CHAPTER ONE | Dalk
Long had it been since the new women had started sleeping in Gahn Errok’s mountain. Their human shuttle was not large enough, nor did it have enough private spaces, for all of them to sleep there comfortably. There were tents, of course, to make more space available. But once the new women got used to the mountain living that the Gahnala Zuh-Tephanie and Priya enjoyed, they had little interest in remaining in the colder tents or the crowded shuttle.
Thus, they had all moved into their own quarters in the mountain.
And we Sea Sand men, as their devoted chaperones, had followed.
The mated new women were spread out all over the mountain. Tok, a Bitter Sea male used to sleeping in caves of stone, had a private allocation to share with Taylor. The same was the case for Abby, Kohka, and their human son, Keir. Priya stayed in Lerokan’s quarters, and the mountain Gahnala Zuh-Tephanie slept beside Gahn Errok. Valeria and Grim were the only ones who spent any consistent time overnight at the settlement beneath the Vrika’s peak. The three remaining, unmated new women, Nasrin, Tilly, and the dark-eyed, flower-skinned Fiona shared one large cave all together beneath the stone.
It was very close to ours.
Ours, as in, the cave housing the five Sea Sand men who had travelled here to protect them.
I was the first to awaken this morning. At least, I’d thought I was. But as I shifted and rose from the oddly fuzzy mountain furs, I saw the glint of Zoren’s pale pinkish-purple sight stars in the pre-dawn gloom.
I still found it very odd to sleep beside the men of other tribes. Zoren, one of Gahn Razek’s warriors watched me, no doubt feeling the same way. He had the typical Death Plains look about him. His face all hard angles, everything drawn just a little too tight, his sight stars pale like the plains he’d come from.
I gave Zoren a low grunt of greeting as I went past him into the very strange bathing area.
I eyed the set-up with distaste. There was too much water here. Water for pissing into, water for washing one’s skin and claws, not a stalk of fragrant talka gel in sight. Instead, there was odd, clinging moss that sudsed up in a slightly similar way, but it was not quite the same.
I missed the territory I had come from. The great red plains and cliffs that Gahn Fallo ruled. The hills studded with rindla blooms and axrekal berries. The place I was born. The place I’d always assumed my heart would one day burn upon my funeral pyre.
I missed it.
But I did not miss it anywhere near enough to leave her.
Them, I reminded myself.
To leave them.
Blast.
I pissed and then washed my hands and claws, hissing at the shivery feeling of water on my hide. How these mountain males could stand water enough to not only wash with it, but submerge their entire bodies and bathe in it, was entirely beyond me.
The new women liked water, too. They’d chirruped and cheered for the large, natural spring in their cave, heated warm enough to bathe in. Fiona’s face had practically glowed, her little cheeks pinkening and bunching with a smile.
Perhaps I should learn to like the water.
Bah. I would leave that for another day. I’d already forced myself into a vastly alien sleeping arrangement alongside men of other territories. I could leave at least a little of myself unchanged for the time being.
I’d never been particularly good at changing.
But then again, I’d never really needed to do it until now.
Making sure my loincloth was well-tied, I headed back out into the main sleeping cave. The others were all awake now. Zoren was still up, of course. He leaned against the clear stone of the outer wall which allowed us to see out beyond the mountain and into the valley below. The pink and purple streaks of the sunrise were the exact same shade as his own sight stars as he stared out there.
“Greetings, Dalk!” called Oxriel. Oxriel was of Gahn Taliok’s tribe, and he was the youngest of us all. He was well into his adult years, but had somehow managed to latch on to a youthful sort of cheer that I found somewhat tolerable at the best of times and absolutely grating at the worst.
As I had only just woken, and my skin still prickled with the echo of water’s slither, this was not one of the tolerable times.
I ignored his greeting, striding past him as well as Bariok (of Gahn Baldor’s tribe) and Vaxilkai (of Gahn Buroudei’s). When I reached my furs, I hoisted up the weapons I’d lain down beside them, strapping them to my back and chest.
This cave was a large one. Plenty of room for us to spread out along the floor with the very strange, fluffy furs. There was a tall, raised bed at one side of the cave, but we all refused to use it, preferring to sleep upon the ground as we had always done. The five of us may have been from different tribes, but at the very least we were all Sea Sand men. We slept on the sand and the plains. We cleaned ourselves in smoke tents, not with putrid water. And we fought like real warriors, with blades and spears, not pinging tiny projectiles back and forth at each other from feathery mounts in the sky. It was much easier to regard these other four as my allies when we stood together in contrast against the purple-hided, flying mountain males.
