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Jenny was shivering, and her teeth were chattering. She felt utterly wretched, cold and exhausted and sore all through from her exertions. She wasn't struggling through a blizzard—the snow, in fact, was feathery and drifting and picture-perfect, like a child's vision of Christmas—but she had long ago ceased to look at anything around her. She must have been in plain sight of the cabin for whole minutes before her frozen mind registered, belatedly, that it was a cabin. Which meant that, just possibly, they weren't going to die.
She had been physically dragging Madame for—oh, it felt like a hundred years, a thousand, long enough to feel that Sisyphus was an utter whinger unless his hill had snow on. Madame was completely insensible, completely motionless. She didn't even stir as Jenny hauled her up the single step to the cabin door.
Which was latched. Ordinarily, Jenny would have been able to take care of that in seconds, but her shaking hands stretched the process into pure agony.
Damn and blast Germany. Damn and blast cases that took them to Germany. Damn and blast people who tried to kill them for investigating. Damn and blast Jack Harkness for his habit of tossing the occasional "aliens that Torchwood doesn't need to know about" investigation in their general direction, and while she was at it, damn and blast him for flirting with Madame and making Jenny want to throttle him.
The latch yielded. Jenny pulled the door open, then dragged Madame over the threshold.
This was some sort of hunting lodge or seasonal cottage, she decided. It had the look of a place that had been closed up for the winter. What that meant, unfortunately, was that Jenny had to go back out to get firewood off the woodpile. She had to hesitate in the doorway for a long moment and clench her jaw before she could will herself over the threshold.
When she came back in, she was struck by how extremely still Madame looked, lying on the floor where Jenny had left her. Jenny dropped the firewood in front of the stove and hurried to Madame's side, fingers searching for a pulse—and then she realized that she was far too numb to feel one.
She didn't have a mirror for Madame to breathe on. She wasn't even certain that would work. And it didn't matter, Jenny decided, because Madame was absolutely still alive, there wasn't even a question, and she had better get on with keeping her warm enough to stay that way.
Coaxing fire from the tinder was simple enough, but the wood was damp, and spat.
Her clothes were wet, too. Wet clothes were bad. Jenny stripped down to the skin, then set about undressing Madame, keeping a wary eye on the fire all the while. She would have relaxed slightly when she heard the stovepipe start to heat, but her mind had narrowed to cold cold cold and she didn't have the wherewithal for relief.
Blankets. Blankets made warmth. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she had a muzzy memory of Madame explaining that blankets didn't necessarily make warmth, that was a human thing, but she didn't care.
A brief and extremely untidy rifling of the cabin yielded bedding. Jenny dumped it on Madame in a heap, then crawled under it herself.
Madame was cold, but that didn't mean she wasn't alive. Because she was. She was, and that was the end of the matter. Jenny pressed her back against her mistress, and draped Madame's arm across her.
She had forgot to hang their clothes up to dry, but she'd do that in a moment. Just as soon as she'd got Madame a little warmer. Just a moment . . .
~~~~~~~~
"Seraz," Madame murmured.
Jenny didn't feel as if she'd been asleep, but the word woke her from something.
She was entirely underneath a messy pile of blankets, not even her nose poking out. She had to shift just to peek out and make sure the fire was still going.
As soon as she did so, Madame tightened her grip. "Seraz aesh," she protested, and pulled Jenny back against her.
The fire had burned down to red coals. "I have to put a log on," Jenny protested, and wriggled downwards. "I'll be back in just a—ow!—minute." Scales might be beautiful—at least, they were to Jenny's eyes—but an unwary human could scratch herself on them.
There were times when Jenny fervently wished she had been born—or hatched—homoreptilia sapiens. Next to Madame, she felt weak, soft, and ignorant. It didn't help that Madame was often less than fond of homo sapiens, even as she protected them from threats. And there were things that Jenny might never understand. She remembered the moment when Madame had tried to describe the sensation called tsokesh—what one felt when scales were stroked in the wrong direction—and they had never got much further than, the sensation of scales being stroked in the wrong direction. It wasn't itching, Madame had said. She itched enough during her yearly molt; she should know. Tsokesh was similarly irritating, but an entirely different feeling for all that.
Jenny put the next log on the fire. The heat as she opened the stove door made her face feel tight. She ached all over, but she had the distinct impression that was a good thing, the protestations of muscles and nerves that were, despite their complaining, fundamentally intact.
She only basked for a few seconds before crawling back under her nest of blankets. Madame reached out and pulled her close as soon as Jenny touched her. "Seraz nel. Shcho."
Nel meant good, if Jenny remembered correctly. The other words were unfamiliar.
Jenny closed her eyes and remembered the conversation when she had finally realized that she had been born into the wrong species. They had been discussing Madame's persona, her excuse for hiding her face, the eccentric noble Russian widow Madame Vastra Ierenova. Jenny had finally managed to ask, more than a little hesitantly, whether Madame had lost someone special.
"Yes. My kirosha. My . . ." She had hesitated. "Lover is the right word, I think, but also junior. It is a complex relationship, with many rules and customs to make sure that the areska—the senior—does not take advantage." Vastra had been quiet for a moment. "Her name was Ayirin."
And—as had happened before, the first time Jenny saw Madame without her veil—the world rearranged itself. Jenny had considered her emotions to be a private perversion, something that she would endure and hide and never impose upon Madame, because nobody else in the world felt like that about another woman, because she cared far too much about Madame to disgust her with such thoughts. But—lover.
Her name was Ayirin.
The arm across Jenny's bare chest was not entirely comfortable, but she could have wished the embrace to last for a hundred years.
