He stood, brushed the dried flakes of mud from his scales, then returned to the underlodge alone. He did not look for Nicci among the sleeping humans at the wall. He went to his cupboard. His woman roused halfway to raise the bedding and let him come beneath, then snuggled close and began to growl softly in her sleeping breaths, the way she claimed not to do. He held her, loving her, hating Nicci—Gann and Sheul each with a hand on his heart—and lay awake for hours.

7

Being hurt sucked.

It wasn’t the pain. The pain was extremely present, but Amber could handle pain. What she couldn’t handle, at least not with any good grace, was the boredom.

Amber knew how it felt to recover from whatever had bitten her that day back in the prairie. She remembered the weakness—needing to be carried, to be fed, to be tended like some…some sick person. But she also knew that it hadn’t lasted long. She’d been pretty out of it for a while, but once the fever broke, she was on her feet and walking in just five more days. Maybe not at her full speed, but walking.

But five days after Meoraq washed the maggots out of her side, Amber felt no better. She wasn’t walking, full speed or any speed; she still needed help just getting upstairs to pee. The pain gradually subsided, but she was always cold, always dizzy, always tired. She wasn’t getting better.

“Nothing’s happening!” she moaned as Meoraq carried her outside on Day Eighteen. “What’s wrong with me?”

“You lost a lot of blood,” he replied. “Sheul can heal your flesh, but blood takes time to renew.”

“It’s taking too long.”

“Stop whining. Try to see this as a time of leisure. Enjoy it.”

Enjoy it. Amber’s experience in the cave in the mountains should have prepared her for a lot of lying around doing nothing, but what she’d failed to consider was that, in the mountains, she’d hadn’t done much nothing at all. She and Meoraq had managed to keep busy most days, and on those rare occasions when they’d run out of busywork, there was always sex. These days, sex was as far out of the question as walking up the stairs.

All she could do was lie there.

Meoraq kept busy, because he was sadistic like that, but he refused to let her out of the cupboard. He got to bustle around the underlodge doing minor repairs and arranging things in their limited space until it was almost homey. He got to do all the cooking and cleaning and hunting. He got to scrounge up pieces of wood and carve them into various utensils, which he did in a yellow-striped state of high piss-off and which he would not allow her to do for him, even though there was no good reason why not, unless he thought she was going to maim herself some more. She told him as much in one of her surlier moods. He shut the cupboard door on her.

And that was how the time passed. Meoraq hunted, gathered, patrolled, prayed, built, repaired, replaced. Eric and Dag and Crandall had occasional spasms of productivity, doing whatever small tasks Meoraq assigned them without complaining, or at least complaining in a laughing way. Even Nicci, who did little and said less, wandered in and out whenever her odd moods took her. Amber lay in the cupboard and grew blood.

Meoraq washed and licked her wounds twice each day, and while he often told her she was healing well, he never said she was going to be as good as new. The kipwe’s claws had left three broad furrows in her side, which Meoraq’s bug-based first-aid had twisted into a godawful mess. The baby-new skin growing there was pink and shiny and unbelievably sensitive; the scar tissue knotted up in it, thick and white and dead. Sunk in the middle of this was a narrow depression, slightly askew, like a second, drunken belly-button.

She hated to look at herself under the blanket, so much so that every time Meoraq left the underlodge, she snuck out and put her tunic on. For Meoraq, wearing clothes in bed made about as much sense as wearing them in the bathtub—something which was not merely unnecessary but a little bit crazy. He’d come home and take them off her. She’d sneak out and put them on. After a few days of this, he made some ridiculously mild remark she couldn’t even remember now and she’d burst into tears and cried until she got a headache. He immediately handed over her clothes, which made her cry harder.

And that was something else, the emotional stuff. Like a playground seesaw with tears on one end and throwing up on the other, as her bouts of unplanned puking slacked off, the equally sudden crying jags picked up. She felt like a crazy person and she had no one to talk to about it.

“You’re pregnant,” said Nicci, the one time she’d tried to bring it up.

“Oh bullshit.”

“When was your last period?”

“I don’t know.” But she knew it had been in the cave where she and Meoraq had spent the winter. And she knew she’d finished not too terribly long before they’d left.

“When were you supposed to get it?”

“I don’t know! Quit talking like that!”

Nicci did, but now the thought was there, itching under her scales, as Meoraq would say. It had been thirty-two days already by that time. She knew because the interior walls of the cupboard were made of bricks, cut from some sort of chalky stone, aged to a dark grey, but which left nice white lines when chipped at with the sharp tip of Meoraq’s kzung. Thirty-two days and change since Crandall had watched her bathing and decided she was ‘putting the belly back on’. Thirty-two days and change plus however long she’d been with Zhuqa, plus the six days it had taken to climb down out of the mountains, plus however many days it had been since she’d finished her period. And that was way too long.

Never mind. It didn’t mean anything. She’d get it when it was time to get it and she sure as hell wasn’t in any hurry for that to happen before she could at least walk herself out to clean up.

She waited. That was it. That was all she could do.

So she did it.

* * *

Amber woke up to the cupboard door sliding open. She kept her eyes shut until she heard the familiar sound of his strikers scraping together, but after he got the lamp lit, she raised her head to watch Meoraq go through his usual morning stretches with her usual morning depression. He caught her looking, paused mid-flex, then abruptly stopped and got dressed.

“Are you awake?” he asked, meaning, ‘Are you going back to sleep or do I have to carry you upstairs now?’

“Yeah, probably. You go ahead, though.”

He grunted and left without a goodbye or a backwards glance.

Amber reached out and groped until she found Meoraq’s sword-belt hanging on the cupboard door. She unclipped his kzung and made the day’s mark.

“Do you guys have to talk so much?” Crandall muttered behind the curtain.

“What do you want us to do, pass each other notes?” Amber replaced the kzung and rolled onto her back, staring at the familiar and hated sight of the cupboard ceiling.

She could hear Eric muttering, probably telling Crandall not to be such a dick first thing in the morning, because the next thing she heard was an angry sigh and Crandall saying, “How you feeling, Bierce?”

“Got a stitch in my side,” she replied flatly. She said that every time someone asked her that. One of these days, it was going to be funny.

“See? She’s fine.”

Now it was Dag muttering, but it was Eric who got up. He pulled back the curtain to open up the room, folded his blanket, packed his pack—a Fleetman still, after all this time—and came over to the cupboard. “Let me see it,” he said.

Amber’s hand clenched on the blanket over her side. “Fuck you! Why?”

“Because it’s making you miserable to keep it a secret. Let me see.”

Amber stared at the ceiling for a few more seconds, hoping he’d go away, not enough to actually tell him to go away, then finally threw back the blanket and lifted her tunic to the waist.