Meoraq turned his head to watch the clouds roll over the moon and pretended not to see. Eventually, she put the cuuvash in a fold of her clothes and he looked at her again. That freakish little nub of a nose. Those fat, purplish folds around her mouth. The rounded shells of her ears.

And her eyes. The living green fire of her eyes.

“No one man can ever comprehend all the wonders of Sheul’s making,” he said, speaking to himself more than to her. “So it says in the Word and I always thought that I believed it. But how could I believe it when I never truly understood until now how much further the wonders of His making could surpass a man’s comprehension?”

“Mee’orakk,” she replied and reached to touch his chest.

This time, he allowed it, frowning down at her hand where it pressed on his bare flesh. “No man could have imagined a hand like that,” he mused. “Five fingers and those round, flat, useless little claws. Scaleless. Hairless. Soft. And yet what have you done with that hand but touch a Sheulek?”

“Amber.” She patted herself just above the twinned swellings of her chest.

“I hear you,” he said, studying them. “Are those really teats or do I just think so because I suspect you to be female and am looking for proof? If they are teats, where is the baby? It would have to be a suckling to swell you so. Or babies, I suppose; you have two teats, you must bear two babies.”

Amber said her name. Meoraq replied with his. He watched her slap her hands to her face and hide behind them, rubbing just as though she had brow-ridges to rub.

That was kind of cute.

“I have to pray,” Meoraq told her, told them both, really. He retreated to his tent to do it and meditated there for some time, fruitlessly, before commending himself to his Father’s divine hands, here in the camp of these creatures, and lying down upon his mat to sleep. He did not undress. He kept his kzung drawn beside him. He feared no creature-assassins but was ready for them. He breathed the way he had been taught, counting six steps over and over, and stopping to listen each time the creatures approached his tent.

As he waited for Sheul’s peace to overtake his restless mind, he found himself wondering what the young of these creatures might look like. He could almost imagine them—twin monsters in miniature—small hands and greedy mouths at work at the fullness of their mother’s teats (Amber’s, for no other reason than that she was the human he’d been sitting with all day), perhaps one at each.

Outside, the wind gusted, moaning like a woman lost to fire. Scott’s voice briefly overtook it and Amber answered, her tone as fearless as her hand had been upon his body. Meoraq listened, smiling, then rolled onto his side and closed his eyes to sleep.

* * *

He dreamt.

Dreams, by their very nature, frequently touched at strangeness and he was not a man who attached much importance to them, even when he recalled them upon waking, which was not often. But this…

When he became aware of it (he could not say ‘at its beginning’ for, like so many dreams, it seemed to have much more history than he could recall upon waking), he found himself seated in the lessons room at the training hall in Tilev. Many others were with him, paying rapt attention to Master Tsazr at the head of the hall, who was going on in his terse, impatient way about something. None of this yet seemed odd. It had been twelve years and some since his ascension, but Meoraq still dreamed of his training days upon occasion. At least he was wearing clothes in this one.

But when he turned his head, he saw that half the students around him were humans. Amber sat at his side, a lessons slate in her lap and a stylus in her five-fingered hand, scratching out notes in alien markings. At his other side sat a dumaq, a stranger, wearing the garments of an exarch with the hood pulled so low over his face that Meoraq could see nothing but his painted snout. His was rather a plain robe, sparsely trimmed and not entirely clean, nothing at all like the fine dress of Exarch Ylsathoc.

Without looking at him, this stranger said, “What is it you seek in Xi’Matezh?”

Wasn’t that just like an exarch, to involve himself in someone else’s personal business?

But Meoraq found himself answering, and answering with both honesty and respect: “I seek communion with Sheul.”

“A man need not travel to the end of the world to seek what can be found upon his knees in his own courtyard. Your House is empty,” the hooded figure said before Meoraq could reply, not that any reply came to his dreaming mind. “Should not a son see to the continuance of his physical father’s honor rather than undergoing lengthy journeys in his spiritual Father’s name?”

Meoraq rarely felt emotion in dreams, but shame stung at him now. Shame, oddly, and not annoyance at the presumption of this stranger. “I never said that I would not take stewardship of Uyane!”

“You certainly seem eager to postpone it.”

“No!”

“No? Then why—” The exarch’s head cocked, still revealing nothing but paint and shadow and now the pinpoint gleam of one eye. “—do you seek Xi’Matezh? What would you ask of Sheul that requires so arduous a journey?”

And rather than tell this man his prayers were for Sheul alone, Meoraq said, “If it is Sheul’s will that I am retired to Uyane, so I will serve Him.”

The exarch dipped his head once, acknowledging, expectant.

“But I do not wish to spend all the years of my remaining life bound to stewardship if it is not His will!”

“Is the House so hateful?”

“The House?” Meoraq looked over his shoulder where, as only seemed right and natural, the lessons room had opened into the rooftop courtyard at the fore of House Uyane. He could see the stone couch his father favored beneath the drooping branches of a ribbonleaf tree, and the wide steps where he himself used to sit when he was at lessons (or when he was hoping to steal a glance at the servant girl who scrubbed the courtyard tiles). “No,” he said now, puzzled. “It is my father’s House and has all my love.”

“Not all, it would seem, if you would travel to the end of the very world to escape it.”

“It is not the House I wish to escape.”

“No?”

Meoraq looked again, but now the courtyard had become his father’s innermost chamber, as seen through the eyes of the young boy he had been on the only occasion he had seen it. And just why he had gone to such a forbidden room, he could not recall, but he could perfectly remember how it had been: the light of lamps behind the screen casting shadows on every wall, the scent of some flowery incense heavy in the air, and the cupboard of his father’s bed standing open so that he could see the broad, scarred field of his father’s back as it bunched and heaved and arched.

Meoraq averted his eyes fast, but the sounds persisted. His father’s deep, steady breaths. His mother’s feeble, mewling cries. The stealthy rasp of scales moving together. The wet pull and suck of sex in its second round.

The stranger was watching, his long hands steepled beneath his chin. “This embarrassed you.”

Meoraq did not reply and did not look again.

“Is it not a lord’s responsibility to preserve his bloodline? To sire sons of his loyal woman?”

His loyal woman. Meoraq’s jaws clenched.

“Surely you do not question Yecedi’s loyalty?”

“I am sure she was ever faithful to my father,” Meoraq said curtly. And he was. Yecedi had passed directly from her father’s own House to Rasozul’s and did not leave it until the day she died.

“She was a good woman.”

“I suppose so.” Meoraq shrugged his spines, wishing the sounds of sex would stop or at least that his mother’s urgent moaning would. “She was a perfect high-born wife, obedient and invisible and able to produce three strong sons upon command.”