Chapter 5 Nasrin
NASRIN
Valeria moved away through the valley. When I went to follow her, Gahn Thaleo murmured, “Wait.”
I tensed, wondering if he’d touch me again.
My fingers twitched, feeling so much colder without his calloused hands wrapped around them.
Of course, that’s why he’d grabbed me. The cold.
I’d complained about the frigid water, and maybe Gahn Thaleo was as keenly aware of our poor, pathetic human constitution as the Sea Sand males were.
He was probably worried I’d get frostbite or something.
He wanted us human women safe and happy here so that we’d accept a Deep Sky mate from his tribe, should one be chosen for us.
And that meant keeping our fingers and little human toesies warm and intact.
He didn’t try to touch me again.
“What?” I snapped when he didn’t say anything more. I was surprised by the venom in my own voice.
“He is about to be told of his dying uncle,” Gahn Thaleo replied, as if I hadn’t just heard Valeria say the same thing. “A man does not need an audience for this.”
“An audience?” I glared. “I wouldn’t intrude!”
Valeria’s words about interrupting something reverberated through my brain.
It sounded like Fiona and Dalk had snuck away to be alone together for the second time today.
Third time, I supposed, if you included early this morning when Fiona fell and Dalk went barrelling into the cave to help her.
If they were getting closer, and Dalk was about to get ripped away, taken back to the Sea Sands to deal with this family trauma and grief, then she might need my support. She and Dalk both.
“I’m Dalk’s friend,” I continued stubbornly. “And Fiona’s.”
Gahn Thaleo’s sight stars pulsed, then drew taut on friend. As if the word shimmered in the air before him, a strange and foreign thing that required some sort of analysis. His face was a cool, scarred mask.
And maybe it was unkind of me, but I found myself shaking my head. “You know. A friend. Haven’t you ever had one of those?”
If my remark – which I regretted the moment it left my lips – affected him, he didn’t show it.
Does anything affect him?
“I have not,” he answered simply. No malice, no embarrassment. No hint of real feeling at all.
He’d never had a friend.
Despite the flat emotionlessness of his honest response, I gasped, feeling suddenly gutted, as if he’d roared the words at me.
The Sea Sand men did not cry tears.
I doubted Gahn Thaleo did, either.
“Alright, well,” I said, sounding shaken even to my own ears. “I don’t even know what to say to that.”
He stood, a colossus before me. Try as I might, I couldn’t picture him as a child.
“Say whatever you wish.” There was an unexpected sincerity in his response.
I’d been rude to him several times this evening, and he didn’t seem bothered by it in the slightest. Whatever was going on behind the crisp mist of his sight stars, he did seem to want to know what I actually felt and thought.
I wasn’t precisely sure that this was a good thing, though.
Revealing too much to a calculating man like Gahn Thaleo could be dangerous.
“I wish to go be with my friends.”
Once again, his sight stars spasmed on friends. But that was his only reaction. When he said nothing else, I turned and began to walk back the way I’d come before.
Gahn Thaleo, for how intimidatingly large he was, was also somehow completely silent. It was only the prickling of my scalp, the resonating ice down the back of my neck – like my spine was a tuning fork somebody had just struck – that told me Gahn Thaleo followed close behind.
By the time we reached the entrance into Gahn Thaleo’s mountain, Grim, Valeria, and Dalk were already boarding her shuttle outside.
Valeria saw us through the shuttle’s viewscreen when we got closer, and she gave us a brief nod before powering up the engines.
Instinctively, I moved backwards, away from the power of the vessel that was about to lift off. My back hit stone.
Warm stone.
I nearly jumped out of my damn skin, snatching myself out of Gahn Thaleo’s reach. Not that he was reaching for me. That seemed to have been a one-time thing, solely to protect my stupid fingers from the cold.
“Sorry,” I found myself stammering, taking several steps away.
Valeria’s vessel buffeted the air. My hair whipped around my face, momentarily obscuring my view.
The whine of the engines intensified, then receded as the shuttle moved swiftly through the night-drenched mountains.
Light from the stars and the band of broken asteroids that surrounded this planet, like a belt of misshapen moons, lit the shuttle’s way until it was gone.
“Dalk has returned to the Sea Sands,” Gahn Thaleo said mildly.
There wasn’t any gloating that I could detect, but I doubted he was sad about that fact.
He wasn’t easy around any males who weren’t from his tribe, but he and Dalk had a special tension between them.
