Someone was watching him. Meoraq glanced around, not particularly troubled, to find a hooded man standing in the corner of the garden. He was dressed at first glance as an exarch, but his white robes were plainly made and worn about the hems. A priest of some sort, though. A familiar stranger.

“Do I know you?” Meoraq asked after a moment.

“I know you.”

The voice was also familiar, but only a little, as if he’d heard it in a dream.

“Where have we met?”

“We haven’t.”

“You’re in my house,” Meoraq said, but did not, oddly, draw a blade and cut him down for the invasion.

The stranger’s hood bulged as the exarch shrugged his spines beneath it. “You’re in mine. Am I not welcome?”

“I suppose so.” Meoraq returned his gaze to his mother’s painting. She was adding tiny points of white light to the dark sky there. “I think I’m dreaming.”

“Do you?” The stranger’s head tipped, curious. “Why?”

Meoraq looked down at his mother, then at the unnamed exarch. “My mother is dead,” he explained.

“So?”

“So she couldn’t really be here. This—” Meoraq waved at the garden. A few leaves fell. “—isn’t really my father’s House.”

“No,” the stranger agreed. “It is yours. Each man builds his own House and it will always be haunted.”

Most of that was nonsense, of course, but one thing did stab in deep enough to raise Meoraq from his mother’s paint-board. “Uyane is mine?” he asked, looking back at the stranger in surprise. “Am I back? Am I married?”

“Would you like to be?”

Behind him, footsteps, absurdly soft and light against the stone tiles. Meoraq straightened and turned as Amber came into his mother’s garden with Nicci trailing in her shadow. Surprised, he raised a hand in welcome. Amber smiled back at him, that grotesque human smile, and took her wristlet off. She held it out to him, saying, “I am a virgin of my father’s House.”

Nicci offered hers as well, silent, unsmiling.

Meoraq started to reach, then dropped his arm and looked back, scowling, at the exarch. “Must it be both of them?”

“It is her House also,” the exarch replied, a little sadly he thought. “And she brings her own ghosts.”

Meoraq took the wristlets, drew a sabk, pinned them both together to the flowering ribbonleaf tree that overhung his mother’s bench. A little blood welled up from the bark, trickled down the blade, let just one pregnant drop fall from the shivering hook of Amber’s wristlet onto Nicci’s.

“Now you are mine,” Meoraq told her—well, told both of them, but it was Amber he reached for.

She came, putting her hands on him in that fearless way, and there was no pretending he took her in his arms this time to bite her in some insane dream-way. He wanted exactly what he did and he wanted it with all the heat and surety that was in Amber’s bold embrace as well. Then they were naked—with his mother and Nicci and the white-robed exarch right there—and Meoraq leaned her up against the tree beneath the blade of conquest and he supposed he was inside her, although that didn’t seem important. They were face to face, and he could feel well enough her arms around him and her twinned teats pressed flat to his chest, but if there was sex going on below that, it happened without him. It was enough for him to just be with her, to see her, feel her, to need her and be needed by her, and everything that should have been wrong about that feeling—not the least of which was indulging it in this fashion while his mother sat right there on her bench and painted—was instead so overwhelmingly right that it broke the whole of the dream in two and woke him back into the world.

He lay with his heart pounding in his chest, staring without comprehension at the top of his tent until he had calmed down enough to realize two things: First, that the reason he could see the top of his tent was because he had overslept and it was a good hour after dawn, and second, his belly was wet.

Cursing, Meoraq yanked his blanket back, fought his belt open, ripped away his loin-plate, and stared in disbelief at the thin veneer of semen glistening over his scales.

He hadn’t done that in years.

He hadn’t done that in years and he’d just done it with his loin-plate on. Who did that? Who came in his sleep, fully constrained, dreaming of a…of a fucking creature?

What was wrong with him?

Meoraq fumbled angrily with his pack until he found his flask, using what little water it still held to wipe himself off. His slit felt very tender.

Outside, footsteps. The humans were awake, some of them at least, and Amber was surely among them. If he listened (he did not want to listen), he would no doubt be able to hear her particular voice among those rumbles and barks that made up the crude human speech. If he looked out, he would see her.

Meoraq buckled his belt back on, cinching it biting-tight, and dressed in furious silence. He strapped his blades on, all of them, like a Sheulek. He untied the tent’s fastens, threw back the flap, and stepped boldly out among the humans who were his trial upon this pilgrimage, and not a damned thing more.

Amber was there. She saw him. Smiled.

He felt again what he had never felt—the warm crush of her body naked against his—and felt with it some ghost of that lying emotion that was nothing but a part of this ordeal.

“Hey,” said Amber, picking up her spear as she climbed to her feet. She came toward him, smiling. “Are you ready?”

He froze, just for an instant, and suddenly remembered their talk of the previous night. Hunting. She thought he was going to teach her the ways of hunting.

He put his back to her. It helped, but not much. He started walking. “Not today. Stay here.”

“Oh come on. I promise I’ll be quiet.”

“I said, no.” He walked faster. “You were supposed to wake me.”

“I wasn’t tired.” She followed him. “I’m totally ready to do this.”

“You are tired, whether you admit it or not. You are useless to me now. Stay.”

“I’m fine, for Christ’s sake. Come on, I won’t even do anything if you don’t want me to. Please, Meoraq, I just need to see how—”

She caught at his arm and nothing else she said mattered. There was no time, only a dark place between one beat of his heart and the next in which he had time to think, completely, that he could be alone with her. Just the two of them in the wildlands, with a tree, perhaps even a ribbonleaf tree, to lean her up against…

“Get away from me!” he roared, and swung around to shout it right in her face. Her ugly face. “Don’t you ever put your hand on me again!”

She drew back and stopped smiling, both so suddenly that he might have reached out and slapped the look right off her face. Around them, human heads turned and human eyes watched. Meoraq’s heart knotted; he gave it a strike with the haft of his hunting blade and snapped, “I told you to wake me and you ignored me! I told you to stay here and you argue with me! So now I see how you obey my orders! Why would you think I would want you with me after that? I don’t like you! We’re not friends! Stop pawing at me and go sit down!”

Someone—Scott, by the smirking look of him—uttered a fluttery sound through his closed mouth. Amber heard it, too. She shot a fiery glance that way, her face darkening either with embarrassment or anger, and then turned all the way around and started to walk away from him. Not deeper into camp. Into the wildlands.

Without him.

She’d be killed.

Meoraq lunged after her and snatched the spear out of her hands.

“Give it back!”

“Stay here, I said!” he roared at her.

“I don’t need your permission! I can go if I want to! Give it back, that’s mi—”

Meoraq snapped it over his knee and threw the pieces at the ground.

Scott let out a, “Whoa!” of happy surprise and laughed again.