CHAPTER THIRTEEN | Dalk
“How can this be the tradition if the new women have never even been here for a vaklok until this one?” I asked, staring at Gahn Thaleo. His sight stars met mine calmly, registering no offence at the impertinence of questioning a Gahn in such a way.
But he had to be questioned. He could not claim Fiona and the others as part of his tribe’s traditions when they’d only just gotten here.
“The tradition is that the unmated women of the tribe bring the food to the vaklok’s competitors,” Gahn Thaleo replied.
“They are not of your tribe,” I snapped back. My words did not come out as sharply as I’d intended, though. They sounded odd, and it felt strange to shape them. The memory of a little foot colliding with my mouth and sending my lower lip against the cutting edges of my own fangs emerged, and I realized that my mouth must have swollen up more since then.
“No, they are not,” Gahn Thaleo conceded, but not fully, not in a way that satisfied me. Almost as if there were an unspoken yet tacked on the end of what he’d said, silent but unmistakable.
“Why can’t everyone help bring the food?” Fiona asked from her place on the stone bench. “There are twenty hungry guys down there and only three of us. Give some of those kids a job; they’ve got the energy to spare.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder, aiming it at the cubs seated with their parents on the benches rising above and behind her.
The pregnant Deep Sky woman beside her looked aghast at the suggestion.
“That would be highly inappropriate!” she exclaimed.
Her name came back to me then. Zaria.
“The delivery of the food is symbolic,” Zaria went on. “It is symbolic of a potential, future mate bond. By handing over the ceremonial meal to each of the males, you are handing over a small piece of your future, acknowledging that any one of them might be your mate.”
“Alright, fair, I see why that would be extremely weird for a kid to do,” Fiona said with some discomfort.
“Or a mated woman,” Zaria added. Then, with a small smile, she said, “You have no idea how glad I am that you are here. At the last vaklok I was the only unmated woman. I had to hand-deliver each meal to the men. The second round of the events could not get underway until well into the afternoon!”
“I mean, we’re glad to help, of course,” Tilly said dubiously while I seethed, imagining Fiona handing another man food that represented some future with her, “but I don’t know about this whole symbolic ‘you could be my mate’ thing.”
“I understand that this may feel foreign to you,” Zaria said, “but the truth of the matter is that if you do not bring the food to them, they will not eat.”
I could see Fiona, Tilly, and Nasrin casting their sympathetic gazes at the seated Deep Sky men.
Too soft-hearted, all three of them.
“Then let them go hungry,” I growled, ignoring the hollow ache in my own belly.
I would have rather starved than watched Fiona simper and smile while handing Deep Sky men, or even Zoren and Oxriel, a pretty little chance at her future. If she was going to bring any male food, it would be me and only me, and since I doubted she would find excluding all the others to be acceptable then I would just have to accept my empty stomach and suffer.
But Fiona seemed keen on making me suffer in other ways.
“Knock it off, Dalk,” she called over. “We’re not going to make everybody sit there hungry all morning. You guys need energy for the next rounds of the vaklok. Besides, we haven’t eaten either,” she said, indicating Tilly and Nasrin, “and I’m pretty sure none of us are going to want to sit here stuffing our faces while you’re all watching.”
Rage rose in me like a wave of hateful water.
“So you would serve these males?” I asked, stabbing a claw at the seated Deep Sky men, “even knowing what it means to them?”
“It doesn’t have to mean that to me,” she replied. “I’m just delivering breakfast over here. That’s it.”
Tilly and Nasrin added their assent to this sentiment. Gahn Thaleo said nothing in objection, and for a moment this surprised me. I thought he would have been arguing harder for the meaning of the ceremony, making sure the new women understood and acknowledged exactly what they were doing when they brought his men food.
But then, with the startling slam of a hammer falling, I suddenly understood.
He was not a participant in the vaklok. A new woman would not bring him a ceremonial meal.
Nasrinwould not bring him a ceremonial meal.
She would deliver the food, and the symbolism of her future mate bond to his men, but not to him.
No wonder he does not go on and on about accepting the symbolism of the act, I observed with no small amount of dark, internal glee. In these circumstances, I do not think he even accepts it himself.
Gahn Thaleo wanted Nasrin. He did not have her. This made me happy. With any luck, he would never have her, and I’d be able to bask in his suffering forever.
