CHAPTER THREE | Dalk
Skin me alive and feed me to a krixel, I thought sullenly, glowering as Fiona rejoined the other new women and began handing out the rest of the Valentine’s Day cards. Somewhere with her, I have stumbled.
Maybe it was when I literally stumbled just now. Or, rather, when I nearly ran full-tilt into a blasted boulder. I’d been bemoaning the state of the Deep Sky men’s brains and then I tried to walk right through a solid wall. If Gahn Fallo had seen me – one of his finest warriors! – behaving with such foolish incompetence, then no doubt he would have doled out some inventive and deeply unpleasant punishment for me.
I wished it had been Gahn Fallo who’d seen it instead of her.
Anything my Gahn came up with would not be half so bad as humiliating myself in front of a soft, pretty female with eyes like sun-warmed rocks in pools of Lavrika’s blood and flowers on her skin.
No punishment could make me feel the way Fiona just did when she told me kissing me had been a mistake.
Maybe it wasn’t walking into that absurdly-placed, hateful chunk of rock at all. Maybe I’d done something wrong at the very moment of the kiss. Maybe I’d... put my lips against hers wrong. Maybe one of my fangs had poked her. Maybe I tasted too much like that disgusting pee-tzaw. Although, I rather thought that should have been a point in my favour, considering she seemed to love the abhorrent stuff.
Maybe it wasn’t the pee-tzaw at all. Maybe I just tasted bad.
What did a Sea Sand male taste like to a new woman?
What had I tasted like to her?
Her tongue hadn’t even touched my lips, though. Perhaps it was not taste at all but smell. Or feel.
Did it feel bad to touch her mouth to mine?
“What is wrong with you? You look like you want to hurl somebody off that ledge,” Oxriel remarked, sidling up next to me.
“Unless you want to be the one falling to your death,” I muttered blackly back at him, “then you will tie your tongues together and be silent.”
No doubt sensing himself in imminently mortal danger, Oxriel left me to my own unspooling thoughts. I ate a little of the Deep Sky meat, though I barely tasted it. Mostly, I watched Fiona as she handed out more pay-pur hearts with her friends, many of them going with a smile to Deep Sky men whom I thought very, very hard about skewering with my blades.
I was a strong male. A warrior of will. I could control myself. I would not kill a man just for accepting a gift from her...
Probably.
Oxriel was right. Now I really was thinking about hurling men right out of the hall. There was no guard wall, just dawn-spangled, temptingly open air beyond this space. Outside, the other mountains gleamed, the deep blue of them glazed with morning sunshine.
It was not long before the morning meal was done and most of the pay-pur hearts had been handed out. The rest, I heard Tilly say to Zakkar, were for Gahn Thaleo’s tribe.
“We’re going to take the shuttle over there later,” Fiona added.
“I will accompany you.”
They turned towards me, and it was only then that I realized it was I who had spoken.
“Oh! You don’t have to,” Fiona said in a rush. “I know you don’t like going there.”
I would have bet all five of the claws on my left hand that no man enjoyed returning to the mountain of the foreign Gahn who’d once held him captive. It was not so very long ago that Gahn Thaleo had imprisoned Vaxilkai, Bariok, Oxriel, and me after finding us with Priya and Lerokan in his territory.
Fiona was no doubt referring to the first night our party had landed in this valley, when Gahn Thaleo invited us to eat with his tribe in his mountain. I had seethed at the idea of returning there and had nearly drawn a blade on him when I’d seen him. Valeria had scolded me, and it had been decided that I should stay behind to guard the new camp while the others went to Gahn Thaleo’s mountain without me.
I’d regretted it the moment the shuttle disappeared, taking Fiona with it.
I would not allow her to return to that territory without me again.
“Do not concern yourself with what I like or do not like,” I said, my voice coming sharper than I’d intended. I found it difficult to form calm words around her in that moment. My mind was still turning over question after question, each one erupting through me with the force of a death blow – did it feel bad did I taste bad what in the merciless stretch of the Sea Sands did I do wrong? – but I managed to grind out the rest of my response. “I am your chaperone. So I will chaperone you.”
“I don’t think you’re our chaperones,” Fiona said, frowning slightly at Tilly, and Tilly nodded her agreement. “I think it’s more that all the other Gahns wanted a representative from their tribes at the new Deep Sky settlement. You’re not our bodyguards or anything like that.”
“Have you forgotten,” I said tightly, my tail tensing, “that there are no unmated females left in Gahn Thaleo’s tribe? You may not think that you need guarding, but you do. I refuse to allow you to wander protectionless into the den of desperate males.”
“Desperate males? That’s not exactly fair,” she said, her frown deepening. “None of the tribes have enough single women. Gahn Fallo’s tribe included.”
“Not enough is not the same as none.”
She did not know. None of them did.
No new woman would be able to comprehend the ever-present ache that lived inside every unmated Sea Sand male. Sometimes just an itch at the back of the brain, and sometimes a breath-stealing wallop that came at you when you least expected it, when you were least prepared to fight against it. Like when you suddenly woke in the cold embrace of night and there was no one with you in your tent, and you realized with the grim bite of a blade in your guts that maybe there would always be no one. Just you and your hides and your weapons in the empty, endless dark.
She could not know what it was to find them, to find her, that surreal day out on the open sands. To drag her away from the lethal zeelk claws that snapped so close to her slender human throat. I protected her skin as my own. I protected her skin more than my own, because I bled at the end of that day, but by the sands I made sure that she did not.
She could not know what it was like to carry her, broken and barely breathing on my irkdu. So small and strange and new she was.
And so very, very female.
I did not wish to know what sort of expression I wore upon my face at that moment. Whatever it was, it had Fiona closing her mouth, swallowing back whatever retort had been rising up her throat.
“I am coming with you,” I said. “Do not bother arguing. You cannot win.”