And he was ashamed.

“I will send it and the others on with Onahi in the morning,” he said at last, but the words were ash in his throat. Onahi may yet have kin in Chalh, but the gates would never open to a man who had ended his time at Praxas as barracks-ward, a man who came with a procession of fatherless women, unhooded, unveiled. It would be a Sheulek’s command alone that could open those gates and win welcome.

Her hand stole in to touch him—that fearless hand—weakly gripping at his arm just below his sabk. “Please look at me.”

He tried, but her tearful face inspired only greater heat and furious urgency in his belly, and that was obscene to feel when he knew a life waited on his judgment. He stepped away from her, clapping a hand to his throat to try and cool the color rising there. “I can’t,” he said. “Leave me. I have to pray.”

She did not. She stood silent at his back as he forced himself to kneel and, as he was taking only the second of his first six breaths, suddenly her hand came out of the wind and slapped him in the head.

“Are you breaking up with me?” she shouted, sobbing so explosively that she could hardly breathe. “Because if that’s wuh-what this is, I can tuh-take it! But don’t you may-ake me fucking wuh-wuh-wait for it!”

“What are you talking about? What’s broken? What—”

And then he thought he understood.

“Do you think I’m putting you aside?” he asked incredulously while his belly groaned and his loin-plate strained. “Why would you even think that, woman?”

“Gee, I don’t know,” she said, trying to sneer through her tears and succeeding only in sounding more pathetic. “You won’t touch me. You won’t look at me. You barely even talk to me and you’re always angry when you do!”

“I’m not angry.” His hand stole down to check the fit of his loin plate. He coughed out a bitter laugh, muttering, “I’m the furthest thing there is from angry,” but it didn’t feel true. The idea that Gann’s loathsome hand was on him came creeping in, as it had so often during these last days and burning nights—that he had breathed it in like a sickness somewhere in the raider’s camp or that it had rubbed off from the flesh of all these damned women…but not from Amber. Never from his Amber. Sheul could not give her back to him only to see her and him both tainted beyond redeeming.

“I’m not angry,” he said again, gazing into the darkening sky. “I just need time.”

“Time for what? Is it…Is it because I was one of them?”

That made no sense to him no matter how many times he turned over her odd human words. “One of what?” he asked cautiously.

She glared at him, flushed and trembling and miserable, and suddenly shouted, “A slave! Because I was their slave—his slave—and you’ve got a lot of goddamned nerve breaking up with me for that, you scaly son of a bitch!” The last words degenerated into fresh tears. She clapped her hands over her face and choked on them.

“You were never a slave. You were always mine! You are still mine!” He caught her wrists and forced them down, forced her to look at him through the wet shine of her tears. “Sheul Himself gave you to me and what He has bound, nothing breaks! How do you mark me, woman?”

She sobbed, if possible, harder.

“I will have an answer,” said Meoraq, beginning to be alarmed.

“You don’t mean it!”

“Stop telling me what I mean!” he snapped. “You’re always doing that and it’s infuriating!”

“You don’t!” she shouted. “You told everyone out there you forgave them! You told me there was no sin in conquest, but that’s still what you see when you look at them! That’s what you see when you look at me!”

He recoiled. “I do not,” he said, but it was only a half-truth and the Sheulek in him knew it.

“Then tell me that baby deserves to live! Tell me it doesn’t matter who its father was! Tell me you think Xzem is a good mother!”

He looked at her, and just as her eyes welled up with fresh anguish, he said, “Truth.”

She blinked, knocking tears loose, but not sobbing them out. “Huh?”

“Truth,” he said again, now frowning.

They stared at each other as the wind blew between them.

“You don’t believe it,” she said again, but timidly now.

“I don’t have to. I hear your words. I judge them truth. If I struggle with acceptance, that is my failing. I will have to pray about that.” He braced himself and gave her a tap, just the backs of his knuckles to the side of her arm, and still almost more than he could stand. “But you are still mine. I never questioned that.”

She looked away. “It won’t ever be the same.”

“As what?” Meoraq asked. “As life before my father’s death? Before you sailed your ship? I don’t want the same life, damn it, I want this one!”

She sniffled and rubbed her face. He couldn’t think of anything better to convince her and couldn’t keep looking at her, so he faced into the wind again.

“Are you mad at me?” she asked in a small voice.

“A little,” he admitted, and rubbed hard at the end of his snout. “Do you want to be broken from me? Is that what this is about? Because you don’t get that!”

“No!”

“Is it because I left you? Because I wasn’t there and you were…taken…”

“We can’t be together all the time. No, Meoraq, that was just…” She paused and uttered a short, tearful laugh. “I was going to say dumb luck, but you don’t believe in that. I guess you’d say it was God’s will.”

Meoraq thought about that.

“Perhaps it was,” he said slowly. “For Xzem’s sake. For Nali’s. For Onahi and his men. For N’ki. Even…for S’kot. I hadn’t thought of it that way…”

But he did now, thinking of all the wooded hills of Gedai and how easily he might have walked through them and on to Xi’Matezh, never suspecting the city of Praxas with its caged humans even existed. He had been meant to find them, to save them. No matter his personal feelings, God had given them a new chance at life.

Meoraq rubbed at his snout again. “Xzem…does seem to be a good mother.”

“She is. She really is.” Amber sighed. “And I want her to have the baby. I know she can take care of it better than me, okay, I know that. I just…worry about who’s going to take care of her, you know? But I’ve seen Onahi with her and if they’re not shacking up yet, they will be by the time you get to Chalh.”

Meoraq grunted, now thinking of Onahi meditating in his tent, patiently awaiting death at a Sheulek’s hand for his perceived corruption. And who was Meoraq to say it was not so? However good the man might seem, it was unforgiveable to lie with a milking mother. Was it a greater sin to end the man now, while he still had some chance of finding peace in Sheul’s Halls, or to wait until the unforgiveable act had occurred? The temptations of Gann were no easy ordeal (his constrained cock throbbed abysmally, sunk in fire, bruising the edges of his slit, and he was never going to have Amber against that fucking tree).

But wait…

It was unforgiveable to lie with a milking mother…unless the man had married her.

And suddenly Meoraq realized what had been before his damned eyes since leaving Praxas: There were six women in his care, five and Xzem, and six watchmen, five and Onahi.

“That’s it,” he said.

“Huh?”

“I’ll marry them.”

“Who?”

“Onahi and Xzem. I’ll marry them. I’ll marry all of them!”

Amber stared at him, not in awe, but in horror. “You can’t do that!”

“Of course I can. And why are you looking at me like that?” he asked testily. “If I presented them at the gates of Chalh as fatherless women, they’d never be admitted. I will give them husbands and I will name those men soldiers under Uyane. There has to be a House Uyane in Chalh and its steward will have to take them in when I command it as Uyane of Xeqor.”

“Meoraq, you can’t! You’re just…passing them out. You’re not even discussing it with them first. It’s like they’re not even people to you, just…”