It shocked and disturbed me that any of the undeserving Deep Sky men had been awarded mates from among the new women at all. Priya and Zuh-Tephanie were mated to a swaggering pair of brothers, Lerokan and Gahn Errok. There were three unmated new women left here – Tilly, Nasrin, and Fiona – and I brooded on the idea that they, too, might end up with Deep Sky mates. Gahn Thaleo’s tribe had no unmated females left among them, so perhaps one or more of those females might end up mated into that tribe. The other Deep Sky Gahn had always seemed unnaturally fixated on Nasrin.
Though, I supposed I could not exactly fault him, when my own sight stars strayed all too often to Fiona’s face.
Not for the first time, I wondered what would happen, what I’d do, if she were mated to someone else. What if, one day, maybe tomorrow, maybe even today, some feather-brained fool from Gahn Thaleo’s tribe showed up here, claiming to have seen Fiona’s face in their Vrika’s pools. Or rather, not pools, I had heard, but an egg. Yes, a literal egg. The Deep Sky men got their most sacred visions by cracking open a big, white egg and staring at it instead of eating it.
Absolutely absurd.
But if it happened...
What would I do?
Well... Nothing, of course. The Vrika was just as powerful and sacred as the Sea Sand Lavrika. The mate bond it established was real and hard and true. Previous generations of the Sea Sands had been decimated by ignoring the Lavrika’s call, and I assumed that the Vrika’s pairings were just as important to the future generations of all tribes. So if it were to happen, if Fiona were to be paired with another male, of course I would stand aside. I had no claim on her. I would let her go. Let her go to him, and... and...
And probably throw the male in question from the top of his very own mountain home.
Or stab him.
Or maybe both. Stab, then throw. Yes, that would work.
I couldn’t risk him surviving the fall and climbing his stupid way back up. Better to kill him first.
I was so caught-up in the pleasantly violent distraction of my inner thoughts that I almost stepped on something as I exited our cave.
I paused, foot mid-air, my sight stars pulsing as I tried to figure out just what it was that I was looking at on the stone floor.
It was a pile of red and pink... stuff. I was fairly certain the new women had a name for this sort of material, but the sands take me, I did not have a single clue as to what it was. I pulled my right foot back, placed it beside my other one, then crouched, staring at the little pile with my elbows sharply placed upon my knees.
When it did not move or do anything else of interest, I lifted a suspicious claw and gave the pile a wary poke. I tensed, but the pile ultimately did not do anything besides shift a little to the side with the force of my touch.
“What is that?”
Oxriel’s voice boomed from behind me. He stepped forward and then crouched beside me, peering down at the red and pink stuff.
“I do not know.”
“Smells like new women,” he remarked, his sand-coloured sight stars vibrating with interest.
“Yes.”
“What should we do with it?”
“How in the Sea Sands should I know?”
“Is it some sort of message?”
“Oxriel,” I said on a low growl, “If you do not cease asking me foolish questions that I have no answer for, I will be forced to hit you. Very hard.”
“Alright,” he said, not seeming perturbed in the least by my threat. And then, less than two heartbeats later, he said, “Do you think it is a gift?”
I reached for his shoulder and shoved, toppling him from his crouched position. The force of his fall made the red and pink bits in the pile lift and scatter like rindla petals in the wind.
“Oh, now you’ve done it,” Oxriel grumbled. “What if the structure was important? Now you’ve gone and broken it.”
“If the wind from your foolish body falling to the ground was enough to break it then it was never meant to stay together,” I snapped. But something like dread made my spine feel cold. Had I broken it?
Rather worried now, I collected all the bits as Oxriel righted himself. There were five of them, all flimsy and thin. I made sure to hold all the delicate leaf-like bits between the pads of my fingers and thumbs so that I did not rip them with my claws.
Then, I placed them all back down as they had been before.
“No,” Oxriel piped up, “that is not right. There was a pink one on top before. Not a red one.”
“Oh. Are you certain?” I asked, tense and annoyed, suddenly unable to recall exactly how the pile had looked before.
