“She is permitted to struggle,” he said off-handedly. “There is no sin in conquest.”

“Wow.” It was all she could think of. It wasn’t nearly enough. She said it again. “Wow. That’s easily the most sexist, pig-headed thing you’ve ever said, and I have to be honest, Meoraq, there’s a lot of competition on that list.”

He didn’t answer.

Amber listened to the silence, torn between her strong desire to apologize for what was admittedly a bitchy comment and her equally strong desire to provoke him with another one. She knew he’d been with other women before (and like the men she knew he’d killed, she suspected the number to be not merely high, but actually beyond counting), but the thought that he might go on being with them had never occurred to her. Funny, how she could laugh at his insistence that they were married right up until the prospect of adultery came up.

‘And this is how I deal with it,’ she thought disgustedly, rolling her eyes at the tent wall. ‘Calling him names. Yeah, that’ll encourage him to stay home with the wife.’ Aloud, she said, “Hey.”

He grunted.

“They say we’re not supposed to go to bed angry, so I’m sorry.”

“Eh? I’m not angry.” Meoraq shifted onto his back and tucked his arms behind his head. “I was thinking of my father.”

“Why?” And in spite of her determination to let this go, out it came: “Did he have a lot of sex-slaves?”

“Servants,” he said distractedly. “Yes, he did. But he never used them for sex.”

“How scandalous.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” he said after some reflection. He frequently had trouble telling when she was being sarcastic. “But it was odd enough that I noticed. There is nothing shameful in the fires given to a steward of the bloodline, and his bloodline is that of Uyane. The females of four hundred households bow under his protection and would be…would have been honored by his conquest.”

“There’s another one for that list…”

“But he reserved his fires for my mother. Even at inconvenience to himself.” Meoraq lapsed into quiet, but tucked his arm around her shoulders. “I think he loved her.”

“Oh. Well…that’s sweet.”

He didn’t answer. That dark thing in her stomach shifted again, lifting its head.

“Isn’t it?”

“There must have been a reason…something I never saw. Did she talk to him when they were alone together? Comfort him?” His fingers flexed lightly on her arm. “Argue with him?”

“Wouldn’t that be a weird world?”

‘Goddammit, Bierce, shut the fuck up.’

“She was special to him,” said Meoraq. “I could never understand why.”

“I’m sure she knew you loved her,” said Amber after an uncomfortable silence.

“No, she didn’t. Because it wouldn’t have been true. I saw every private touch they shared, touches no less than these—” Meoraq squeezed her shoulder, his thumb running lightly over her scars. “—as a personal affront to the dignity of our House. It embarrassed me to see them together and it embarrassed me even more after she died to see my father mourn her. I feel…”

She waited, but in the end, he only blew out a rude snort and said, “I don’t even know what I feel, Soft-Skin. It was his own House, and I made it impossible for my father to share an honest touch with his wife without fear of consequence. What an insufferable little prick I was.”

“Okay, what’s that mean?”

“What?”

“Prick. That wasn’t your language, that was mine. What’s it mean?”

“In dumaqi? Eh, it’s the thing…the two things that fit together that make it possible for a door to swing open and closed. Why? What does it mean in your speech? I’ve never been able to puzzle that out, exactly. I only know that it’s a curse.”

“It’s another word for this.” She gave the smooth mound between his legs a pat.

“Another one? How many words do you need for that?”

“This from the man who can say gann eight different ways,” Amber remarked, gently kneading.

“Twelve. You are amazing,” he said seriously.

“Hey, I’m just getting started, lizardman.” She rubbed her thumb along the moist edge of his slit, cupped the hard bulge she felt just below the surface, and squeezed. “But hold that thought, because I’ll want to hear you shout it a few times.”

Meoraq arched his neck and grunted. “Woman, I was just speaking of my father. This is hardly appropriate.”

It wasn’t, was it? But that thing was in her gut and if she didn’t do something to get back to normal, it was going to eat its way out of her right through her mouth. “A woman should always be ready to receive her man’s fires,” she reminded him.

“To receive, yes, but not kindle them.” He caught her wrist up and pinned it to the bed above her head, rolling atop her in the next moment to nuzzle aggressively at her neck. “And I’m not the one who does the shouting, am I?”

“You make your share of the noise.”

He hissed at her, but the teasing light of his eyes suddenly died, replaced by an unnerving somberness. He frowned at her, his face very close to hers, all that she could see. After a few false starts, he suddenly said, “I love you, you know.”

Her stomach clenched once, hard enough to hurt, and then slowly, finally, relaxed. She told herself it didn’t matter, she wasn’t one of those girls who needed to hear flowery shit like that, but…but he said it. He said it to her.

“I can’t believe I’m saying that to a woman,” he remarked, looking at the wall of the tent above her in an unfocused way, just like there was a window there to stare through. “But there it is, and it is the only word. I love you. Huh.”

She gave him a few uncomfortable moments to come to terms with that, and when he only continued to lie there on top of her, staring at the wall and keeping her wrists pinned above her head, she finally put on her best state-paid counselor’s voice and said, “And how do you feel about that?”

“Bitterly ashamed.”

She stared.

His spines flicked as he gave her a sheepish sort of look. “Not of you. Of myself. It can be nothing less than a gift of God to know love…and I made my parents hide it. I would give anything…” He thought, frowning. “Almost anything,” he amended, “to go back to just one day, one hour, and unmake the insufferable little prick that I was.”

“Almost anything, huh?”

He met her smile with another of his terribly serious looks and brushed his knuckle across her brow. “I would not give you. My blood. My blades. Even my name, but not you, Soft-Skin. You are mine. I will give you up to our Father and no one else.”

Amber sighed and patted the side of his snout. “Say that again, but try not to sound like such a stalker when you do it this time.”

He leaned in to nuzzle her, scraping the end of his snout forcefully and deliberately up one side of her neck and down the other, inhaling slowly the whole time. He finished with a hard bite to her scarred shoulder, not quite hard enough to break the skin. “You belong to me,” he murmured. “You will always be Soft-Skin under Uyane. In life, in death, and in the Halls where we reside after. You are mine.”

She couldn’t help smiling any more than she could help saying, “You don’t know what a stalker is, clearly.”

“You try so hard to convince me you are impossible to please, but I know better. Hold still.” He pressed his rough mouth carefully against hers, then withdrew and flicked his spines playfully forward. “Do you want to have sex yet?”

“Oh boy, do I.”

He grimaced and started undressing her.

“Wait. I…”

I what? I love you? Why? Just because he said it first? Sure, it seemed like the right thing to say, polite and expected and non-threatening, and who knew, maybe even a little bit true, although she refused to look at that too closely. Not right now. God, he was looking at her. Waiting, just like she’d asked him to. And she had no idea what she wanted to say, except that she knew it was still choking her out from the stomach on up.