The pleasure at that thought was short-lived, replaced with annoyance that the three unmated new women were already rising from their places on the bench and picking their way over to the food that had been laid out.
After a moment of hesitation, Oxriel and Zoren sat down with the Deep Sky men, not among them, exactly, but a little off to the side. Eventually, I did the same, my skin crawling with the odd, new sensation of the ends of my hair tickling my shoulders. I would have to either cut it shorter or re-braid it, but at this current length a braid seemed difficult. Maybe just a simple tie at the back, then... I certainly wouldn’t be able to continue on the way it was now, swishing about my neck and making prickles run up and down my spine.
As Fiona, Nasrin, and Tilly loaded food onto large bone trays, I got to work, slicing one of my sharp claws along the edge of my dakrival hide belt. I peeled off a soft, flexible strip of leather, then used it to secure my hair behind me. I gave my head a few shakes, making sure it was tight enough to last through the next few rounds of the vaklok. Other than my hair feeling much lighter than it did before, it seemed like it would more or less be alright. I still could not quite believe that the foul braxilk had gone ahead and not only snipped of my braid, but eaten it. Ill-trained creature.
At least it let me on its back when I told it I had a woman to impress. I wasn’t entirely certain, but maybe it had been a male. Maybe it knew all about the lengths one had to go to to catch the eye of a rare and pretty female.
And there that rare and pretty female was, a huge tray balanced precariously in her arms, laden with Deep Sky food. Fiona walked carefully from the shady area over to us in the sunlight, followed closely by Nasrin and Tilly.
Since I was the last one to have sat down, it worked out that I was also the furthest from the group and the closest to the approaching new women. With Fiona leading the way and me directly in her path, it would have made sense for her to make her way to me first.
Well, it would have made sense to me, anyway. Apparently not to her, though. When she noticed that I was the one before her, she stopped short, then glanced furtively left and right, looking for someone else to bestow the bounty upon.
Oxriel was the next closest male, and with something that looked like relief, she angled herself his way and took a step.
Oh, no. I don’t think so.
My tail was faster than Fiona. It swept along the stone and stopped right in front of her foot-shells. She halted, leaning backward to compensate for her forward momentum and the weight of the tray.
“Dalk!” she cried. “I could have dropped this!”
“Whether I eat it from the bone tray or the stone ground makes no difference to me,” I said, looking up at her. As long as you are the one to bring it to me. And to bring it to me first.
I did not say that part out loud.
Her breath came out in a sharp huff that usually meant some sort of rebuke was coming. I was ready for it, more than ready, rather eagerly anticipating it, actually. But instead she just sighed and lowered herself carefully onto her knees, brandishing the tray between us.
We both looked down at the proffered food stuffs.
Some of it I recognized and could tolerate reasonably well. I was generally satisfied to eat any sort of meat at any time, and I saw plenty of it here. There were other items I recognized but did not enjoy, like the sickeningly sweet, squishy white bars called moonbark. There were other sorts of food I had not ever seen before, and I wondered if these were special to the vaklok. For example, there were scraped-out husks of Deep Sky valok plants stuffed with a sort of jelly – maybe something made from bone marrow – and topped with fragrant bits of grass.
“Well?” Fiona asked. “Are you going to eat any of it?” Her tone softened as her gaze fell to my mouth. “Hopefully none of it hurts your lip.”
Other than the swelling that had made it a little difficult to speak, I’d mostly forgotten about my split lip. I waved away her words with a rise and flick of my tail off the ground.
“I know you new women like to fancy yourselves much stronger than you actually are, but truly, a foot to my face, even from one as stubborn as you, is not enough to cause me any real injury.”
I had meant the words to be comforting, to remind her that there was really no way for her to hurt me. At least not physically, but I would not pursue that line of thinking. Would not go down the path of imagining what ways she really could hurt me, because that way felt very cold and dark. Cold and dark like an empty tent in the night. And maybe it would always be empty...
Whatever my intention, Fiona did not seem comforted. She pinched her pink mouth up, her eyes flashing.
“Well, I’m glad my weak human ass didn’t actually hurt you. Thanks for reminding me how not-strong I am.”
I was about to tell her she was welcome, but I paused, trying to make sense of the contradiction between her face – angry – and her words – glad.