Dalk had been held prisoner here once, back before we’d hammered out our alliance with Gahn Thaleo and Gahn Errok, and I knew that he’d been a particular handful for Gahn Thaleo’s guards.
“Probably just temporarily,” I said, noticing that Fiona hadn’t boarded the shuttle with him. I doubted Dalk would be willing to be parted with her for long, even for something important.
Gahn Thaleo made a non-committal noise in his throat, a sort of closed-mouth sigh. His sight stars were trained on the sky we’d watched swallow up the shuttle.
“Because he will want to return to his friends,” he said, still not looking at me. “Rather than remain in the Sea Sands, among his own people.”
“Yes,” I replied slowly. I wasn’t sure Gahn Thaleo even required a reply from me, or if he was just musing aloud. But when I spoke, he turned his sight stars on me as if with rapt attention.
“Dalk is gone. Grim and Valeria, too. You have three fewer friends in the Deep Sky now.”
“So?”
“So. I can remedy this.”
I gave a startled laugh. “You’re volunteering for the job?”
I knew that Gahn Thaleo wanted us to be comfortable here. That he was, in a way, trying to woo us by playing the immaculate host. But was he actually offering to be my friend? What the hell would he even know about the subject? He just told me he’d never had one!
He sliced his tail through the air behind him, a stark gesture of no.
“I meant my people. There are many who could be friends to you in my tribe. I noticed you and the other new women seemed to chat easily with Zaria.”
A limping sort of heat lurched through me, culminating in my cheeks.
Jesus Christ. Why the hell had I thought that this block of ice carved into the shape of a man actually wanted to be my friend? I shook off what felt dangerously close to humiliation, choosing instead to believe that it was relief.
“Phew,” I said. “For a second there I thought you were the one making me an offer of friendship.”
“No. I was not.”
“Because you don’t have friends.”
“Because I offend you,” he said with something close to softness, but not quite, his sight stars intent upon my face. “And I would never make you an offer that was so deeply unworthy of you.”
I gaped at him, searching for any hint of cynicism or mockery in his words, his eyes.
If someone like Gahn Errok had said such a thing, it would have been positively dripping in bitter sarcasm.
I could literally picture Gahn Errok’s handsome face pulled into a sneer.
Sorry the idea of my friendship offends you.
But not so with Gahn Thaleo. It seemed to be nothing but a simple statement of fact. He wasn’t giving me the alien version of an eye roll or fishing for a specific kind of reply. At least, I didn’t think he was. But how could I really know for sure?
Did I even need to know? The man didn’t want to be my friend. And I told myself that was more than fine by me, whatever his reasons.
I was saved from having to come up with a reply by the arrival of Tilly, Oxriel, Zoren, and Warrek.
Warrek seemed to have inserted himself into their little group, very clearly following along wherever Tilly went.
Oxriel and Zoren looked a little apprehensive about their new fourth wheel, but Tilly didn’t seem bothered.
She had a small smile playing about her lips as she reacted to something Warrek said to her.
“Hey, guys,” I said when they were within earshot, glad of something else to focus on besides the strange Gahn I’d somehow ended up spending a good chunk of this evening with. Warrek raised his tail to Gahn Thaleo, letting the tip of it pass before his eyes as a show of respect for his Gahn.
“Greetings, Nazreen!” Oxriel said jovially. “Did Valeria come this way? Did she find Dalk?”
“Yes,” I said with a nod. “Valeria and Grim just left with Dalk in the shuttle. They’re heading back to the Sea Sands. But Fiona didn’t go with them.”
“Oh,” Tilly said, worry tilting the corners of her lips down. “We should go make sure she’s alright.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” I said to her.
“Make sure she is alright?” Oxriel repeated, his warm sight stars contracting with concern. “What do you think might be ailing her?”
“Dalk just left,” I said. I didn’t fill in all the details, hoping Oxriel would catch my drift.
Clearly, I hoped for too much. He cocked his head.
“Why should Dalk’s absence ail her?” he asked. “If anything, distance from that taciturn brute would do a female good!”
Clearly wanting to speak up for poor Dalk, who wasn’t here to do it for himself, Tilly interjected with a defensive, “Hey!” But Zoren made a grunt of agreement with Oxriel’s statement.
“Well, we’re not so sure Fiona will see it that way,” I said. “She might be missing him already.”
“I do not see how anyone can miss the male embodiment of an angry thundercloud,” Oxriel huffed. “Though, perhaps she will miss his cock.”