Amber had not moved.
Meoraq pondered her for a moment more in silence, then heaved a mental sigh. He may as well get the whole of the fight out of the way now, rather than portion it out over the next several days and impede all the other work they could be doing. He said, “All things happen in Sheul’s time.”
“Bullshit. Lizard-shit.” She shot him a fierce, humiliated sort of stare and as quickly looked away. “Why don’t you ever just come out and say what you mean?”
“Great Sheul, O my Father, give me patience. What do I mean?”
“You think I’m weak!”
Of all the things she could have said, this was the one he was least prepared to hear. “In what sense?” he asked guardedly.
“In the sense that you think I’m weak!” she yelled back at him. “There aren’t a whole lot of different ways to say that, lizardman! You think I’m weak!”
“You are,” he said, baffled by this outburst.
She stepped back with her spear so tightly clenched in her fists that it shook. Her mouthparts, as tightly pressed together, shook also.
“Your skin is soft,” he told her, hardly able to believe he needed to make these arguments out loud. “It bruises at every touch. It tears. It can’t hold its heat. In that sense, you are weak. In the sense that you can’t carry the provisions you require to sustain you on this journey, you are also weak. You have suffered severe illness which makes you tire more easily. You may improve in that regard with rest and time, I don’t know, but for now, you do tire easily, which makes you weak. You don’t know how to survive in the wildlands. This is ignorance more than weakness,” he added thoughtfully, “but it bears mentioning.”
She turned around with curious difficulty, as if pulling against invisible hands.
“Your clay is much too frail,” he went on, watching her walk clumsily to the mouth of the cave, “for the soul it must house.”
She did not stop and he was obliged, not without a sigh, to follow after her for a second time.
“Sheul measures us all,” he said, taking his place at her side and resisting mightily the urge to pick her up and carry her off again. “His greatest trials are reserved for those He takes greatest pride in. You must please Him, Soft-Skin.”
“I don’t believe in your stupid god.”
He snorted. “It amazes me each time you say that, as if you truly believe it is necessary that you do.”
She rolled her eyes in their bruised sockets and tried to walk faster, skidding now and then in the wet snow, but soon enough her step began to slow. She struggled on for a time, following the path they had made in her first senseless flight, but when she reached the mangled place where he had seized and carried her away, she went no further. She glared at the ground between her feet, not moving. Meoraq waited, watching the snow catch in her hair.
“They could be just up ahead,” she said finally.
“All things are possible, but this is not likely.” And in answer to her glance, explained, “If they passed through this valley, surely they would have seen that cave and slept within at least one night, and if they had, I would know it. You would know it.”
Her shoulders fell. She stared at the mountains.
And because it needed saying, even as much as he hated to be the one saying it, he took grim hold of that spear and drove it all the way in. “I have not seen any sign of their passing in a long stretch of days.”
“They’re not dead. My sister—” She stabbed her eyes at him and looked away just as fiercely. “—is not dead. I’d know if she was.”
“I’m not saying she is,” said Meoraq, who nevertheless thought just that. “I say only that they have not come this way. Perhaps they crossed elsewhere. They may have made a camp to weather out the cold season or even abandoned their search for Xi’Matezh altogether. If it is Sheul’s will, we will meet them again. But for us, for now, we are done.”
Meoraq stood in the snow and let her think. She had begun to shiver by the time she was done, but he did not attempt to hurry her along.
Her breath heaved in and out of her. She turned around to face him. “If I go back with you tonight, I don’t want to hear you tell me not one more word about how this is God’s will.”
He opened his mouth to tell her that, whether she liked admitting it or not, she was his wife and as such, sworn to obey him in all things, but the words would not come. Instead, awkwardly, he opened his arms. Glaring, wordless, she shuffled closer and let him hold her.
“I still have the lichu,” he said at last, for want of something intelligent and comforting to say. “We’ll cure leathers and make clothes. The cold will pass. All things in…All things in time.”
“Thank you,” she mumbled.
They went together back to the cave as the snow fell and filled their bootprints.
BOOK VII
ZHUQA
The worst winter of Amber’s life happened the year she turned five. These were among her earliest memories—freezing in the basement of the flophouse where Mama made them stay, hiding from the men with the big hands who stayed there too, Baby Nicci always crying and sometimes Amber crying with her because her stomach always hurt. The days of state-care with juice boxes and storybooks and all of life’s cares erased in one wonderful tumble down a hill was months away, a fairy-tale Amber didn’t even know to hope for.
The second-worst winter would probably have to be the one two years before her mother died. It had been Bo Peep’s last real effort to kick the drugs, and even though everyone knew how it would end (except maybe Nicci), they all went through the same tired motions. Every night, Amber had to walk home from the bus stop with filthy snow seeping in through her shoes and her back aching from a full shift at the factory, not knowing whether she’d find Bo Peep passed out on the floor or fixing dinner. The bad nights made the good ones impossible to enjoy; the good nights made the bad ones worse. Hope and cynicism fought a constant, gut-wrenching war which finally ended on Christmas morning, when Amber came out of her room to find that all the presents beneath the tree (their first tree in years and how much fun it had been, flinging tinsel over plastic branches like a bunch of kids and laughing) gone, along with the TV, the rent money, and the microwave, of all things. Nothing left but wads of wrapping paper and Nicci’s gift for their mom—a picture of the three of them together—tossed on the floor.
In fact, on the list of Bierce’s Bad Winters, the one Amber spent in a cave with an alien didn’t even make the Top Ten. If only she had enough good memories to make a Bierce’s Best Winters list, it might actually be there instead. The cave was warm and a little homey. The food was monotonous but plentiful. Meoraq helped her keep busy (one way or another). Some days, it was more than just killing time. Some days, she was happy.
So why had she hiked all the way out here again, across the whole valley and up the south side of the mountain, skirting ledges no wider than her boots and climbing over icy chasms and fallen trees, just so she could stand here and look at the pass? It looked exactly the way it looked three days ago. And two days before that. And six days before that. The snow that filled the sharp V between the slopes was maybe a little more compact, but even she didn’t try to kid herself that it was melting.
She couldn’t understand that. It had to be melting somewhere. The little fall where they drew their water every day had tripled in size and sprouted a dozen brothers and sisters. The trees were warming up, or at least, they gave off a greenish sort of scent if she broke off a branch. And the animals were coming back after a long, scary absence.
