I clear the channel for most of the morning. The work is physical and repetitive. I move along the corridor, section by section, pulling debris, scraping packed dirt with a flat stone, opening the groove. My hands get dirty and shoulders ache from reaching.
The groove sits above my head. I have been working with my arms raised for two hours and my body has opinions about the architectural choices of ancient serpent priests.
Around midday, he comes back, surveying what I have done. Twenty feet of cleared channel, the debris piled on the floor beside me.
“Good,” he says.
The way he says it. One word, low, with a weight behind it that I don’t think he intended. Like he hasn’t had reason to say it to another person in a long time.
“Careful,” I say. “Compliments like that, I’ll start trying.”
“It was twenty feet of channel.”
“You’ve said maybe four words to me since the river. For you, that’s a speech.” Something shifts at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. The place a smile would start, if he let it. I look back at the stone before he can catch me watching for it.
He has brought food, setting it on the floor near me.
I eat. He stays in the corridor while I do.
When I finish, I reach for the water jug at the same time he reaches to take the empty bowl. His hand closes over mine on the clay.
He pulls back fast, the movement controlled but the speed of it not. He pulls away from my skin the way you pull away from heat.
I look at my hand. Where his fingers covered mine, the skin is pink. Not the gray he warned me about. Not damage. Pink, the way skin looks when blood comes to the surface. Warm.
He sees it, too. Stopped in the corridor with the bowl in his other hand and his eyes on the flush across my knuckles.
I hold my hand out. Not toward the bowl. Toward him. Palm up. The pink still visible across my knuckles.
He looks at my hand. He does not take it.
Neither of us says anything.
His hand is still near mine. Where his fingers covered my knuckles, the skin is warm. Not the cautious warmth of venom contact. Something else. Something that stays after the touch is gone and settles lower than my hand.
I pull my sleeve down over the warm place like that will make it stop. It doesn’t. So I go back to the channel, because stone is a problem I know how to put my hands on, and whatever just moved between us over a clay bowl is not.
That night I lie on the bedroll, and the warmth is still there. I feel the shape of his grip around my knuckles as I press them against the rough fabric. My body has kept the impression. My body is keeping a lot of things I have not asked it to keep.
I can’t sleep and decide to follow the warm air.
The corridor slopes down to a second level. The stone is warmer here, the air thicker. I turn a corner and the passage opens into a low chamber. Stone basins cut into the floor, fed by a spring that seeps up through cracks in the rock. The water is green-clear and steaming. The largest basin is the size of a small room.
Moss grows thick at the lip. Nobody has been here in a long time. The steam drifts in the lamplight.
I stand at the edge and the heat off the water hits my face and I want in so badly my shoulders ache worse for it. A whole day spent reaching over my head, and here is a pool the size of a room, steaming, just sitting here for the taking. I crouch and put two fingers in. Warm to the bone. I could be in it in ten seconds.
I make myself stand up instead.
I do not know what feeds heat like this, and I am not getting into strange water in the dark without asking the male who owns it first. Which means tomorrow I get to make him talk to me.
VADH
Her hand is fine.
I check it again at breakfast, when she comes into the main hall still blinking sleep out of her eyes and sits on her stone and reaches for the water jug. Her sleeve rides up.
The skin is clean.
