Lucky guess. It had to be. Meoraq had picked up English fast, but not that fast. All the same, she was glad she’d kept the bitchy out of her mouth for a change.

He unlocked his door and held it for her. His lamp was already lit inside. There was food on the table—tachuqi and roots and what looked like a short stack of pancakes. Zhuqa had to tap her shoulder to get her attention again. “Take off your clothes.”

She did and he took them, feeling out every fold before tossing the robe carelessly over a crate.

“Now you,” he said, and put his hands on her.

She waited, staring fixedly at the wall while he satisfied himself that she had no weapons socketed away, and when he was done, before he could give an order, she moved in close and touched her cheek briefly to his chest.

His spines flared. “My Eshiqi,” he said, rubbing her back. “When Hruuzk called to you, you didn’t know he saw me coming, did you? You thought he meant to put you on the block with the other slaves.” And he smiled, like it was funny.

Amber didn’t smile. She didn’t swear at him either, or call him names or make any of the sarcastic comments she might have made if it wasn’t for the little matter of how much English he might or might not understand…and if he wasn’t right.

“Come to my table,” he ordered, moving ahead of her to take his seat—still the only seat—and giving his thigh an inviting pat. When she sat, he pinched off a large bite of tachuqi meat and offered it up. “Hruuzk tells me you’ve been a good worker. You may think Hruuzk praises all the women who have played Zhuqa’s House with me, but he doesn’t. You have been my loyal woman…and a good mother to my child.” He watched her eat. “Did you lose one?”

“No,” she said, but thought of Nicci. “Never had one.”

“I’ve lost five so far. I try not to see omens in piss anymore, but…this is my sixth.” He took a bite for himself and chewed, gazing up at the ceiling as if he could see through it to Xzem and the baby, far above them. When he swallowed, he looked at her again. “A child needs a mother.”

“A child needs not to grow up in a place like this even more.”

“As the Word says, a father is God upon the living world,” said Zhuqa, giving her another bite of meat. “The only God my son is likely to know. I can train a son. I can take him on hunts and raids. I can teach him blades and spears and grappling. I can be proud of him. I can even be fond of him, from a distance. But even a warlord’s son needs a mother to hold him.”

“I guess you’re not always a dirty girl, are you? Sometimes you’re a real sweetie. A prince among thieves. Or a princess.”

He grunted, rubbed her thigh, fed her another bite.

“What if it’s a girl?” asked Amber. “What happens to all your fatherly affection and pride then? Do you sell her?”

“Eh?”

She put her hands together in the teardrop-shape, but he continued to look blank. Amber made rocking motions with her arms, then realized she’d never seen Xzem rock a baby that way. For that matter, she’d never seen a human rock a baby that way, either. Awkwardly, she cupped her arms as if holding a baby upright at her breast and rocked back and forth instead. This put unpleasant pressure on her sex, but after she’d again made a teardrop-shape and repeated the baby-rocking, his light bulb finally came on.

“You think it will open up female?”

“You’ve got a fifty-fifty chance, don’t you?”

Zhuqa grunted and stroked his throat, studying her through narrow eyes. “Zhuqa the Warlord has only one use for daughters,” he said after a long silence. “But in Zhuqa’s House, all children are prized. If I gave her to you, would you be grateful?”

“That depends. So far, all of your promises have only been good for a year.”

He grunted, but in a thoughtful way that made her wonder again how much of what she said he was starting to understand. It didn’t help when he said, “This place will never be better than a raider’s nest to anyone who has ever known a true home, but you might be surprised how long a child can be happy here, if it’s cared for.”

“That’s a horrible thought,” said Amber, taking the piece of tachuqi he offered her.

“To a child who is not…well, you get Iziz.” Zhuqa gestured broadly and helped himself to a root. “Who, I think, would never imagine that he has been mistreated in his life, but who was surely bought and buggered six times for every finger and toe on his body before the last of his scales went black. Raider-sprats like Iziz or Xzem…they’re not unhappy just because they take a poke ten years too early. That’s only hell to people who know better. So I ask you again—” He held up another piece of meat and cocked his head. “If I gave her to you, if I let you be the God in her living world, if I let you decide how much hurt is normal and how much is never visited…will you be grateful?”

“How grateful do you need me to be?”

“I’m giving you a chance to have a family,” he said quietly. “But I won’t let you raise my child to hate me. If you want it, you will have to decide whether you want to be my loyal woman or my fierce little slave.”

She didn’t answer, not out of defiance, but simply because, for one terrible moment, she wasn’t entirely sure what her answer would be.

Zhuqa’s eyes stabbed into her, deeper and deeper. At last, he leaned back in his chair and gave her another bite of meat. “But I won’t ask you to choose tonight. For now, I am content as long as you play the game, Eshiqi. You don’t have to mean it, but you have to play the game.”

She closed her eyes, took a few breaths, then looked at him and forced a smile.

“I suppose you think it’s silly,” Zhuqa mused, tracing the shape of her lips with his fingertips. “And I suppose you would be right. But what else do I have here, eh? They taught us about evil when I was a boy, and about God’s love and the promise of His forgiveness. I believed it. I believed that I knew where I fit in the world. I believed that I would serve Him someday and if it was His will, I would return with honor to be steward of my father’s House. I believed I would have children in a place where it was not expected and acceptable for the first one to die. Now these things, the very idea of them, are nothing but pieces in a silly game.” His eyes sparked. “Why shouldn’t I want to play it?”

Amber did not answer. After a few seconds, he grunted and shifted her off his knee. “It’s dark in here,” he said.

Amber looked around, then went to the nearest lamp and pulled the wick up a little. The flame lengthened, but guttered. The pitcher of xuseth oil he kept in his room was nowhere obvious. While she looked for it, he went to the wall where he kept his awful drink in a new waterskin, poured himself half a cup, thought about it, then poured the other half. By the time she’d found the oil (on the shelf where it belonged, and God alone knew what it was doing there), he was back in his chair with his feet propped up on the table, drinking.

“Do you want to know what I did?” Zhuqa asked suddenly. His voice was mild; his scales, dark. His eyes, half in and out of shadow, had all the expression of cigarette burns. “Would you like to know what great unforgivable act cut me from my father’s name and put me here? Would you like to know why I am so unfit to keep his House, why my children, if any of them survive, will never have the name I was born under? Eh? Do you?”

She ducked her head and fussed with the lamp, hoping that if she stayed quiet, he’d change the subject.

He took his boots off the table and brought his chair crashing back onto all four feet. She jumped; he watched her, calmly picking through the bowl of roots for one to eat. “Two years before my ascension, the training master I was brunt to broke his leg. They replaced him with someone new, someone from outside. He took an interest in me. Used to keep me extra hours, teaching me advanced fighting forms, but didn’t work me too bad afterwards. We spent a lot of nights just sitting up together, chatting while I cleaned his boots or put an edge on his blades. I liked him,” Zhuqa said, twisting the words like a knife. He laughed once, shortly, and drank again.