“Yes!” Oxriel said. With careful claws, he fished out a pink bit. As he did so, the bit came open. We both stared at it as Oxriel fully unfolded it.
The shape was odd and curving. Very symmetrical. Like a circle was trying to split off from its own centre, two bubbly bits at the top both anchored together by a point at the bottom.
“Look!” Oxriel breathed, his sight stars pulsing. “This is new women writing!”
So it was a message, then. But a message we were incapable of reading.
I would have snatched the one Oxriel held from his claws for a better look, but I did not wish to tear it. Instead, I reached down and gathered the others from the stone floor. Like the one Oxriel held, each bit unfolded into that same oddly round and pointy shape. While I could not recognize the individual symbols of the new women’s writing, it did not take long to realize that some of the same symbols were in the same order, painted onto each one of the red and pink shapes. The symbols differed at the bottom, though. As if each one had started out written in the same way, and then changed into something unique at the very end.
One of them, I noticed, even had a small flower painted on it. Like the others, it had the same identical symbols at the top. At the bottom, it had four symbols arranged in a unique order, different from the others.
D A L K.
A true mystery. What could it possibly mean?
This particular piece, the one with the flower, smelled most strongly of Fiona. I raised it to my nose and inhaled hard.
“What are you doing?” Oxriel asked, giving me an odd look.
“Nothing.”
“You’re not doing nothing. You’re smelling it.”
“Shut up,” I snarled. “I am looking for clues.”
“You mean sniffing for clues.”
“What are you two doing out here?” came the scraping rumble of Zoren’s voice. “Why are you holding a bunch of pay-pur?”
“What is pay-pur?” I asked.
Zoren’s sight stars, so similar in colour to some of the pink pieces I now held, went to my claws.
“That is pay-pur,” Zoren replied.
“I see,” I said, feeling rather like a fool and not enjoying it one bit. “Do you know what pay-pur is for?”
Zoren slashed his hand through the air, indicating no.
“I rarely see the new women use it for anything. Though there is a fair amount of it on the shuttle.”
“Do you recognize this shape?” Oxriel asked, spreading open the folded symmetry of his pay-pur.
Zoren regarded the pay-pur for a long moment, then said, “It looks a little like the leaf of a Death Plains branata bush.”
Oxriel’s sight stars snapped back and forth with interest.
“And is that a good sort of plant?” he asked, his voice rising with what sounded like hope. “Is the leaf useful? Perhaps used for healing? Or eating? Is it tasty?”
“It is poisonous,” Zoren said flatly.
“Oh,” Oxriel said, looking down at his pay-pur branata leaf, mystified.
“Here. See what you can make of these,” I said, passing Zoren three of the pay-pur bits. I kept the one with the flower, though. I didn’t care what the symbols meant. I didn’t care if it was shaped like the most disastrously lethal thing to grow upon this world.
This one smelled like Fiona and it was mine.
By now, Bariok and Vaxilkai had also wandered out of our cave. Zoren passed out the pay-pur leaves and we all studied them, mostly in silence, but with the odd question or remark thrown at one another now and then as we tried to puzzle out the mystery before us.
“Well, it seems there is no other course of action than to simply ask the new women what it all means,” Vaxilkai said with a twitch of his tail.
Vaxilkai was so much like his own obnoxious Gahn Buroudei it made my fangs clench. Always thinking he had the right course of action, like he was the leader of us all. Gahn Buroudei was the first one to have been granted a mate from among the new women, and he’d had a specifically annoying arrogance ever since. It was Gahn Buroudei and his mate who decided to keep all the new women together, to take them from Gahn Fallo’s lands.
That feels so very long ago.
But I had noticed Fiona even then. When we had saved the new women from the zeelk attack and brought them back to Gahn Fallo, Fiona had been the one upon my irkdu.
She had seemed so small and weak against me then. I’d been overcome with a protective instinct so sharp it almost felt like rage.
I’d never gotten that close to her again. Unless you could count the soft smack of her lips against mine at the New Year’s Eve party. But that had lasted a mere moment. So fast it ended before it had really begun. Not like the ride back to our territory after the zeelk attack, when I’d had her limp and panting against me the entire time.
“We cannot simply go and ask the new women what the pay-pur means,” I hissed.
“Why not?” asked Oxriel. “I like Vaxilkai’s idea.”
“Because!” I snapped. “Because then the new women will know we are too dense to understand their gift on our own!”
