Enth might hate her now. She found the thought painful. The only retreat from that pain would be to take up the ground that Harathes had prepared: that Enth was a thing, a monster; that what Enth might feel—if Enth could feel—was too trivial for Light-blessed humans to concern themselves with. Eschewing that convenient philosophy, she exposed herself to the emotional consequences of her actions.

When she opened the door, he was there, standing on the other side as though he had been waiting like that through all the hours of the day. She tried to find meaning in his gray face, in the liquid black discs of his eyes, letting the moment stretch out. In her own self, something moved: uncertain but undeniable. Pieces of last night kept filtering back into her recollection. The confusion, the tentative motions, his fear of something unknown and unknowable; then the physicalities, the rhythms and the clutch of her arms against the hard muscle of his back; his own fierce grip that was strong enough to crush her, and yet could never do so. And she had lain beside him, after, and felt nothing of the guilt and shame and disgust that usually came to her, with that unwelcome postcoital clarity. Because what she had pressed herself against was not the smudged and overwritten story of some lothario, that would leave her marked and dirty with its expectations and its baggage. Enth was tabula rasa, and she had come away from him unsullied. Or so she had felt. Lying beside him, still comfortably drunk and feeling sleep steal upon her, she had felt at peace.

“We’re leaving here,” she blurted out awkwardly. “We…” Last night, I need to talk about last night, I need to ask if I’ve wronged you. But she did not have the words, and more than likely Enth did not have the ability to understand the question. No doubt he saw what had gone on as just an extension of the general way he had been treated ever since they had taken him from his home. The thought was hard-edged and ugly.

She wanted to say that she was sorry, but even that might be more than he could understand, and what did that ever solve, anyway? She’d had enough empty apologies made to her, in her life.

“Thank you for not killing me,” Enth came out with, apparently after his own struggle for vocabulary.

“I, yes, I spoke for you. Lief spoke for you. You’re not going to be killed.” She felt a rush of relief that the talk had gone so quickly onto comprehensible things.

But Enth’s head twitched sideways twice, a weird tic until she realized he was shaking it, disagreeing with her. “After the union,” he said.