No woman in all his life had ever…ever touched him like that. In other ways, yes. He tended to be permissive with his women, particularly if they, like the woman in Xheoth, came to his room more than once. Those he took in conquest after trial, like the flat-headed girl in Tothax, were permitted to struggle, but they rarely did and even they did not touch him like that—flesh to flesh, uninvited and unrepentant for it.

Then she let go and moved away, taking the short, limping steps of an old woman. “Oh Scott!” she called in that musical way.

At some short distance, surrounded by his generals, Scott turned around. “Miss Bierce,” he said without welcome.

Amber smiled. “Everly.”

Meoraq stepped between them.

“Do you know what this is?” he demanded, thrusting the object he had collected on his solitary walk—a plain stone, charred along one side—out before him.

Scott looked at it. So did Amber, although she had to come around the side of him to see.

“What did he say?” Scott asked in a tight, impatient way.

“He…wants to know what that is.”

Scott looked at her. She rolled her shoulders and shook her head. He frowned.

Meoraq waited.

“It’s a rock,” said Scott.

“And do you know where I got it?” Meoraq inquired.

Amber asked.

Scott’s brows puckered. “How the hell should I…? This better be what he’s really saying, Bierce, because if you’re just trying to make me look stupid—”

“You don’t need my help to look stupid.”

Meoraq gave the rock a terse shake. “Answer!”

Amber rolled her shoulders again, adding, “I hope to God you don’t want us to walk back and look because I’m done in, lizardman.”

“I took it from your fire-pit!” Meoraq bellowed, so suddenly that both of them—and quite a few of those around them—jumped. “We have been walking all day and for what? We are still in easy distance of your first camp’s fires! I could walk further on two broken legs!”

“What’s he saying?” Scott asked.

Amber ignored him, beginning to scowl up at Meoraq in her fearless, senseless way. “Hey, I think we’re doing pretty goddamn good here!”

“We have not gone half a span, human! Not even half of half! Do you know what a day’s shamefully idle distance is for me?”

“Do I care?”

“Five!”

She looked at him, then down at herself, and up at him again. “Look at me!” she said angrily. “Do I look like I can go any further than I did today? Do any of us?”

“I could,” said a human.

“Shut the fuck up, Crandall!”

“Well, I could. Hey, realistically, we did, what? Two miles?”

“It had to be more than that,” said Scott, looking alarmed.

“Uphill, loose terrain, bad weather, and of course, lugging the heavy stuff. It took us forever to get going and every time we took a break, we’d end up sitting around like two hours. I wasn’t going to say anything,” he added, rolling his shoulders. “I mean, I realize you guys aren’t soldiers.”

“But we could have done a lot better,” Eric said quietly.

“Well, you just tell him we need this equipment,” said Scott, turning back to Amber. “And while you’re at it, you might find a nice way of suggesting that he pull the stick out of his scaly ass or someone just might have to kick it for him.”

“How many times do I have to tell you? He understands English just fine!”

Scott frowned at her, then looked at Meoraq.

Meoraq slapped him.

“And we’re not slowing you up for the fun of it,” Amber told him as Scott staggered back. “This stuff is heavy.”

“Then leave it behind! I have never seen you so much as open those crates! How can they be so essential?”

“What is he saying now?” asked Scott, cradling his jaw just as though Meoraq had broken it.

“He wants to know if what we’re dragging around is important,” said Amber.

“What we’re dragging around is none of his business. His only job is to act as our guide.”

“No, human,” said Meoraq, darkly amused by the man’s audacity in spite of himself. “My only true task is to serve Sheul as his Sword and his Striding Foot, and in that pursuit, I am given all liberty. All, S’kot. To defy me is to defy Him, and the cost of that defiance is death.”

Scott continued to glare, although his brows creased above his snapping eyes with a human expression of confusion. “What did he call me?”

“He didn’t call you anything,” Amber replied. “He just said he doesn’t work for you. And…something about God, I’m not sure what. And I think that bit at the end was him telling you to quit arguing with him.”

“I’m not arguing with him! He’s arguing with me! Look, Meoraq,” he said, turning briskly to face him even as he edged out of easy striking reach. “I can appreciate your concern and I share it. If it was within my power to expedite our progress, I would.”

“You could carry something,” Amber remarked in a dry tone.

“Your input is not requested, Miss Bierce,” said Scott without looking at her. “If you can’t act as an interpreter without inserting your uninformed opinions, I will end this discussion right now.”

She opened her mouth.

Meoraq put his hand on her shoulder in warning and squeezed it. Miraculously, she silenced herself, even if she had to roll her eyes first. “I am prepared to hear you, human,” he told Scott. “But so far, I have heard only your insolence and a lot of human whining. I will not carry you all the way to Xi’Matezh!”

“It isn’t his decision, Miss Bierce!” Scott said loudly once Amber had repeated this in their own rumbling tongue. “It’s mine! And you can tell him that we aren’t going to be walking forever! Someday, we’re going to have to make a permanent home with a permanent infrastructure! These things are essential to our ultimate goal and, regardless of how he thinks this inconveniences him in the short-term, we’re keeping them!”

Meoraq cocked his head. “He has a tendency to use longer and stranger words when he thinks he’s losing an argument, have you noticed?”

“Oh boy, have I noticed.”

“Don’t talk to him!” Scott snapped, glaring from one to the other of them, his face coloring up high in the cheek. “You’re just the translator!”

Meoraq acknowledged this with a grunt and did his best to address Scot without sarcasm. “If the things you insist on carrying are vital to your settlement, I will allow you to hold them for now, but the weather is turning and I will not be caught by it.”

“How bad is it going to get?” Amber asked, frowning.

“If this day is anything to measure by, the mountains will be hip-high in ice before we come to cross them,” he told her, then gave her a hard rap on the brow with one knuckle. “Speak my words. And tell him that he must prove these things to be truly needful before I allow them to anchor us further.”

“It’s all necessary!” Scott barked before she had hardly begun to obey. “Every single item is absolutely imperative to our survival in the new colony—”

“Oh Christ, not this again,” sighed Amber, rubbing at her eyes.

“—except you!” Scott finished, rounding on her.

“I’m the translator,” she told him. “And the translator would like to know what fantasy you’re living in where half a filter pump and fifteen bags of concrete is useful.”

Meoraq put his hand on her shoulder in warning. “My words, human. Give this fool my words now and have your own arguments later.”

“What did he just call me?” Scott demanded. “Did he just call me an idiot?”

“Oh, that you understand, eh? Then understand this.” Meoraq moved Amber aside and pointed at Scott with the whole of his hand in undisguised contempt. “I do not ask your will. I declare mine. Open the crates and I will judge them for myself.”

Scott looked at Amber.

“He wants to see what we’re carrying,” she said.

Scott’s face filled with color. “No!”

Meoraq’s spines slapped flat. He folded his arms, lay his first fingers along the hilts of his sabks, and calmly said, “I would be very clear, human. Do you answer her or are you defying me?”