At last, Meoraq rose and retrieved his knife, careful to keep the hairs it pierced together. It wasn’t easy. After a moment’s thought, he held it out to her. “Plait this into a cord,” he ordered, “and I shall wear it.”

She looked at him for a long time before she took it. Perhaps among her people, a trophy of first conquest was burnt or buried.

Well, her people had turned her out. Now she belonged to him. He licked her shoulder once more and went, smiling broadly to himself, back to his mat and slept.

6

Dawn woke her, but he was already gone. His pack and hers were already bundled and good to go. A little more than half of last night’s horrible dinner had been tucked up beside her head next to his flask. Apart from the aching, scabby bite, a brand-new breeze on her ear and some dry threads of grass itching around inside her pants, she could almost believe she’d dreamed the whole thing.

She ate. Drank. Packed up the tent. Reached into her pocket and brought out what been covering most of the left half of her head the previous day. Her hair. He wanted to keep it. Like a trophy.

She honestly did not know how to feel about that. He’d taken her by surprise (so to speak), but in the cold light of day, she knew she hadn’t tried very hard to fight him off. Hell, if he’d chosen to wake her up with his hand between her legs instead of hacking at her hair, she probably wouldn’t have fought him at all. It had all happened so fast and felt so inevitable that she’d just…given in.

All the same, this didn’t feel like her usual morning-after regrets. Part of her wanted to braid this hair and see him wearing it; it brought to mind those story-book pictures—Amber as the damsel bestowing her favor and Meoraq playing a dual role of knight and dragon. But that was only part of her. The rest of her remembered only too well looking up through a haze of cramping pleasure to see him working at her in unhurried rhythm with his eyes fixed on the wall above her head and no expression on his face. Yes, he said he wanted her and yes, he told her to make his little keepsake, but all the rest of the pillow-talk had been between him and God. She was just “this woman” in that little chat, like it didn’t even matter if it was Amber, like any warm squeeze would do. And after the bite that had branded her, he’d put out the light and gone to sleep, leaving her to pull her pants up and button her shirt in the dark. She’d had to lie awake a long time while the ghost of her drunken mother talked to her about men and whores. She didn’t believe it, not really, but it was hard not to listen.

Amber braided the hair.

It wasn’t easy. She’d worn her hair in braids as a very little kid, but only when her mom did the braiding. Messing around with hair was a girly thing to do, a Nicci-thing, the sort of thing Amber rolled her eyes at with lofty disdain. Who’d have ever thought that was going to come bite her in the ass on an alien planet?

She had managed to produce a mangled-looking snake of snarls and was working to tie off the end when Meoraq came prowling back with the big waterskin. He grunted at her as he passed by. It sure didn’t sound like a good-morning-radiant-woman-of-my-fantasies greeting. He checked the weight of the wrappings containing last night’s leftovers, gave her a disapproving glance, then noticed the clumsy braid in her hands. He grunted again and beckoned to her. “Come. You may tie it around—” He eyed the length critically. “—my arm.”

Amber frowned up at him for a moment, then got to her feet and went to him. He offered his arm. His bicep bulged. She could still remember the strength in those arms as he grappled with her, the power evident even in his gentlest touch. And there had been a few of those too, even though he was not a gentle man.

She tied the braid on just under his shoulder, where the bulk of his muscle would keep it from slipping down around his wrist. It stood out surprisingly bright against his dark scales. Every loose strand and ugly knot showed clearly, but he seemed pleased with it. Proud of it, like the look in his eye when he shifted his gaze to the bite on her shoulder. He even gave her a deeply unsettling yet probably playful lizardish grimace before moving past her to collect their things.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?”

He straightened up, gave that some obvious thought, then cautiously said, “Good…morning?”

“Not that. About last night!”

His spines snapped irritably flat. “What am I supposed to say?”

“Why don’t you start with why, after all this time, when you’ve never so much as crossed your eyes at me, you suddenly decided we had to have sex?”

“I had a vision,” he replied. “A true vision of God.”

It was not a shocker, as revelations went. Amber covered her eyes with both hands solely to keep them from turning into fists. In the dark behind her palms, she said, “God told you to have sex with me? Seriously? That’s what you’re going with?”

“Yes.” He shrugged into his pack and secured the straps. “We need to get moving. I see a hard rain coming and I want to put the spans behind us before it reaches us. No more arguments, woman. Let’s go.”

There was that word again. All of a sudden, the whole issue with her hair seemed a lot less important as making love took an ugly turn into fucking. “Did you just call me ‘woman’?!”

He shouldered the filled waterskin and gestured at her pack. “Yes.”

Absurdly, her first impulse was to snatch her hair back from him. She restrained it. “And just what in the hell makes you think you get to do that?” she demanded.

He looked at her, his expression tipping back and forth between annoyed and confused. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because it’s rude! I don’t call you man!”

“Yes, you do. Lizardman, even,” he added with a glare.

“Not all the time. Only when we’re fighting.”

He threw out his arms, his head cocked hard and eyes snapping. “We appear to be fighting,” he told her, then pointed at her pack. “Get your things, woman, and let’s go.”

Her stomach clenched. “Stop calling me that.”

“You’re my woman now, I’ll call you whatever I want.”

“The hell you say! I’m not ‘your’ anything. Just because I slept with you once doesn’t mean I belong to you.”

“You slept in my camp. That means you belong to me. You have been mine from the day—” He stopped there, then rolled his eyes and heaved a hard sigh. “Fine. How many times do humans mate before the woman considers herself conquered?”

She stared at him for a long time before she was finally able to say, “That’s not how it works with us,” biting off each word and spitting it like a bullet.

“More pity for you,” he said with a careless shrug of his spines, “because that’s how it works with us. No more talk. We’re leaving.”

She put her pack on, snatched up her spear and started walking, too angry to even look at him anymore. “Well, clearly last night was a huge mistake.”

On the horizon, thunder muttered, attracting his immediate attention. “You don’t mean that,” he said, frowning back over his shoulder at the sky.

“Don’t tell me what I mean. I don’t care what God told you, I don’t belong to you.”

“Yes, you do,” he said, not in a romantic way, but just another argument in his favor. “You are mine as much as my own skin. God Himself has married you to me.”

“No, he didn’t,” she snapped, slapping at her forehead.

“Yes. He did.”

His matter-of-fact tone finally pierced all the way in and made everything else she was feeling fade to an uneasy black. She looked at him, feeling her brows draw in. “Yeah, but we’re not really married.”

His head tipped, as if he were very, very slightly puzzled. He caught her by the sleeve to make her stop walking, leaned close, and said, clearly and distinctly, “Married.”