Rasozul held him, rocked him. “No one is beyond forgiveness.”

“Whose forgiveness?” Meoraq asked, even as he pressed his eyes tighter into his shielding hands. “Is there a God? Does He know me?”

“I can’t answer, son.”

“Why not?”

Rasozul’s hand rubbed gently up and down over his bent back. “Because you have to ask. Ah, boy, look up. Look around you. Can’t you see?”

Meoraq slowly lowered his hands and raised his eyes. He saw the stars, shining out even brighter and more numerous than before. Their beauty had a sound, like a memory of music he could no longer hear with his ears but could still, however faintly, recall.

Meoraq looked away, at the braziers glittering over the rooftop of Xeqor. “It is nice,” he mumbled, rubbing at his snout.

Rasozul sighed. “It is,” he agreed.

They sat.

“How long do I have to wait here?” Meoraq asked.

“I can’t answer that, son.” Rasozul bent his neck and rubbed at his own snout. Patience colored all his thoughts and feelings. “We’ll move on when you’re ready.”

“Where are we going?” Meoraq looked out into the darkened wilds beyond Xeqor’s walls and, for a moment, thought he caught the suggestion of mountains to the east, the ghost-glow of golden light filling the barren washes between them, but then it was only blackness. “Is it far?” he asked uncertainly. He didn’t want to go any further from Amber than he had to.

Rasozul sighed again and patted Meoraq’s knee. “Only as far as you make it, son.”

“Do I have to go right now?” Meoraq asked. “Can’t I wait for her? I want to be here when she comes. She’ll be frightened.”

The stars began to wink out, one by one. The breeze, so sweet and soft all this time, gusted suddenly. His chest cramped. Oddly, pain was something he could feel in death.

“What—” Meoraq bent, one hand scratching over his chest, dumbly seeking some physical cause for this sudden assault. “What’s happening?”

“Just look at me.” Rasozul cupped Meoraq’s face between his hands and leaned close. “Son, look at me. You’re all right.”

“Is this a punishment? I’m not leaving her!” he declared, shaking off his father’s touch to shout into the darkening sky. “You can take me this far, but no further! Do you hear me? I…am not going…anywhere!”

Pain slammed like a hammer right into his heart, knocking whatever air filled his dead lungs out of this body. Meoraq fell back into Rasozul’s gentle hands and writhed there as that hammer struck and struck and struck.

“Oh, my son,” Rasozul said somewhere above him. He sounded as if he might be smiling, in a weary and resigned sort of way. “You don’t have to fight.”

Meoraq roared, kicking and slapping at the wind as it gusted, battering its way inside him. “No!” he spat, twisting his head violently back and forth until the wind went away. “Not! Leaving!”

“Meoraq.”

It was a woman’s voice, a woman’s hands that brushed along the sides of his face, cupping him and making him quiet as the hammer rose and fell, rose and fell. He opened his eyes and saw his mother, fresh as on her wedding day, bending over him with loving exasperation shining down out of her eyes. Her eyes were golden brown and warm as tea; he’d forgotten.

The wind slackened. A few stars flickered and grew. In the east, the mountains he thought he saw flickered as well; Rasozul glanced that way and then at Yecidi.

“I know,” she said, as if he had spoken. Perhaps he had, in that way of silent understanding which Meoraq had so briefly shared and which the pain had utterly taken from him. “But he’s not ready. And he doesn’t have to be. Meoraq,” she said again, bending even lower to touch her brow to his. “Trust me. Do you trust me? I know you are very tired, but you must trust me.”

He groped for her hand and found it, weakly squeezing, trying to fill that touch with all the years’ worth of love he’d denied her for all his arrogant, stupid reasons, but he could feel her withdrawing from him. He could still see her and she was still smiling, but she was holding herself separate from him and she was doing it deliberately. It hurt and as he withdrew himself in confusion, that hammer suddenly smashed into him again.

“Breathe,” his mother said, stroking his face. “Don’t fight. Trust me, Meoraq, and relax.”

He tried, but at the slightest loosening of his will, the pain took his whole body, burrowing into his throat like a living thing and swelling through his chest.

“Breathe it in,” his mother said, and although she was still holding him, he could scarcely see her. The stars were going out in sheets now, all the world filling up with black, and ah, he hurt, he hurt, there was nothing left to feel but hurt.

“We’ll wait for you,” his father said. “Remember that and let go.”

Let go. He’d said that to Amber once, in the ruins the night of the storm, and although he couldn’t bring that night fully into focus through this terrible pain, he thought she’d done it. Because she’d trusted him to hold her. Meoraq battled his eyes open, but there was nothing of his mother left but her hands like shadows to either side of his face, nothing of his father but a voice beneath the killing wind telling him to breathe. The hammer struck; Meoraq opened his mouth to scream and the pain clawed at once down his throat.

He breathed it in.

* * *

Meoraq was awake long before he was able to do anything about it. Awareness was a live coal in his chest, a thick pool of pain much wider than the dimensions of his body. His arms and legs, of no significance, floated elsewhere. He drowsed in the thoughtless black, listening to low speech and shuffling bodies without the ability to make words of what he heard. And that was fine.

Gradually, the pain grew sharper and as it sharpened, it shrank. With the shrinking came a better sense of the rest of his clay until, all at once, he had an arm with a hand attached at the end of it, and within that hand, another hand. A soft hand. With many slender fingers.

He knew it was Amber before he knew he was Meoraq. Smiling, he squeezed the hand that held him. She squeezed back.

“Where is the knife of my fathers?” he asked. His voice was a whisper, a ghost in his throat.

She lifted his hand and laid it over the smooth bone hilt.

He smiled in the darkness. “Draw it with me, wife.”

Someone coughed. Not Amber. Someone else.

Meoraq opened his eyes. He lay in a sickbed—a raised mat, open all around to allow ease of tending—and a rather large blurry man stood at the foot of it with a scattering of other blurs around him. People. Damn it. “Leave us,” said Meoraq.

“That’s not His fire in your belly, son,” said a familiar voice, not moving. “That’s wetlung.”

Meoraq saw no reason it couldn’t be both, but the act of opening his eyes had forced daylight into the whole of his body. Now he could see that the sickbed in which he lay was in a room, which was in a House, which was in the city of Chalh. He started to sit up, but his brain threatened to leave if he insisted, so he settled back into the bedding under Amber’s guiding hands. “It is Uyane before me,” he said, fitting a name to the man just now coming into focus at the heel of his sickbed. “Lord of his House under my descent and steward of his bloodline in Chalh.”

“Keeper of the armory keys, warden over the Holy Fire of Gedai, guardian of the Oracle’s Fourth Order, and too damned old to care,” Uyane agreed. “But it’s just Jazuun when I stand with kin. Or are you holding my House in your shadow?”

“Not from your sickroom, I’m not.” He looked around again. “How did I get here? Wait…”

Meoraq thought.

He remembered.

He looked up at his wife. “You saved my life.”

One corner of her mouth ticced up in her crooked, human smile. “Feels awful, doesn’t it?”