“I should have what?” Meoraq hissed.

“Are you high?” Amber asked, and while it was impossible to read either her malleable face or her tone, both were clearly touched by some sort of emotion. “He’s not running a hotel here, he doesn’t owe you a continental breakfast!”

“He does if he wants us to follow him anywhere. I like this camp exactly where it is, Miss Bierce. We have the high ground here, we’re in easy reach of water, we have the herds—”

“This is not your decision, human!” Meoraq snapped. He could feel his throat warming in pulses. His color was coming in. He made an effort to take deep breaths.

“What herds?” Amber asked. “The saoqs are hours away these days and you have no guarantee that they’re coming back.”

“Deer don’t migrate, Miss Bierce.”

“These aren’t deer, you dumb dick! Stop acting like this is Earth!”

Meoraq terminated her further words with a silencing grip on her shoulder. “Enough. Speak my words, human. Do not speak for me. I am Sheulek.”

She shut her mouth and waited, glaring at Scott who made a point of gazing loftily back at all his lounging people as he said, “If you want to go, go. No one’s stopping you. But you are going to have to give me some incentive before I uproot these people a second time. We have everything we need right here in my camp. I’m not leaving just because you say so.”

“So be it,” said Meoraq, once he was himself quite calm. “Sheul has put you in my path and until I know the reason, I accept that I must care for you. So I will make a hunt for you. But if you want to share in it, you will have to be at my camp.”

Amber relayed this, more or less, while Meoraq stood behind her and punctuated the words with hisses where necessary. “Now here’s a little something from me,” she said at the end of it. “In all this time, you haven’t done a goddamn thing except hold meetings and tell us everything is going to be okay. When Meoraq walks away, you don’t get to say that anymore. Instead, you get to tell them to pick up a spear and figure out how to use it before they starve to death. You think anyone is going to care how far they have to walk as long as they don’t have to do that?”

Scott said nothing. His face had turned a deep purplish-red color, like shadesweet fruits left too long on the vine and gone to poison. “I’ll think about it.”

“Think as long as you like,” Meoraq told him and turned to Amber, “Gather your things and whichever of your people—”

“You do and you’re out of here!” Scott shouted, grabbing at Amber’s shirt. “Don’t you dare say one word to anyone, Bierce! This is my camp! Mine!”

Meoraq had never lost his temper so entirely or so quickly in all his life. Shoving Amber aside, he seized Scott by his soft, pink throat and lifted him right off the ground. “No one interrupts a Sword of Sheul!” he bellowed. “Not abbots, not judges, not governors, and not you, you freakish little gutter-bastard! Give me your obedience or I’ll send you back to the clay that shat you out!”

Scott strangled and battered futilely at Meoraq’s arm.

“Obedience, I say! Show me your fucking fist! Tell him—” he roared, turning, but Amber was nowhere to be found. Meoraq blinked, breathing hard, looking left and right and finally down, where Amber sprawled across the wet ground, clapping one hand to her head and staring dazedly at the sky. Blood, red as those shadesweet fruits in their fullest, dappled her fingers and streaked her hair.

And his first thought, unwelcome as a cold draft blowing across a dark and empty room, was not that she was injured, but only that she was a woman lying at his feet upon her back. He saw that and somehow forgot his anger even as it continued to throb in his throat, just as he forgot the human gasping for air at the end of his fist.

But thankfully, that moment ended.

Meoraq turned all the way to her and let Scott go. He didn’t mean to throw him, but he wasn’t careful either, and Scott crashed into a wooden crate and slid gasping to the ground. Meoraq was on one knee in the next instant, chasing her hand away to probe through the springy, matted mass of her hair.

The damage he found was little more than a scrape, neither deep nor wide. It bled, as head wounds were apt to do, but Amber did not give any kind of cry when he nudged at it. She pulled irritably out of his reach instead, saying, “I’m fine, damn it! You pushed me in the mud, not off a cliff! Christ, these pants were clean just, uh…I guess it was a week ago, but still! Damn it, Meoraq!”

“You’re bleeding.”

“I’m what?” She noticed the red smears on her fingertips and stared at them without comprehension, then touched at her head and studied the fresh daubs of blood she took away. “I didn’t hit a rock or anything,” she said, seeming puzzled but only a little troubled. “It must have been you.”

He drew back, his spines flaring forward.

“You have rough hands,” she told him. “Your…you know, your scales.”

He stared at her for a long time before slowly looking down at the faint sign of her blood, like red frost, on the side of his hand.

“There he goes,” said Amber, climbing to her feet. She was watching Scott, who had already retreated across the whole of the camp to gather his lieutenants and hiss at them. “It doesn’t look like he’s telling people to pack up and get ready, either.”

“I do not care,” said Meoraq distantly. He clenched his hand to a fist and opened it again, watching the blood shine where it was still wet and crack where it had already dried. “If it is to be Sheul’s lesson that I learn to herd cattle, so be it. I shall tether them up in a line and whip their flanks, but they will walk, by Gann.”

He heard a dry, fleshy, smacking sound. Amber had clapped both hands to her face and was holding them there. “You can’t talk to them like that,” she said, sighing in the same breath that she spoke, which was a clever human trick.

“Of course I can. I am Sheulek.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means I am owed all obedience.”

She sighed again. “Listen. This is…This is a social situation, okay?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means…You have to make friends with these people.”

“Eh?”

“Friends.” She cast about with her eyes, then shrugged her arms out in futility. “Friends, you know? You need them to like you.”

She said it, as she said most things, with sincerity even though he knew it for a lie. Friendship could be pleasant, but it could also be a dangerous distraction. A boy born under the sign of the Blade did not play with the other boys of his caste, but competed against them, brawled with them, beat and were beaten by them. The masters at Tilev allowed no leisure hours in company, only study, meals and sleep, where every stolen whisper risked a slap across the snout. The brunts at least had some leeway to chat amongst themselves, but were set against each other so often and so brutally as part of their training that even then attachments were few. After his ascension, his duties as a Sheulek kept him moving from city to city, and what company he might share with a man like Nkosa was kept brief. A Sword of Sheul must always be honed and ready to strike, and personal feelings could only complicate things.

“Do you like any of these people?” he asked, gesturing toward the camp where a few humans were reluctantly gathering up their gear.

She dropped her eyes as if it were a reprimand before glancing shamefacedly at her people. “I should.”

“Why?”

“Because…Christ, I don’t know.” She covered her face again, baring her teeth as if she wanted to bite something. “Okay, so I’m a horrible hypocrite and the last person who should be trying to explain this to anyone, but that doesn’t make it any less true. People need people.” She grimaced even as she said it, not in a smiling way. “What would you do if Scott convinced them you were some kind of…of raging, man-eating, bloodthirsty lizardman?”