There was an immediate rustle of sound as the lizardladies resumed work.

Amber turned around. Xzem at once dropped her eyes. She kept her head bent as Amber went back to the worktable and picked up her half-done lamp. Then Xzem reached out and tapped the back of her hand once on the top of Amber’s bare foot. Just once—a touch so light and swift that if Amber hadn’t seen her do it, she might not have noticed. Amber paused uncertainly, but Xzem did not look up and she was afraid of attracting Dkorm’s attention. She went back to work in silence, like all the other slaves.

8

The sun rose in Gedai the same as in Yroq and Meoraq was awake to see it. They had made camp atop a high, narrow ridge, which gave him an impressive view in any direction. He could have watched the sun rise if he wanted. Instead, he sat with his back to the morning and watched the light crawl over the broken walls of distant Praxas.

He had hoped for a full hour of travel before darkness shackled him. He received perhaps half of that, not at a run, but at a torturous stride that seemed to hurl him back in time to that first day herding humans across the prairie.

The boy was not delicate. He did not run, but slipped through trees and thorn-breaks as easily as any saoq, and had a knack for finding pathways far superior to Meoraq’s own. Yet when the light was gone, the boy halted and would go no further. This was only common sense in the wildlands and Meoraq knew it. Still, he tried to coax the boy on and then order him and finally threaten.

The boy remained impervious, laughing as he invited Meoraq to beat him, “or whatever takes your pleasure, sir,” but the day was done and so was he.

So they camped. The boy started a fire and brewed nai. There was bread and cuuvash in the pack of provisions Onahi had given them. There was no tent, but the boy was no stranger to sleeping wild. He lay down and was silent. Meoraq paced, drank hot nai, meditated, patrolled, drank cold nai, lay down, sat up, thought of Amber.

He did eventually sleep, but his sleep was thin and haunted. He woke uncounted times, only to stare in vain at the empty night, the faint coals, the boy.

A night’s broken rest only further frayed his senses. Long before dawn, he was aware of paranoia, like grains of sand, itching under his scales. He heard things out in the forest, went out to search for the source, and then heard things at his camp. Worse, he did not hear things, which unnerved him even more, as ridiculous as he knew that to be. He felt tense and frustrated and always at the knife’s edge of furious. He felt watched.

Now it was morning and as God raised His lamp over the world, Meoraq could feel clarity like a cooling hand once more in his heart and mind.

He reached over and shook the boy, who rolled muttering onto his belly and glowered at him through a shield of his crossed arms.

“You never sleep,” said the boy.

Meoraq grunted and kicked dirt over the coals. “We’re moving now. Get up.”

“What did they take from you anyway?”

Meoraq caught the boy by the back of his ill-fitting tunic and hauled him to his feet. “We’re moving,” he said again. “Now.”

“The Sheulek who comes in the summer makes the governor give him anything he wants. I thought that was the whole point of being Sheulek.” The boy thought a moment, then shrugged and smiled. “That and getting dipped everywhere you go.”

“There’s a reason you were never meant to be one.”

The boy’s smile did not diminish, but even so, it grew a thinned, painted-on appearance. “I’m sure there’s more than one.” He picked up his pack and rolled his blanket away. When he straightened up again, his smile had broadened into a disturbing grimace of good cheer. “Luckily, I have you. Let’s go.”

They went. The boy didn’t bother looking for a trail, but traveled vaguely eastward, veering toward landmarks as they came across them—this oddly shaped boulder, that great direthorn tree—and if reaching them meant wading a frigid stream or climbing a soft ravine, that was what they did. The sky took on the bruised color that came before a storm and within the hour, it had found them. The ground turned to clutching mud beneath their feet. The boy wasn’t slowed in the slightest. Meoraq considered himself an expert at wildlands travel, but it was difficult to keep pace.

And why, by Gann? Because he’d had a few nights’ bad sleep? Run all the way to Praxas without food? Had to walk now in a little hard rain? In his first striding days, he’d run three days and nights straight through on nothing but water for no better reason than to get someplace with a hot bath. And a bather.

‘I am not a young man anymore,’ he thought, and felt a pang of dismay stab all the way through him. Not for the careless youth now behind him, but for the future he could only pray he hadn’t lost. He would never be a young man again, but now, more than ever, he wanted to be an old one, in Xeqor, with his wife and children.

Lightning arced across the sky, close enough that he could smell it. Thunder came immediately after. The wind gusted, blowing stinging shards of rain directly into his eyes, so that for a moment, he seemed to be falling blindly forward.

“Hold!” ordered Meoraq, and threw down his pack. He hunkered beside it, breathing too hard, lost in thoughts of Amber, how she’d clung to him that night in the ruins…the little cries she made each time the thunder rolled.

“Are we stopping?” the boy asked, watching from a cautious distance.

“Resting.” Meoraq tipped his head back, let his mouth fill with water, and swallowed. It tasted of the storm and strange, green leaves.

“I thought you Sheulek didn’t need rest. I thought God moved you at His speed.”

“Only at His direction. Mine is the same clay as any other’s.” Meoraq cupped his hands and splashed rainwater over his face. “You don’t know much about Sheulek.”

“True enough, I suppose. The one that comes in the summer only stays a few days. He stays with the governor.” The boy moved from one tree to another, restlessly tapping at each trunk. “No one ever has a trial for him. He says Praxas is such a—”

Thunder cracked overhead, shaking the air over his scales and the bones in his breast as it rolled slowly away.

“—a peaceful place,” the boy finished, now from behind him. “Why do you keep looking up? It’s just rain.”

“I know.”

“You look nervous.”

“I’m not.”

But Amber…wherever she was…

‘Sheul, my Father, be with her tonight,’ he prayed, watching sparks sweep across the sky. ‘She is so frightened of the weath—’

He had his head back, his snout raised, his arms at rest on his knees. The boy’s looped belt dropped over his head and before Meoraq’s eyes could identify the danger, it had cinched tight.

No air. A perfect choke. He had less than a minute to break it. Meoraq’s sabks were already in his hands and stabbing backwards, but the boy skimmed around them with the same ease as he’d navigated thorns and gullies all day. Abandoning that, he slashed at the belt, but the boy wore a braid and the cheap leather was thick and stiff. He hadn’t made a single good cut before the boy bashed the rock into his hand. Once. Twice. Then the other. Disarmed.

Through a haze of smothering grey, Meoraq heaved himself backwards, groping blindly for an arm, a throat, his tunic, anything. The boy leapt out of the way, heaving with him, and then Meoraq was on his back on the ground, staring at the world through shades of grey that shook with his own pulse. In his last seconds, he tried to pull the belt out of the boy’s grip, but he had no leverage and no strength. He could feel the scratching of his scales on the taut leather vibrating through his skull, but even that felt distant, unimportant. He could see his mouth opening and closing; the world beyond was smoke and shadow and the white open eye of death.