Chapter 1 Rivven #2
“Alright,” Dorn finally said. Though he still fiddled with the ends of his hair, as if not entirely reassured.
“Oh, I recognize that one!” Xennet exclaimed suddenly as Tasha resumed showing us the pictures on her data tab. “That is the shouty pink surgeon!”
“Zohro.” I said his name, remembering him as well.
Like Xennet, he had a classically handsome face and dark pink hide.
Unlike Xennet, he possessed an air of absolute competence about him.
We’d watched him perform surgery on Warden Tenn on one of the tables in this very saloon. He’d saved the warden’s life.
“Yes, that’s Zohro. And here he is with his wife, Jolene, and their daughter, Autumn,” Tasha said, swiping to another picture. “This one isn’t going to be published. We’ve decided to keep Baby Autumn’s image private.”
“That is his daughter?” I asked, my brows shooting upwards. “His wife has already conceived?”
The baby looked entirely human to me, but what did I know about how Zabrians and humans might mix?
“Jolene was pregnant when she arrived,” Tasha explained. “The biological father was human.”
“Ah.” For some reason, I felt a bit deflated by this fact.
“Although…” She glanced back at Warden Tenn. They shared a look between them. “Although,” she said again, quietly, as if she shared some secret, “one of the other brides is pregnant. From her Zabrian husband. It is possible.”
“By the blazes!” Xennet exclaimed, his eyes white as moons.
“I could be a father? Tasha! Please put that as a caption to my image! Write, ‘Xennet: Husband. Chair. Knife. Bed. And most excellent future father!’” He stared intently at her face.
“I will not be able to read it. But I will trust you to put my words down faithfully!”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Xennet,” she said quickly. She patted his arm. “Let’s just take this one step at a time.”
“But it is possible?” Everyone turned to look at me. My voice had come out ragged, like someone had dragged it over ten spans of gravel before forcing it up out of my throat. “Possible to have a child?”
I’d never even expected something as incredible as the chance at a wife. That alone seemed to me to belong only to the realm of dreams. A perfect fantasy, the sort that dissipates upon waking and leaves you feeling vaguely haunted.
But a child...
Xennet bounded away from us, already forgetting Tasha’s request to take things one step at a time. “Look here, Tasha!” he cooed, snatching up a sack of flour from behind my counter. He cradled it in his arms with a surprisingly gentle tenderness. “Look how well I can hold a baby!”
“That’s not a baby. That’s my flour,” I grunted. “Drop it.”
He did so at once. The sack hit the floor with a powdery thud and exploded.
“Blast!” Xennet groaned, clomping out from behind the counter, leaving footprints with his now entirely white boots. “Tasha, do human females enjoy a...a rather dusty sort of male? Or should I change my boots?”
“Uh…” Tasha looked like she did not know what to say to this.
But I knew what to say.
“Before you change your boots or do anything else,” I growled, “you’re going to clean up the mess you just made.”
“Why should I?” he asked blankly. “It is your flour.”
“But you’re the one who dropped it!” I shot back. Obviously, a new sign was in order. Xennet shall clean up his own messes, lest he be tossed out of the saloon on his tail.
“I may have dropped the flour,” Xennet argued, “but it is only because you told me to. I was being rather agreeable, I think. Besides, it is not my fault that the sack you stored the flour in was not strong enough to withstand the fall!”
“‘Not strong enough to withstand the fall,’” Dorn repeated with a snort. “It is a very good thing that was not an actual child…”
“I would not have been so careless with a child,” Xennet snapped impatiently, as if we should have known such a thing about him by now, even though everything we’d ever witnessed him do seemed to prove precisely the opposite.
“And even if I had been that careless, a child would have fared much better! It certainly would not have exploded all over my boots in such a fashion. Children are far more durable. They’ve got those bouncy, bendy little bones… ”
“Bendy little…Jesus Christ,” Tasha whispered.
“Enough.” Warden Hallum’s voice fell like a hammer, despite the fact that he did not shout. “Xennet, clean up this mess and then sort out your boots. Rivven, let’s get your picture done so we have time for the other two. It will be dark soon.”
Warden Hallum was right. Autumn was at its end.
Though it was only afternoon, the sun was already dipping towards the horizon outside, sending shadows stretching.
A cold wind rustled the few leaves that remained clinging to the branches of the fruit trees in my gardens.
We’d likely get our first snow of the winter season soon.
“Right,” I said. I glanced once more at Tasha’s data tab, though it had gone dark with inactivity. “All the other men were posing outside in their pictures,” I said to her. “Should I do the same?”
I did not have an entire bracku herd of my own like all the other men. But I had my shuldu and my gardens, my eggbirds and my stables. And I did have one lone, adult bracku with a calf – both of them female.
Even now, even after all this time, I could not go near a fully-grown male bracku without my heart seizing in my chest and my missing right hand throbbing as if it were still attached to me, mangled beyond recognition.
It made me worry that a human woman might not want me. Because I could not manage a herd as the others did.
But Tasha’s next words helped dispel at least a little of that fear.
“The saloon is so wonderful,” she said. “All this beautiful wood. I think it’s worth showing off in your pictures. We’ll take a few more in here, but we can also take some outside, if you’d like. And I’ll take Dorn’s and Xennet’s pictures outside as well.”
“What sort of publication will this be?” Dorn asked. “Where will the pictures all go when you are finished taking them?”
“Oh, that’s easy. We’re going to start with a calendar,” she said, a smile brightening her pretty face.
“A calendar?” I asked. Dorn and I glanced at each other, unsure if we’d understood correctly. “You mean, a document outlining future dates of the cycle?”
“Yes, precisely!” she confirmed. “Maybe it’s just a human custom,” she went on.
“But we like to put pictures above the dates. There’s a very long human tradition of selling calendars with good-looking people and cute animals in them, often as fundraisers.
Firefighters holding kittens. That sort of thing. ”
I did not know what firefighters or kittens were.
I decided not to ask. Tasha was the expert here.
If I wanted any chance at all at earning a wife, I would throw myself at the mercy of her advice.
Even if that advice seemed to involve fire for some reason.
And kittens, whatever the blazes those were.
“Alright,” I said. “Let us continue.”
“Excellent,” Tasha replied. “Back to your places, everybody. Xennet, you can keep working on that mess behind the counter, as long as you’re out of sight. I don’t want your head randomly popping up in the background if we can help it.”
“Oh, he can help it,” Warden Hallum said, an edge of warning in his voice clearly meant for Xennet, who was now crouched behind the counter, scrubbing vigorously at the floor and muttering to himself among the rising clouds of flour.
“Good.” Tasha raised her data tab and aimed it at me once more. “Ready, Rivven?”
I cleared my throat and lifted my chin.
“Ready.”