“You are doing that human thing,” I grunted, skewering a juicy piece of felkora meat with my claw and popping it into my mouth.
“What human thing?” she asked warily as I chewed and swallowed.
“That thing where you say the opposite of what you really mean.”
“You mean sarkazm?”
I chewed another bite of meat and swallowed before responding. “I suppose.”
“Well, for your information, it was only halfway sarcastic,” she informed me rather tartly.
I glowered at her, thinking about how deeply unfair it was that she could be so pretty even when she was irritated with me.
“Being reminded that I’m weak? Yeah. Not exactly glad about that even if it is kind of true.” Some of the sour edge bled out of her voice. “But I am glad that you’re not that hurt, at least according to you.”
“Who else should it be according to?”
“I don’t know. A healer?”
I snorted, nearly dropping my next bite of felkora.
“A healer?” I scoffed. “For a bloodied lip?”
“Well, I don’t know!” she cried, her cheeks pinkening in a way that made me want to reach out and touch them. Or lick them, sands help me. “It bled a lot!” she went on frantically. “I’ve got the bloodstains all over our cave floor to prove it.”
I gave a careless toss of my tail against the stone.
“Do not trouble yourself over that,” I said. “I can clean that up.”
If it were merely some random cave in Gahn Thaleo’s mountain then I would simply say, curse you twice, you may keep my bloodstains or get down upon your knees to clean it yourself. But Fiona seemed somewhat distressed about it, and I didn’t need her constantly dithering about how weak or injured I might be every time she saw the dark splotch of my blood in her sleeping cave.
“You don’t have to clean it up. I’m the one who kicked you,” she muttered as I ate a few more bites. She shook her head. “Between that and the whole braxilk-braid-eating-incident, you’re really having quite the day, aren’t you?”
“It is just hair. It will grow back.” I stiffened, then peered at her so closely she reared back, her eyes so wide I could see the white all the way around the dark central sight stars. “Does your hair not grow back when you cut it?”
“Of course it does!” she said, putting down the tray and swatting at my hand as I tugged the hood of her cloak aside to better see her silky strands.
I released her hood. “Then why are you so concerned about it?”
“I don’t know. I just...” She cast her eyes down, nudging a bit of moonbark away from the edge of the tray so that it would not fall. “When I first saw it happen, I thought it was blood. I thought the braxilk had cut your throat.”
Just how frail does this female think I am?
It was a physical pain inside me, a grating scrape against my bones, to know that Fiona was walking around this world thinking that things like little female feet and braxilk beaks could actually damage me.
“Fiona,” I growled, fighting to keep impatience from making my words too snappy and harsh. She never seemed to respond well to that. “The braxilk are strong creatures, no doubt. But if I had been in any real danger, I would have drawn a blade and felled it in an instant. It took my braid. It did not – and would not have been able to – take my life.”
“If you say so.”
“I do,” I sighed, irritated and perplexed. “Did you not just hear me say it? I will say it again if you did not understand me the first time.”
“No, no. Not necessary.” She gave me a strained smile. “Ah, shoot. Tilly and Nasrin have already fed half these guys and I’ve just been sitting here with you.”
“Good.”
Fiona had gotten one foot underneath her, half in a kneel, half in a crouch, but her upward progress halted as suddenly as if the top of her head had bumped up against an invisible wall.
“What? What’s good?”
Ah.
I said that out loud, did I?
Well, nothing for it now.
“It is good you have been here with me and not those other males,” I said. “In fact...”
Still in her odd half-crouch, Fiona hadn’t yet picked up the tray. It lay on the stone between us. I grasped up all the remaining felkora meat between my claws, crushed it into a fleshy ball, and shoved the whole thing into my mouth. The stretch actually did make my lip burn quite uncomfortably, but blast if I would let it show.
“Dalk!” Fiona said, sounding too astounded to be angry with me. Yet. “That was for all the competitors!”
I swallowed – a rather difficult feat, it turned out, because that had been more meat in one go than I’d actually anticipated – and fixed her with a hard stare as I dragged the back of my hand across my mouth.
“Give them the other things, then,” I told her. “The sweets and the jellies.”
Sweets and jellies meant nothing. Less than nothing.
