Chapter 10 Nasrin #2
“It is I, Arton,” she repeated sarcastically under her breath as she reached us. “What, boy? You think that just because you haven’t come to see me since the day you informed me of Zaria’s pregnancy that I’ve forgotten your face?”
“Apologies, Grandmother,” Arton spluttered. “But you asked who it was who approached, and-”
“Obviously, I meant these ones!” She lifted her bow, sweeping it in a cracking arc that made Oxriel leap back in order to avoid a nice smack to the side of the head.
“These are my friends, Linnet,” Zaria said. “Three of the new women – Fiona, Tilly, and Nazreen.” She gestured to each of us with her tail as she named us off. I took off my sunglasses to let the old woman see my face a little better.
Linnet gave an unimpressed grunt. “And what about these odd-looking louts?”
“Oxriel and Zoren of the Sea Sands. At your service!” Oxriel replied at once, lifting his tail before his eyes in a show of respect usually reserved for Gahns, Gahnalas, or the Lavrikala - the holy guardians of the Lavrika in the Sea Sands.
Zoren quickly did the same, raising his tail and letting it fall.
“Bah,” she said, planting one end of her bow firmly down on the rocky ground like it was a sceptre, the muscles of her long, lean arm cording.
“Save your tail raising for Gahn Thaleo. I’m long past the age where some scoundrel lifting his tail to me sets my heart a-fluttering!
I’ll have none of that nonsense here. What is it you want? ”
Linnet gave me crotchety old lady who didn’t give a fuck vibes. I liked her immediately.
“We wanted to come see the brolka, if that’s alright, Linnet,” I said. I suddenly understood Oxriel and Zoren’s compulsion. Under the stern glare of her lilac sight stars, I was struck with a near-comical urge to curtsy.
“So the Gahn’s favourite wants to see the brolka,” Linnet sniffed, “does she?”
“The…The Gahn’s what?” I echoed, startled.
“The Gahn’s favourite,” Linnet repeated. “Your ears no good, new woman?”
“Oh, I heard you. I just don’t…”
Linnet silenced me with a slice of her tail through the air.
“Just because that fool,” she said, aiming her bow at Arton, “does not visit me near often enough to keep me apprised of the goings-on in the mountain, doesn’t mean that others don’t.
I have heard tell of the new woman with the dark brows that arch like braxilk wings, with deep green sight stars below.
They tell me that the Gahn’s eyes follow you as reliably as a man’s own tail follows him when he walks. ”
“I mean, you kind of can’t argue with that,” Fiona said. “Gahn Thaleo does seem to like watching you.”
“I doubt that means that I’m his favourite!” I cried, looking at my friends and hoping for someone to back me up. No one did. “The man’s never even smiled at me!”
“Hasn’t smiled since before he got that scar,” Linnet growled.
“Since before his parents died. He was a serious boy, and now he’s a serious man.
And a good Gahn he is, too. A very good Gahn.
” Her sight stars tightened as she looked me up and down.
“You’re a scrawny little thing, but I don’t think Gahn Thaleo would waste time staring at someone unworthy of his attentions. ”
She twitched her tail, a resolute look passing over her features, as if this conclusion she’d just drawn meant she was obliged to respect me.
Just a little. “But don’t be expecting me to raise my tail to you yet,” she added sharply.
“Unless the Vrika comes for him, you’re not my Gahnala.
Gahn Thaleo follows the old ways for the good of our tribe.
That means that no matter what sort of an interest he’s taken in you, he won’t choose you as his mate until the Vrika does. ”
“Um. Alright. That’s…fine?”
I knew a few men who’d chosen their mates before getting their mate visions – Lerokan, Galok, Kohka, and Razek, to name a few.
I’d never expected that sort of thing from Gahn Thaleo.
Especially not if it was about choosing me!
If anything, this was a good thing! I didn’t want to be his mate, so knowing it would take the Vrika to move him in that direction was just fucking fine with me. Peachy, even.
So why the hell am I suddenly so annoyed?
“Why don’t we go see the brolka,” Zaria said, perhaps sensing the awkwardness and wishing to diplomatically move things along.
Linnet grumbled that we were free to do so. It made me think that she would hang back here while we went ahead, but when we began to skirt around the lake to the area where the brolka were grazing, she came along with us, settling into step beside me.
“How long have you been taking care of the brolka, Linnet?” I asked her.
