to sleep.

And she’d left his father’s knife uncovered in the dirt. Meoraq glared at it, but did not recover it, much as it infuriated him to see it neglected there. She might wake and remember it, and if so, she must see only what she had left behind her. A naked blade. A sleeping man. Both primed to enter flesh and abandoned.

He lay back down and shut his eyes, frustration like a forge in his belly.

Perhaps she didn’t know, he thought suddenly. Perhaps she did not recognize his cock because it was not limp and loose and generally disgusting. He supposed that humans did not mate as dumaqs, did not penetrate at all but only…what? By all the movement he had glimpsed on past encounters, he knew they had to be mashing themselves together somehow, but as horrible as that image was, Amber surely would think it just as wrong to have a dumaqi member stabbed into her.

And yet…

He’d seen her naked many times during the terrible days of her illness and so he couldn’t help but notice the slit at her loins. It meant nothing to him at the time, which was a better testament to his character than it was now, when he could think of nothing else. Regardless of how their males were formed, he knew that human females were similar to normal women, at least on the surface. He may not be able to sheathe himself entirely, but there was something and he could pierce it.

In a burst of determination, Meoraq flipped onto his feet and took two long strides toward the tent. He was done. He’d been patient. He’d tolerated every unintended offense and quite a few intended ones and, by Sheul, he was ready to be the man that proved she was a woman! If it meant getting creative about the method, so be it, Amber’s hand had put him in a damned creative mood, but he was waking her up right now!

The wind turned abruptly, stirring the grass with whispers in which Meoraq heard the ghost of his father’s voice: A Sheulek is the master of his clay, always.

Meoraq cursed silently, blasting his own thought-space with profanities he never would have dared to utter to the true ghost of his father. A Sheulek was a master of his emotions as well, but he would just have to work on that.

He went back to the fire and lay down beside his disgraced knife. He glared at the tent where the human slept on, oblivious to him. He closed his eyes, measured out his breath—

She’d put her damned hand right on him.

—and began to pray.

4

In another few days, Meoraq saw the mountains. They were just a smudge on the horizon now, a broken blue line he could see only from the highest point of one of the many steep hills they had to climb, but they were in sight. The borders of holy Gedai, birthplace of the Prophet and of the Word, a land Meoraq had heard of all his life but never expected to see, and now the mountains were before him. They had ceased to be a part of the myth of Xi’Matezh and had instead become inevitable.

He pointed them out to Amber with a broad smile, but regretted it immediately when she dropped her pack and lunged ahead. “Where are they?” she gasped, searching the empty wilds. “I don’t…I don’t see them.”

He could see it in her soft face, how she tried to be a little happy when he told her about the mountains, but she didn’t care. He had meant to show her how much closer they were to God’s true House, but without intending to, he had instead shown her Scott’s people, her people, and then removed them all over again. She said it didn’t matter. She kept walking. And she cried that night, when she thought he couldn’t hear her.

He wanted to give her back her people, as much as he hated the thought of having them back. He wanted to prove they were all dead so her grief would finally end, but he couldn’t do it without killing her blood-kin, her damned Nicci. He wanted Amber, the whole Amber, and he wanted her to want him the way she thought she wanted the cowardly, treacherous cattle who had left her in the grass to die. He wanted all these things, all at the same time, and the conflict left him in such a constant state of resentment and self-disgust and sympathy that he could hardly speak to her at all.

Sheul would make His will known in time. Meoraq believed that, even if Amber didn’t. Sheul would make His will known and until then, they walked.

The hills grew steeper, more compact and more orderly. Meoraq knew what that meant and he could have led Amber around easily enough—she had a tendency to fall into her own mind when she tired and she tired very easily these days—but he didn’t. Scott would have come this way, walking between the hills where it was relatively flat, as slopes gradually gave way to rubble and the rubble to ruins.

“I knew it,” said Amber behind him.

He grunted, his eyes moving restlessly from tower to archway to raised loop of road—all destroyed, all decayed, all fallen. Little remained that the land had not at least begun to swallow, and Meoraq could see several structures that would not be standing at all but for the years of dead thorns enwrapping them. No sane and reasonable man would ever get closer to those cracked towers than Meoraq stood now.

“Do you think they went in?” Amber asked.

“Yes,” said Meoraq. They were poor ruins, even as ruins could be reckoned, but Scott would have insisted on walking through them if he’d seen them.

And Meoraq thought he’d probably seen them. There was little left of the humans’ trail these past few days, but there was enough yet to catch a trained eye. Boot prints amid the animal tracks in the frozen mud at an icy stream. A tattered jacket, blown into a thorn break after its owner had no more use for it. The ash-heaps of their fires wherever they’d stopped to camp. No, they weren’t close, but the last sure sign of their passing had been only a quarter-span back, so they had seen these ruins.

Meoraq shrugged off his pack and handed it to Amber. “I’ll go. You rest.”

There wasn’t even time to take one step before his pack struck his back and her challenging, “You rest! I’m fine!” rang out.

He sighed and rubbed at his brow-ridges, reminding himself that he had begged for her restoration. “Must we do this every day?”

“Stop saying that like I’m the one doing it.”

“Put out your hand.”

“No! You’ll tie me up!”

“I’m tempted,” he admitted, “but no. Never again. Now put it out, Soft-Skin.”

She glared at him, her mouthparts pressed together into a hard, pale line, and then suddenly thrust out her arm like a spear.

He waited, watching her hand tremble until it became too heavy to hold and she dropped it back to her side. “I’ll go,” he said, turning around. “You rest.”

“Jerk.”

“Pest.”

“Be careful, then.”

“And you.”

He went alone into the ruins with his kzung in his hand, but he knew already that they were empty. No lights burned in these broken windows; no voices called out from the speaking-boxes. Scott had surely stopped to indulge his fascination with the machines that dwelled here and perhaps to shelter out some little fall of rain, but the ruins were no place to sustain a man. Eventually, Scott would want a fire, clean water, a chance at hunting. Meoraq would find nothing here worth stopping for and he knew it, but he would find whatever there was and he would make some report of it to Amber, easing her mind just enough to let her sleep tonight, and that alone made this inconvenience tolerable to him.