Amber stared at the halves of her hunting toy. Her mouth was a thin line, pressed pale, shaking at its edges.

“I shouldn’t have to spend every hour of every damned day looking after you,” said Meoraq brusquely, pushing past her. He felt heavy, as if the hand of Sheul Himself were pressing down on him, body and soul, but the words kept coming, spitting out of him as bitter as bile. “Stay here and stay out of my way.”

A scraping sound.

Meoraq looked, his hand tightening on the hilt of his kzung, knowing she had picked up half of her spear and was coming to knock it against his head.

Only she wasn’t.

She was taking it into the prairie to hunt.

“Go on, then!” he spat after her. “If there’s anything left of you for me to find, I’ll find it when my hunt is done and not before!”

She kept walking.

“O Sheul, my Father, she is Yours,” Meoraq said loudly. “And if feeding the beasts of the wildlands is as much use as she can be to You, so be it!”

Sheul’s answer was a darkening across his heart, a terrible weight of censure in his very soul. Meoraq found he could not hold his eyes to Amber’s stiff back; they went instead to the dull half of her broken spear, and his blood crawled with shame.

‘She smiled when she saw me coming,’ he thought. ‘She had come to greet me.’

He had once seen his mother come to the outer courtyard to greet his father just that way after the battle at Kuaq. Meoraq remembered well his embarrassment that she had let herself be seen so publicly and with such effluence of emotion. And he remembered how Rasozul had reached out his arm to clasp her shoulder in passing, a gentle touch shared just between them in that one moment they had, and how she had bent her neck to brush at the back of his hand with her cheek, as if the touch were all she craved in the world.

Amber was a dark stripe in the distance—a foolish female with half a spear and no strength in the arm that carried it. None of the other humans moved to follow. Not even her Nicci.

Someone came to stand beside him. Scott, of all people. Scott, wholly ignorant of how deeply Meoraq wished to bury his blade in his smirking face, saying, “You better go after her.”

Meoraq looked at him, his spines flat and his pulse surely flashing yellow in his throat. “I do not like you either,” he said quietly.

The human’s happy grimace quickly wiped itself away as Scott retreated.

Meoraq looked again into the prairie, but Amber could no longer be seen. ‘Idiot,’ he thought, and felt the word echoed back at him.

He should go after her.

All the humans were watching.

Meoraq turned around and walked in the opposite direction. Her temper and the pride that fueled it would cool. She would return and he would take the higher path and allow her to ask his forgiveness for her fit of human petulance.

The wind blew. The morning air was still clear and dry, but not so fresh as it had seemed. The sun had risen higher behind the rolling clouds, yet the world seemed no brighter. Meoraq walked in darkness and he walked alone.

4

Meoraq’s heart may not have been in the hunt, but his heart was not necessary. His body made an easy kill of two panicked saoqs drinking at a distant ground-spring, which he could have taken at once back to camp for his hungry humans. Instead, he butchered them alone in the plains and he made thorough work of it, not merely fleshing and skinning. There was dried dung enough for a thousand fires, so he built one and sat beside it as he worked. There was bowel to clean, long bones full of precious marrow, and time, plenty of time, to think.

He thought of the spear he had broken. The clumsy, crooked, childish spear which Amber had probably made herself. Over and over, he saw himself breaking it. Over and over, he saw her walking away into the wildlands with the splintered tip he’d left her.

He prayed.

At last, Meoraq buried the meat and moved his fire atop it. He threw the most of the emptied bones into the coals to burn, trusting the foul smoke to ward away any beasts who might otherwise be drawn in by the smell of blood. He bundled his marrow and all the clean fat he’d scraped off to render down if he had the time. Into the last carrying pouch of his possession, he set the edible offal, wrapped in grass to soak in the blood. Then he left it all in Sheul’s hands and walked half a span across the plains to the nearest stand of zuol trees.

Making the spear took all the rest of that day, which was fine, because the saoq had to roast anyway. He hadn’t made one, even for idle amusement, since his boyhood days, but it was one of the lessons Master Takktha had taught and what the body has had beaten into it by Master Takktha, it does not soon forget. This spear might never have had the honor of hanging on the wall in the training yard, but Meoraq was certain it would have earned a turn in Takktha’s hand at least. He’d cut six zuol saplings before he’d found the balance he’d desired in a haft; he did not consider this a waste, since there were ten thousand uses for the fine, straight poles of young zuol and the humans were entirely without them. He then spent easily two hours peeling bark, trimming branches, and smoothing its length with the rough side of a stone—far more work than was strictly necessary, but it did look damned nice when it was done. There was plenty of xuseth around, all gone to seed this late in the year, but he dug up a few roots and split them to rub its oily fibers into the green wood. After some meditation, he took the flared wings of the saoq’s hip-bones (which he had tossed to the coals earlier, but which had fallen aside by Sheul’s grace and gone unburned, though heat-cured and hard as rock) and carved along their outer edges. Then he carefully split the green wood of the spear’s tip—a difficult task made infinitely easier by the xuseth oil—and worked the shards of bone beneath so that they protruded in flaring points along four sides. By this time, the fire had died down to perfect coals and he spent the rest of the day alternately baking the spear over them and applying more xuseth until the spear was as strong as stone. He made a few practice throws just to satisfy his vanity, then swiftly bound his spare poles into a sled and loaded the meat for travel.

It was dark when he finally left, but the shine of the moon behind the clouds was enough to guide him until he could make out the many fires of the humans in his camp.  He was surprised to see meat in several hands as he pulled his sled through their slow-moving bodies, and he saw that they were almost as surprised to see him at all. So. They thought he had abandoned them, and this had been all the motivation they required to see to their own survival. He was now of half a mind to abandon them again tomorrow.

He could not see Amber at a casual glance, so Meoraq turned himself and his sled toward the sound of Scott’s voice, because Scott sounded angry and that usually meant he was talking at Amber. Soon, he saw the man himself at the fore of a loose ring of other humans, all together around a fire where the smell of roasting meat and burning bones was strongest, and yes, Scott stopped his angry words at the first sight of Meoraq and said instead, “He’s back. Get up right now and apologize,” so Amber had to be there somewhere.

Meoraq hissed and humans moved aside for him, revealing her on her knees with the fire turning her hair to red and her back full to him, but she was starting to turn and there was a grudging sort of curl on her mouthparts as she raised her hand to greet—

The poles of the sled fell out of his grip and the world itself seemed to drop away with it.

There was a knife in her hand.

“O my Father, no,” he heard himself say.

She scowled, deciding to be angry. “What the hell is it now?”