He snorted, but put the last handful of berries in the pouch and came out of the bushes. “This is my camp, woman, and I decide when we leave it.”

“Have fun bossing yourself around all day, lizardman.” ‘And screwing yourself all night,’ she thought, but couldn’t bring herself to say that.

“I can’t deal with you before I’ve had something to drink,” Meoraq said, kneeling by the fire. “And there are days, woman, when tea is not enough. Go to sleep before I—”

He stopped. His spines flared all the way forward and slowly lowered again, not quite all the way flat. He put the berries down and picked up a dung-and-grass lizardman.

Amber smacked her palm into her face. She thought she’d burned them all.

He stared at it, very still, for a long time. Then he looked at her and while she was hunting for a way to simultaneously apologize and explain that she hadn’t really meant anything by it and not to get his metal panties in a bunch, he got up.

“Meoraq—” she began, holding her hands up in surrender.

He took them, pulled her to her feet, and put his arms around her.

“We will walk, Soft-Skin,” he said in an oddly-subdued voice. His hand moved from her back to cup her head, then her shoulder, then back to her head, as if he wasn’t sure what to touch. “Sleep a short time. I will wake you and we will walk.”

“I don’t need to sleep! I can go now, damn it! I’m fine!”

He drew back, frowning as he searched her eyes. He opened his mouth several times as if he wanted to argue, but in the end, he set the grass-and-dung lizardman gently in her hands. “Then we will go now.”

Amber stared at him while he started taking his tent down, then at the doll which had given her such an easy and baffling win. Not knowing what else to do with it, she put it on the fire. When she straightened up, Meoraq was watching her, his hands still gripping at the tent-poles but motionless. His eyes met hers briefly, troubled, and then he went back to dismantling his tent.

She supposed she could just ask him what he thought the stupid little doll meant, but it would inevitably lead to her telling him why she’d really made it and she couldn’t see how any conversation that included the words, “I was burning you in effigy all night,” could end well. And she didn’t want to fight.

Well, she kind of did. But she shouldn’t and she could admit that much at least.

Amber poked at the burning doll, breaking it back into the three bundles it had been before she’d tied them together. Flames leapt up at once and she watched them instead of Meoraq, knowing he’d be ready in just a few minutes more and then they’d be on the move again. And that was great.

The fire burned, strands of grass turning black and curling, one by one, before falling apart into white powder.

She wished she’d at least let him finish making his tea first.

* * *

They walked in silence most of the morning. Meoraq couldn’t be certain of Amber’s thoughts; whenever he glanced back at her, she always seemed to be wholly fixed on just not falling over. He wished she would say something, even if it was to call him an insensitive brunt (or more likely, a scaly son of a bitch), because his own thoughts were a torment. He carried them like stones in his belly, each one with the name and face of a human he had been ready to forget, and the largest and heaviest belonged to Nicci.

He hated Nicci. He’d hated her when he’d been forced to feed and tend her and he hated her ghost once she was gone, but no fire burns without fuel, and in her absence, hate had cooled to coals. In truth, he hadn’t spared her even an idle thought in days.

But she had never left Amber. She was there still, silent, invisible, clinging on to Amber’s hand and doubtless streaming water out of her empty eyes. Amber, who still spoke of ‘catching’ the others, just as though there were anything left of them to reach out and hold in her hand.

Because they were dead. He knew it and had known it ever since he had seen their broad trail end at a crumbling canal and realized that they had chosen to walk inside it. Why? Because it would be covered against the rain. Because it would be flat and easily traveled. Because no one was there to tell them not to walk in a storm canal in the rainy season and those idiots would need to be told. No, Meoraq could see it clearly: Scott had led them into the tunnel and some hours hence, some ancient reservoir had overfilled, prompting some unthinking machine to open a ventway and empty a few hundred thousand meti-weights of water into Scott’s safe, dry, level road. They were dead.

But even in death, their souls would never be freed from their clay unless they were burnt. Meoraq knew that. He knew it, but he’d never once thought of them and the hell their undying clay must be now enduring. If he felt anything at all, it was only a grim satisfaction that he would never have to see them again. He had his Amber, now his wife, without the thorn of her annoying kind and especially her whining little blood-kin, and he had been content.

And Amber had said nothing, because she, as his obedient wife, must be content also. Content with nothing to burn but dolls in the shape of the one she loved enough to call ‘sister’.

Self-disgust reached a sudden, jarring pinnacle throughout his mind and body, like Gann’s own orgasm. Meoraq halted—Amber bumped up hard against his back—and began yanking at his harness-fastens. “We are stopping,” he spat, throwing his tent to the ground. “I have to pray.”

Amber made a sound of spiritless assent and staggered a few steps away, dropping her pack and collapsing on top of it. Seeing that made him feel even worse, but it had been her insistence that they travel. He would have been happy to give her a day’s rest this morning if she had not been—

If she had not been burning Nicci.

Now he looked at her, even though he should be on his knees, palms to clay and deep in prayer. He looked at the woman Sheul had given him, married to him, and realized with a sinking belly that the dual burden of grief and illness were simply too much for even his stubborn Amber to carry.

He began to clear the earth and gather what tinder there was for a fire. She did not move to help him. A second glance showed him she was lost in sleep already, mired in it, despite the pain that yet twisted her soft features. He tried not to wake her, but she startled when he struck the fire, moaned, and finally dragged her eyes open. She stared without recognition at the growing flames for several seconds before her eyes went wide and filled with dismay.

She tried to sit up, fell, and tried again even as she protested, pleading with him not to make her stay, she could walk, she was fine.

He put his heat-stones in the fire and filled the stewing pouch with water.

She caught at his arm, cursing and apologizing, vowing that she would never stay up all night again, only please please not to do this. They had to catch up. They had to keep going.

He opened his pack and brought out his fine inlaid tea box. He put all he had left of the dawnslight blend in the steeper and dropped it in the water. He put away the tea box and brought out some of yesterday’s saoq, tepid and greasy in its wrappings. He held it out to her.

She glared at him, lightly trembling, then snatched up her spear. She had to climb it as a crutch to gain her feet, but once gained, she set off into the prairie, limping and swearing at him. She fought when he brought her bodily back, but she was too tired to fight for long. She collapsed again on top of her pack, weeping furiously behind her hands, and fell asleep as soon as the storm lagged, tears still wet on her skin.

Meoraq sat and watched his tea heat. He did not pray, exactly. Certainly, he did not pray as he probably should have done, back bent and with all the ritual words in place, but any man’s heart can be an altar if it is open and any man’s words can reach God’s ear if they are sincerely spoken.