‘You could always just fold your damn ears up again if you didn’t want to listen to me.’
Now, he was content to simply sit, holding the boat’s tiny rudder. It was far more pleasant company. The rudder was constant, the rudder was quiet. The rudder was going nowhere.
‘Why couldn’t you just have said you didn’t know how to plot courses?’ Asper roared at Denaos. ‘Why can’t you just be honest for once in your life?’
‘I’ll start when you do,’ Denaos replied.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
The humans had their own problems, he supposed: small, insignificant human problems that teemed in numbers as large as their throbbing, populous race. They would be solved by yelling, like all human problems were. They would yell, forget that problem, remember another one later, then yell more.
The Rhega had one problem.
One problem, he thought, in numbers as small as the one Rhega left.
‘Because we shouldn’t be arguing,’ Kataria retorted. ‘I shouldn’t feel the need to argue with you. I shouldn’t feel the need to talk to you! I should want to keep being silent, but—’
‘But what?’ Lenk snapped back.
‘But I’m standing here yelling at you, aren’t I?’
Things had happened on Ktamgi, he knew. He could smell the changes on them. Fear and suspicion between the tall man and the tall woman. Sweat and tension from the pointy-eared human and Lenk. Desire oozed from the skinny one in such quantities as to threaten to choke him on its stink.
‘It’s supposed to mean exactly what it does mean,’ Denaos spat back. ‘What happened on Ktamgi that’s got you all silent and keeping your pendant hidden?’
‘I’ve got it right here,’ Asper said, holding up the symbol of Talanas’ Phoenix in a manner that was less proof and more an attempt to drive the rogue away like an unclean thing.
‘Today, you do, and you haven’t stopped rubbing it since you woke up.’ Denaos’ brow rose as the colour faded from her face. ‘With,’ he whispered, ‘your left hand.’
‘Shut up, Denaos,’ she hissed.
‘Not just accidentally, either.’
‘Shut up!’
‘But you’re right-handed, which leads me to ask again. What happened in Irontide?’
‘She said,’ came Dreadaeleon’s soft voice accompanied by a flash of crimson in his scowl, ‘to shut up.’
Their problems would come and go. His would not. They would yell. They would fight. When they were tired of that, they would find new humans to yell at.
There were no more Rhega to yell at. There never would be. Grahta had told him as much on Ktamgi.
You can’t come.
Grahta’s voice still rang in his head, haunting him between breaths. The image of him lurked behind his blinking eyes. He did not forget them, he did not want to forget them, but he could only hold them in his mind for so long before they vanished.
As Grahta had vanished into a place where Gariath could not follow.
‘It’s not like this is exactly easy for me, either,’ Lenk snapped back.
‘How? How is this not easy for you? What do you even do?’ Kataria snarled. ‘Sit here and occasionally stare at me? Look at me?’
‘Oh, it’s all well and good for you to—’
‘Let. Me. Finish.’ Her teeth were rattling in her skull now, grinding against each other with such ferocity that they might shatter into powder. ‘If you stare, if you speak to me, you’re still human. You’re still what you are. If I stare at you, if I speak to you, what am I?’
‘Same as you always were.’
‘No, I’m not. If I feel the need to stare at you, Lenk, if I want to talk to you, I’m not a shict anymore. And the more I want to talk to you, the more I want to feel like a shict again. The more I want to feel like myself.’
‘And you can only do that by ignoring me?’
‘No.’ Her voice was a thunderous roar now, cutting across the sea. ‘I can only do that by killing you.’
The wind changed. Gariath could smell the humans change with it. He heard them fall silent at the pointy-eared one’s voice, of course, saw their eyes turn to her, wide with horror. Noise and sight were simply two more ways for humans to deceive themselves, though. Scent could never be disguised.
An acrid stench of shock. Sour, befouled fear. And then, a brisk, crisp odour of hatred. From both of them. And then, bursting from all the humans like pus from a boil, that most common scent of confusion.
His interest lasted only as long as it took for him to remember that humans