“This is new women writing,” scoffed Vaxilkai. “Written on new women pay-pur. How in the shifting sands are we supposed to understand it on our own? When they awaken, we will simply ask them.”
“No,” I growled again, my tail thumping the floor.
“I agree with Dalk,” said Zoren. “If we cannot understand the gift on our own then we are not worthy of it.”
Vaxilkai’s tail snapped with annoyance.
“I will not ascribe my worthiness to the flights of fancy of the new women. Everything they do confounds me, including this.” He shook his red pay-pur in the air.
“We have figured out some of it already,” Zoren replied testily.
“Yes,” I said, eagerly seizing on that fact. “The pay-pur bits are shaped like branata leaves. They are poisonous.”
“You are going to accept gifts signifying poison without even bothering to ask them what it’s supposed to mean?” Vaxilkai said, astonishment in his voice. “If anything, that requires even more thorough explanation!” He looked at his pay-pur with renewed suspicion.
“It’s not actually going to poison you,” I sneered at him. “Are you that afraid of the soft new women?”
Before I could react, Vaxilkai’s hand rose and snacked me across the ear, the way a disapproving parent might.
My pay-pur held fast in one hand, my other flew to my blade. Oxriel’s sight stars misted in wide eyes. Zoren, clever male that he was, moved swiftly out of my way. Bariok looked as if he might try to stop me, but then seemed to think better of it, stepping back as Zoren had.
“Touch me again,” I seethed, “and I’ll slice your fingers from your hand before you can even-”
“What is going on out here?!”
Five Sea Sand heads swivelled at the exact same time, turning towards the sound of the voice.
I knew that voice before I even saw who it was.
Fiona.
She stood just down the natural stone hall at the entrance to the cave she shared with Tilly and Nasrin.
“What are you doing up?” I asked gruffly, lowering my weapon. Sometimes Tilly got up around this time, not long after dawn, but Fiona never did. Her long brown hair was slightly mussed, and there was a delicious, sleepy softness to her scent when it reached me. It made me think of warmth and darkness and holding her in the night.
My loincloth felt suddenly tighter than before.
“Well, I couldn’t exactly sleep with you lot going on here the way you are!” she said.
Subdued by the irritation in her voice, I sheathed my weapon.
“We did not mean to wake you,” I replied, making sure to quiet my voice more than I had done before. Though that was probably pointless, since she was already awake now.
“We are merely trying to interpret this message!” Vaxilkai said, waving his pay-pur at her.
She blinked her white and brown eyes, then said, “Oh! They’re your Valentine’s Day cards.”
“What’s that?” asked Oxriel. “Zoren says you’ve made them in the shape of a poison leaf.”
“What?” Fiona asked, balking. “No!”
By now, Tilly and Nasrin had appeared behind her. Unlike Fiona, their complexions were fairly uniform across their bodies, Tilly’s a rich dark brown and Nasrin’s lighter. Fiona was the only one whose hide had the dark, swirling marks upon it. She was wearing a sleeveless tunic now, the flowers and other shapes visible along her arms. Flowers so much like the one painted on the piece of pay-pur I held...
The three new women came to join our group. After glancing at the cards held by Vaxilkai and the others, they began to rapidly redistribute them among us males. Fiona tried to reach for the flower one I held, but I yanked it out of reach.
She gave me a questioning look, then glanced at the pay-pur in my claws.
“Oh! That’s alright, actually. You’ve already got yours.”
“I do?”
“Yeah.” She moved her head in the up-and-down yes motion typical among her kind. “See? That’s your name. Or, at least, how I assumed it would be spelled with these kinds of letters. It says, ‘Happy Valentine’s Day, Dalk.’”
I stared down at the pay-pur, one of my claws tracing the symbols there.
“This is my name? Did you write it?”
I looked at her intently, noticing a slight flush of colour creep up her neck into her cheeks.
“Well, yes. I did.”
I inhaled sharply through my nose.
“But I helped make them for the others, too!” she said quickly. “I also made Oxriel’s. And cards for other people in the tribe.”
I sent Oxriel a stare so hateful and heated he physically flinched.
“What are they for?” Bariok asked, turning his card this way and that, examining the odd shape of it from all sides.
“They’re for Valentine’s Day,” Tilly answered cheerfully.
“Valentine’s Day is all about love and friendship,” Nasrin added.
