CHAPTER FOUR | Fiona
Igave him an out, I thought as we piled into Valeria’s shuttle later that day. I told him he didn’t have to come. He’s a big boy and he can make his own decisions.
But... I still felt bad. It was too easy, sometimes, with our ra-ra-everyone-be-friends human shtick to forget that there were very real grievances and very recent wounds among the tribes of this world. Dalk, Vaxilkai, Oxriel, and Bariok had been imprisoned in Gahn Thaleo’s mountain when they’d come into the Deep Sky to bring Priya back after her disappearance. I didn’t expect Dalk or any of the others to forgive a thing like that. And I didn’t expect him to want to come with us to Gahn Thaleo’s mountain.
But here he was, sitting on the metal floor directly in front of my seat with his long legs bent awkwardly, his back to me. Valeria and Grim were seated up front in their usual spots. Nasrin and Tilly, like me, were strapped into two of the other chairs that folded out from the shuttle’s walls. Bariok and Vaxilkai had ultimately decided to stay back at Gahn Errok’s, though Oxriel had come, and Zoren, too, both of them on the floor, too big to fit into the fourth empty chair.
Why Dalk hadn’t stayed behind with Bariok and Vaxilkai was anyone’s bloody guess. Oh, apart from all that nonsense about desperate Deep Sky males. I wondered what went on in that big alien head of his. Did Dalk really think that some Deep Sky dude was going to pounce on me the moment that he wasn’t there and drag me screaming into some dark hidey hole to be his unwilling human wife?
I stared down at the top of his dark head, watching the way the muscles of his shoulders and on either side of his spine bunched and rolled with tension as the shuttle lifted off. Much like his Gahn, the infamous (or just plain-old-insane) Fallo, Dalk tended to wear more knives and blades strapped to his body than the other Sea Sand or Deep Sky men did. Two very long black blades made an X shape across the broad expanse of his back, plus smaller blades (that were likely just knives to him but machetes to me) fastened all along those straps. Then he had the belt with more knives, all topped off with a spear balanced with perfect power on his lap. With the movement of the shuttle and the awkward bend of his legs in his current position, the spear should have been wobbling all over the place. But it wasn’t. One hand curled long, dark fingers over the middle of the spear’s shaft, and that one point of contact kept the whole impressive length of the weapon tight and still.
“Who taught you how to handle a spear?” I suddenly asked him over the din of the engines.
It seemed to take a moment for Dalk to realize I was speaking to him. He twisted to look back at me, coppery sight stars shimmering into focus.
“My father died when I was very young. His brother Taraken taught me what I needed to know. He never had a mate. No sons of his own.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. About your father.”
Dalk made a clicking sound of irritation with his tongues before turning around and facing forward once again.
“I will never understand why you new women apologize for the deaths of others.”
“It’s just how we deal with grief, I guess.”
“But you should not apologize for a death you did not cause. And if you did cause a death, then you should have meant to do it and thus would not be sorry, anyway.”
I am really stepping in it today.
“What about your uncle?” I asked, trying to change the subject. “Is he still around?”
“Yes. He is one of the warriors stationed back in Gahn Fallo’s territory, holding watch over our ancestral lands in the Gahn’s absence.”
For some reason, that surprised me. Dalk had never mentioned having any living family before. But then again, he wasn’t exactly the chattiest male I’d ever encountered.
I lapsed into silence, shuffling pink and red paper hearts in my hands as I absorbed what Dalk just said. He had a living uncle out there, family in the lands he missed so much.
Why was he staying here?
That was probably a question that I should have kept to my own damn self, but it came bubbling up and out of me anyway.
“Why do you stay in the Deep Sky? I’m sure Gahn Fallo would rotate you out of here. Even if he wasn’t reasonable about it, I’m certain Chapman would be willing to send a replacement if you wanted to do a tour as a guard with your uncle back in your homeland.”
Dalk had already been tense. But somehow, he got even tenser. Like someone had drawn a zipper up the length of his spine, pulling him upright vertebrae-by-vertebrae until his back could have been used as a level.
Very carefully, very slowly, and without turning back to look at me, he said, “Would you wish me replaced with another male?”
“What?” I stammered, flabbergasted by his words. “What the hell kind of a question is that?”
I lowered my voice when Nasrin and Oxriel broke off their conversation mid-sentence to toss curious looks my way.
“I wasn’t saying anything like that,” I whisper-hissed, leaning as far forward as the harness of the seat would let me. “I just... It’s just that you don’t seem very happy here.”
“Since when have you been so concerned with my happiness?” There was an odd, snippy edge to his voice I couldn’t quite understand or identify.
“Since... always? Since I’m a nice, normal person? You said you missed your homeland, and now I know you have a living relative there. I just don’t understand why you’re staying here and being miserable about it if you don’t need to be.”
“Who says that I am miserable?” he asked, still not looking at me. “And who says that there would not be things for me to miss here, were I to leave one day?”
I rolled my eyes.
“Oh, yeah. Right. Like all the water. And the Deep Sky men you love so much. You’d definitely miss all those things.”
While the Deep Sky men seemed to have a bit more of a knack for it, the Sea Sand guys didn’t often identify sarcasm well. I didn’t know if Dalk couldn’t quite make it out in my voice or if he just chose to ignore it, but either way he simply said, “You are wrong. I would not miss them.”
The shuttle was already angling down for landing. We were arriving at Gahn Thaleo’s mountain, and I wished Dalk had never come here at all. Guilt twisted in my belly, and I fought the urge to throw all the Valentine’s Day cards on the floor.
“See?” I muttered, sagging back against my seat as the shuttle descended. “Nothing’s stopping you. You said yourself you miss your old home. You should go back. It might do you good.”
The shuttle touched down, the engines whirring, then quieting. Dalk could have walked away from me then, heading to the shuttle’s exit as Oxriel and Zoren were currently doing.
But he didn’t.
He snapped the spear up out of his lap and then stood so fast it nearly made me dizzy. Finally, he turned around to look at me. I gawked at him, chastened into silence by the bright, hot throb of his sight stars when his eyes met mine. He hinged at the hips, bending until our faces were level with each other and there was nowhere for me to look but at him. Then, his lip curling up into a snarl, fangs glinting with the promised bite of rage, he uttered a single scathing scrape of sound in the shape of a word.
“No.”