“My whole life,” she replied. “It was my father’s place before me, and I lived as much out here as I did in the mountain.”
“You lived out here?” But even as we passed the small cave Linnet had come from, I could see it was more than a temporary place to sleep.
There was a fire pit outside, as well as shelving inside.
What looked like drying meat and herbs hung deeper inside the cave, and there were plentiful sleeping furs.
“And still do now,” she replied with that odd sort of grumpy pride that only gruff old people seemed capable of.
That explained why we’d never seen Linnet before now, at the vaklok or any of the large meals in the hall.
“That’s pretty cool,” I said, impressed that she made her life out here alone this way.
“Only at night,” she said, “but I’ve got furs aplenty for that.”
I hid a smirk at the translation mix-up.
“So it’s just you out here? And you watch over the brolka?
” The brolka didn’t seem to need much in the way of care.
They grazed on their own, munching on the stalks of silvery grass or peeling bits of bark off with their teeth.
And they obviously had lots of water at their immediate disposal.
“Someone needs to make sure they don’t wander off down some dead-end valley or get picked off by a pattarak or harassed by the felkora during their mating time.
” She raised her bow meaningfully. For the first time I noticed the quiver of arrows on her back.
Badass. “I keep them in this safe area and shoot at anything that might want to bother them. That’s my job, and mine alone since Arton’s grandfather died. Though I’ve still got Linnet.”
I knew better than to offer her my human condolences on the death of her mate.
And, frankly, I was too stuck on the other thing she’d juts said.
“You’ve still got…” I cast her a sideways glance, wondering if her earlier comments about having all her marbles maybe weren’t all that accurate after all.
“Linnet,” she repeated staunchly, glaring at me as if I were the strange one talking about myself in the third person. She jerked her bow in the direction of the braxilk that was now airborne, swooping lazily over the lake. “My braxilk. Linnet.”
“She’s also named Linnet? Did you name her after yourself?”
“Course I did,” Linnet said. “And why shouldn’t I? Mine’s as good a name as any other!”
I wasn’t entirely sure, but I thought I heard Fiona whisper, “Fucking iconic.”
Linnet’s question of, “And why shouldn’t I?” didn’t seem to require a response, so I lapsed into smiling silence, enjoying her crusty mountain lady energy immensely as we made our way around the last curve of the lake.
“Well, there they are. Now you’ve seen them,” Linnet grouched.
“Oh my God,” Fiona squealed.
“They look like walking dandelions!” Tilly added breathlessly. “They’re so cute!”
And, Jesus Christ, they really were. So many of the animals we encountered out here were spiky or spooky or tentacley or bitey.
But the brolka looked like something a bored young child would come up with in the cozy, quiet moments before sleep.
They were near-spherical with plush grey wool, just big round puffs on legs.
Their faces were soft and not wooly, looking more downy, with long, floppy, anteater-like snouts and gigantic eyes that came in dreamy shades of purple and pink.
I couldn’t tell the males from the females from this distance.
They didn’t have horns or anything like that.
“That there is where they sleep,” Linnet said, aiming her bow towards a cave a dizzying distance up the side of the mountain the brolka currently grazed at the base of.
It seemed impossible that cute plushies like these could traverse the steep, rocky side of the mountain that easily.
Maybe the wind bore their fluffy bodies upwards each night, like the seeds of the dandelions Tilly had just compared them to.
“There now. That’s a brave one,” Linnet added, drawing her bow back down. “Not put off by your strange smell, I suppose.”
I followed her gaze and gasped as a little brolka wandered over to us on wobbly legs. It nosed at my knees, then stopped, seeming to expect something.
“Can I touch it?” I asked Linnet. “It’s not going to, like, bite my fingers off for trying, is it?”
“Only one way to find out,” Linnet responded flippantly.
Very reassuring.
I decided to go for it, figuring that Linnet probably had a store of Vrika’s blood in her cave if it did decide to get a little chompy with me.
Slowly, I lowered my hand to its face, letting it sniff me with that funny, floppy snout.
I suppressed a giggly yelp at the tickly sensation.
Then, when it didn’t run away or bare its teeth at me, I carefully touched its downy head, above its eyes.
It made a soft, trumpeting sort of sound that I assumed was a happy one based on the fact it was now headbutting me for more pets. I grinned down at it, staring into its strawberry milkshake eyes, feeling like, at least for this moment, all was right with the world.