It was a bittersweet thought, the notion that Madame had mistaken her for Ayirin, for a person Jenny wasn't and could never be. But she wanted the illusion, just for a little while. She wanted seraz to mean beloved.
~~~~~~~~
The next time she woke, it was with the realization that Madame was gone.
Jenny sat bolt upright and then, realizing she was still nude, clutched the blanket to her chest. "It's all right," Madame said soothingly, as soon as she moved. She moved to Jenny's side. "I'm right here. It's all right."
Jenny blinked and rubbed sleep dust from her eyes. From the light in the window, it was just after dawn. Which, at this time of year, probably meant ten o'clock or so.
"The owners of this place didn't leave any food, I'm afraid," Madame told her. "I just searched. Will you need me to catch you a squirrel or two before we decide on our next move? I should be able to manage that."
Her tone was solicitous, and Jenny felt ashamed. Yet another weakness of humanity; the constant need for food. True, Madame required considerable quantities of meat when she did eat, but she didn't feel the need to do it every day, much less several times a day. The sheer emphasis that human society put on eating—fine dining, dinner parties, whole professions built around a single kind of food—both bemused and amused her. "I'll be fine for a bit, ma'am," Jenny said.
"You're sure? Because it's no more than my duty."
"I'm fine. Thank you, ma'am." Jenny looked down. "I'm sorry."
"Whatever for?"
"For being . . ." Jenny made a helpless motion, intended to indicate her frailness and general humanity.
Madame looked at her, surprised, then sank down to sit next to Jenny. "You realize," she said, less lightly and more slowly, "that your blast-furnace metabolism just saved my life."
Jenny blinked. "What?"
"It always seemed a trifle silly to me," Madame admitted, "the way your bodies work. Being continually warm would be nice, but the price is a constant demand for fuel." Madame shook her head. "Last night, you gave me a very vivid demonstration of a situation in which your body has the clear advantage. No heat source, surrounded by snow—and you not only managed to carry me to safety, you were conscious enough to light a fire. Do you have any idea how very nearly supernatural that seems to me? To us, cold is something that slows us, saps our mental faculties, forces us into torpor, and eventually, kills."
"Humans die of cold, too," Jenny protested.
"True enough, but compared to us, you remain functional almost until the end. It was a terrifying thing, to many; a death that forces you asleep so it can kill you at its leisure." She put her hand over Jenny's. "And you saved me from that, with your own body. Thanks are inadequate, but I thank you anyway."
"I was glad to do it, ma'am," Jenny said. "I'm just glad you're all right."
Madame smiled. "I am."
Jenny hesitated for a long, unbearable moment, then blurted, "You talked in your sleep. I thought you didn't dream, but . . ."
"Not quite the way you do," Madame said, "with sleepwalking and bursts of mad narrative. My dreams are slower, steadier, and considerably less baroque; my people never used them for prognostication, nor psychoanalysis. To my forebearers, they simply never seemed that interesting." Madame was somewhat bemused by Sigmund Freud, with his insistence that what humans thought they were thinking wasn't really what they thought. Some of her peoples' scientists put forward similar views, she'd told Jenny: that due to the onion-layered structure of the human brain, humans could not actually know what they were thinking or feeling. After soul-searching, she had decided that any theory which led to judgments such as, but they can't experience pain, not actual pain, not like real people, ought to be viewed with suspicion if not outright alarm. Bizarrely over-evolved pests the humans might be, but that sort of thinking would lead quickly to a person she wouldn't want to face in the mirror—or, she had said to Jenny, that's what a certain old madman would tell me, I think. "What did I say?"
"It was in your language," Jenny told her, "so I didn't understand it, but—seraz nel, I remember that. Seraz nel, scho . . ." She didn't get the consonant right, and knew it. It was one of those complicated sounds that reminded her of Russian. "And . . ."
Madame laughed aloud. Jenny trailed off.
"Seraz nel, shcho, perhaps?" Madame said. "Were you, by chance, getting up to put a log on the fire?"
"Er . . . just coming back from, actually. What does it mean?"
"'Good rock,'" Madame translated. "'Stay.'" She laughed again at the expression on Jenny's face. "In my society, children were given stones with small heating elements in them. They were . . . oh, about like a girl's favorite doll, I suppose. One carried them about, pretended they were pets . . ."
"Oh," Jenny said, very quietly.
"Oh, don't look like that." Madame put a finger under her chin to make her look up again. "There are worse things," she said quietly, "than being associated with a childhood memory of comfort."
Jenny had been remembering her silly romantic assumptions, and burning inside at how they looked in retrospect. She hadn't thought to look at it from that angle.
"Besides," Madame added, touching Jenny's face lightly, "you are the most marvelous heating rock a woman could possibly dream of."
The touch felt—very, very gentle, and meaningful. Much like Jenny's hopeless fantasies of Madame backing her into a corner and kissing her.
If they were hopeless. Because, that touch—the tone of Madame's voice—
"Now," Madame said, more briskly, "seraz aesh, we should determine where we are, and what to do next. Somehow I doubt a habitual man-eater would have forced us out of the carriage at gunpoint rather than shooting; that was more the reaction of a panicked family member shielding the true culprit, whose appetites she may not have known about before the evidence was given her. Not all the Scletheroi are guilty, I think. Our American friend had a good hump."
"Hunch," Jenny corrected, quite hastily. "A good hunch."
"It is a completely nonsensical expression either way."
Jenny couldn't argue with that, but then, she thought quite a lot of the things Jack Harkness said were a bit nonsensical. "What does seraz aesh mean?"
Madame smiled. "My heating rock."
Heating rock or not, Jenny's insides gave a funny little flutter at the emphasis Madame put on the word my.