“How long…” he asked. “How long have we been here?”
“The sun has risen and set twice since I awakened, and now it is night,” she told him. “I do not know how long I was unconscious before that.” She felt Reza’s eyes close, the brushing of his eyelashes a pleasant tickle against the skin of her breast. Thinking he had returned to the quiet of sleep, she said no more.
But he was not asleep, only thinking. “Esah-Zhurah,” Reza said, breaking the silence, “why are you still here?”
“What do you mean?” she asked, puzzled.
“The storm has long since passed, has it not?” Outside, the only thing to be heard was the muted sound of Goliath’s breathing and an occasional groan as the beast voiced its hunger.
“It is so,” she answered cautiously, unsure where his thoughts would lead.
“I was as good as dead, drowned in the river,” Reza went on, his voice a gentle but unrelenting probe, exploring her motivations. “You could have left me behind. You could have taken the shelter and Goliath and tried to make it on your own. Why did you not?”
She shifted uncomfortably beside him. “I shamed my honor with my arrogance by abandoning you,” she said, her voice low and measured, each syllable a self-punishment exacted by her conscience. “I could not abandon you again. You are strange, and not of our Way, but you… are special to me, in a way I do not fully understand.” She paused. “I could not bear the thought of losing you.”
His hand found hers. There was no need for words. She held him tightly, feeling the warm wetness of his tears upon her breast. In her heart there was a quiet jubilation that they were both alive, and that this day they were something more than they had ever been before.
As their bodies melded together in the deepening cold, she found herself murmuring softly in a prayer to the Empress, asking if perhaps this human – just this one – might indeed have a soul and a place among Her Children.
When Reza again awoke, it was to a sensation of rampant thirst the likes of which he had never known. Esah-Zhurah had done her best to give him what fluids she could against the fever that had taken him, and had drained all of the shelter’s normal liquid supplies. But it had not made up for what he had lost, and the debt the fever had left in its wake had finally caught up to him. The inside of his mouth felt like it was sewn together from sun-baked leather.
“Water,” he croaked.
“Here,” she said, holding a small clump of packed snow to his lips.
He opened his mouth eagerly, but found the icy snow, taken from a small pile Esah-Zhurah had brought in for the purpose, to be like acid in his mouth. It burned in his throat as it grudgingly metamorphosed into its liquid form. Even so, his thirst was so overpowering that he began to suck on it greedily, and was rewarded with a fit of coughing as water found its way into his trachea, choking him.
Esah-Zhurah held him steady as his coughing subsided into ragged breathing. He was still terribly weak.
“Wait,” she told him, gently rolling him onto his back.
He heard her scoop up some snow from wherever she had it sequestered behind him, and then she was silent for a while.
“What are you doing?” he asked, staring into the darkness.
Then he felt one of her hands reach down to cradle the back of his head, lifting it up, while the other gripped his lower jaw and gently forced it open. With shocked surprise he felt her lips press against his, and then cool water was spilling into his mouth from hers. For a moment, he did nothing, disbelieving that she was actually doing such a thing – the rough equivalent among her kind of a human kissing a dog in the world he had once known – and wondering if he should be thankful or repulsed by her touch.
But then her lips pulled away, and he forced himself to swallow the water she had shared with him, having melted the snow in her mouth with the heat of her body. With a detached, almost shameful sense of curiosity, he found himself analyzing the water for any trace of her own taste that might be there, noting with mixed emotions the lack of anything unpleasant.
“More?” Esah-Zhurah asked. She had discovered that actually carrying out the idea that had struck her had been… pleasant. It was not at all like when she had pressed her frozen mouth to his to force air into his lungs. In fact, it had excited her in a way. She wondered what it must have been like before the reign of the First Empress, when male warriors walked among her race, and there were no clawless ones, no sterile mules like herself. Did they perhaps lie quietly next to one another like this on cold winter nights, speaking only with the beating of their hearts and the touch of their bodies? This was the stuff of legend, of fairy tales, or so many peers thought, and undoubtedly it was so. The ancient tales and songs of those times struck a hollow chord among the Empire’s warriors. For they knew that the males of their race were nothing more than instruments for the propagation of their species, and it was hard to imagine they had ever been anything more. Some, like Tesh-Dar, truly believed the ancient legends as historical truth. But many had their doubts. Esah-Zhurah tended to believe that the legends were only stories. But something in her mind, a tiny race memory left in the wake of the long evolution of her people, left her thinking that perhaps the peers, the doubters, were wrong.
Licking the tiny bit of moisture that had spilled on his lips, Reza nodded in the darkness. “Please,” he begged, his thirst now completely awakened, a ravenous thing trapped in his parched mouth.
Esah-Zhurah repeated her performance four more times, until her tiny stockpile of snow was gone. She noted with a twinge of alarm that touching Reza this way was beginning to seem more than just pleasant. As she gave him the last of the water, the stream between their joined mouths now spent, she pulled away from him, pausing with her lips a hair’s breadth from his, her heart beating like thunder in her ears.
“Thank you,” he whispered, his lips brushing hers as he spoke the words, sending a jolt of emotional electricity through her. He reached out, running his fingers across her cheek, through her hair, before drawing her down to him. Like strangers whose destiny was to become fast friends and more, their lips touched in a gentle kiss that left them both breathless. When their lips parted, he only had time to utter her name before she kissed him in her own turn, carefully lowering her body onto his, her breasts pools of heat against his chest.
Reza felt a stiffening at his groin that he had experienced before only in his sleep. It was something he had never experienced in human company. He moaned softly as his erection pressed against the smooth, taut flesh of her belly, and he felt her shiver as his hands moved down her back to stroke her sides, his fingers tracing invisible patterns against her skin.
Esah-Zhurah was nearly lost to a power she had never even dreamt of, something that had not been experienced by a member of her race for thousands of generations: physical love. Her mind sought vainly to understand what her body instinctively knew, and she felt the first stirrings of a part of her that – as a mule – normally would have remained dormant her entire life. The fire that had begun in her veins when their lips touched had worked its way downward, and the wetness she felt in the furnace that burned between her thighs both exhilarated and terrified her.
“Esah-Zhurah,” Reza whispered, reluctantly parting from her kiss, “is this even possible?”
“Yes,” she answered huskily, gently running her fingers over Reza’s face. “Our bodies… are similar enough to a human female’s, but…” She shook her head and began to pull away from him, but he held her back.