Fiona moved her head up and down again.
“Exactly. You give cards and sweets to people you care about. We don’t have any chockies, though. At least, not on Valeria’s shuttle.”
“What is the shape meant to be, if not a poison leaf?” I asked.
“It’s... it’s a heart.”
My tail snapped in surprise.
“This does not look anything like a heart,” I protested.
“You guys didn’t have any kind of scanning tech before we got here. How do you even know what a heart looks like?” she countered, placing her small hands on her prettily curved hips.
“I have seen them,” I answered honestly. “On the battlefield.”
Her face drained of colour. It was maddening, trying to figure out what all the different shades of her meant.
“Please don’t tell me you’re the one who ripped them out,” she said weakly.
I swished my tail, trying to appear nonchalant but nonetheless proud of my achievements, proud that I was able to tell her I was a strong male, a victorious male, one who could pull out another man’s organs if I so wished.
“It has been known to happen,” I replied.
“Good grief,” she said, rubbing her forehead. “OK, well, these are supposed to represent hearts. For love and affection. Not battle.”
“Is this what a human heart looks like?” I asked. I held the pay-pur between us, in front of her chest, trying to imagine it in there.
She swatted it away.
“No, of course not. It’s just a symbol.”
“Hmm,” I said, bringing the card back close to my face once more. I traced the writing with my sight stars, imagining Fiona working on it in secret, where I could not see. It felt... intimate. That she’d thought of me. That she’d shaped my name with her odd human ink.
“Did you really make these cards for everyone?” I inquired, a little more sharply than I’d intended to.
“Yes,” said Fiona. “We didn’t want to leave anybody out. We even have some for Gahn Thaleo’s tribe.”
I scowled at her instant response. I rubbed my thumb back and forth over the little flower on the card. It reminded me of the markings on her arm, as well as the bloom I’d carved for the Halloween contest.
“Did you draw flowers on all of them too?” I asked, more softly this time.
Her answer was hushed.
“No. I didn’t.”
I sent a triumphant look over at Oxriel. He did not have a flower from Fiona on his pay-pur.
No other male did.
No other male but me.
“Thank you for this card,” I said solemnly, already thinking of the safest place that I could keep it. Somewhere its edges wouldn’t get bent and its ink wouldn’t fade.
“You’re welcome, Dalk,” Fiona replied. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“Are there any other Valentine’s Day traditions?” I barely allowed myself to ask it. I was a fool, but I could not stop myself. Hope rose in me like heat in morning. A stupid emotion. But there all the same.
Her slender brows puckered with a frown.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Like New Year’s Eve,” I explained thickly. My heart gave an odd lurch in my chest when the pink colour returned to her cheeks. And then it lurched all over again when I remembered the tiny burst of soft pressure that night, her lips on mine, dizzying as a dream.
“Oh!” she squeaked. “No. No, not really. Nothing I can think of.”
“Well,” I said gruffly, carefully folding my card, “if you remember any more traditions like that... any that require the participation of a male... I suppose that I would not mind... obliging you.”
“How very generous of you,” she said, her voice oddly breathy.
My blood felt hot in my veins. I wanted to tell her that it had nothing to do with generosity and everything to do with the slow constriction of desire I felt for her, winding tighter and tighter every day, until it felt as if my ribs were not large enough to house my lungs. I wanted to tell her that I’d thought of that little, luminous kiss multiple times a day, every day, since it had happened. That I’d dreamed of it and dreamed of what could have happened afterwards if she had not immediately bounded away to rejoin her human friends.
I wanted to tell her that I’d stroked myself to climax remembering it.
But I didn’t. Because that would be ludicrous. Absurd in the extreme. And really, I groaned internally, rather pathetic. What kind of male panted and pined after a woman who was not even his? What sort of warrior would admit to spilling seed freely outside of her cunt – always considered a bad omen in the Sea Sands – just because she’d had the nerve to touch her lips to his?
Fiona’s attention was wrenched from me then by Oxriel asking her a question about the writing of his name. As she explained something to him, pointing her slender finger at Oxriel’s pay-pur, I stared at her profile, simultaneously relieved and miserable that she was no longer looking at me.
This would not do. This attachment was growing beyond my control. I had to sever it somehow.
I should throw the card away.
But as I ran the pads of my fingers over the delicate thing Fiona had made especially for me, I already knew I wouldn’t.