Meat was sustenance. Meat was life. And if any food on that tray was meant to represent something like a mate bond, it would be the meat. The other men could have the odd and chewy Deep Sky trifles.
But the meat from Fiona’s hands was mine alone.
“OK. Wow. So not only are you a Mr. Grumpy Grabby-Hands, you’re also a Greedy Gus.”
“I do not know what those words mean.”
“Yeah. I said them in English to maintain the alliteration. It’s a literary device that... You know what? Never mind. I don’t even know why I’m still talking to you.” She snapped her legs straight as she stood, then bent to retrieve the tray, snatching it out of reach as if worried I’d try to take the rest of the food. “God, it’s a good thing Tilly and Nasrin’s trays are bigger than mine,” she said, looking over my head to watch her friends wind through the group of men behind me. “They’re already on their second rounds and luckily there’s still meat to spare.”
That was fine by me. I didn’t give two discarded claw trimmings about the contents of Nasrin’s or Tilly’s trays, or whom they chose to distribute their meat to.
But even so, I did twist in my place to see them. Nasrin was approaching a seated warrior whose face I could not see, and Tilly was bending to offer her tray to Warrek, Gahn Thaleo’s closest man. Although I almost didn’t recognize him, because his face, usually as serious as his Gahn’s, was stretched in a wide smile, fangs glinting.
“So we meet again,” Warrek said, still smiling, staring up at Tilly.
“Yes!” she said with a bright laugh. “I certainly seem to be making the rounds! There’s a lot of food on these trays! Want anything else?”
“There is something that I want,” he said, sight stars keen on her face. “But it is not food.”
Tilly stood awkwardly bent, her tray held out before she straightened and withdrew it.
“Oh?” she said, somewhat cautiously, “and what is that?”
Warrek got to his feet, looming over her. Tilly usually wore her kinky-curly hair in a round puff tied on the top of her head. This added a bit more height to her frame, but even so, she was one of the shortest new women I’d seen.
“I noticed,” Warrek said, leaning down slightly to her, his near-black hair turned shockingly blue where the sun hit it, “that you bear the face of the warrior Oxriel in your hands while you watch the vaklok.”
“Oh! Yeah. We just... Well, we wanted to cheer them on,” Tilly said. “There are only three of them compared to, what, more than fifteen of you competing? Plus, we just didn’t have time to make them for everyone.”
“You did not need to make them for everyone,” Warrek countered. “Only one other man.”
Tilly looked like she was about to say something, then hesitated. Warrek sliced into that silence like a hunter.
“I hope that in the next vaklok, it will be my face you hold up,” Warrek drawled. “Or perhaps even more than that, I hope that in the next vaklok I will not be competing at all. And you,” he gestured a claw at Tilly’s tray, “will not be handing out food with the unmated women as you do now.”
He walked away then, turning and heading over to his Gahn, leaving Tilly to stare after him, her small brown face furrowed with confusion as his words slowly sank in. But that confusion would not last. Tilly was clever and she would glean his meaning soon, fully understanding what Warrek had just insinuated.
That by the next vaklok, the two of them might be mated. That he openly wished for it, in fact.
I watched realization dawn, smoothing out her features. I expected those features to then pull themselves into some sort of grimace, or maybe an expression of outrage at Warrek’s boldness.
But curse me for thinking I knew a single blasted thing about the new women, because she tipped her face down, casting it into further shadows. And in those shadows, she smiled.
“Did you see that?” I hissed at Fiona. Tilly smiled! Smiled at such an outrageous claim made by a warrior who grinned so boldly at her he practically leered!
When Fiona did not answer, I jerked my head back around to find her gone from me. She was now chatting away with Oxriel, or Ox, as she infuriatingly insisted on calling him. Like Tilly, she was also smiling. Fortunately I could at least count on Oxriel to be just a little too timid to openly proposition a new woman and claim her as his future mate before a bond was even established.
The meat churned in my stomach. I stood rapidly, unable to remain still and seated any longer. Confusion lurched through me like a limping animal. Could such boldness as I’d just witnessed from Warrek, such a direct and confident declaration of desire, really be effective?
Could I simply tell Fiona I wanted her and have that actually work?
I stared at her with Oxriel, claws flexing at my sides, almost as if I wished I could grab a blade and fight off these feelings. I knew how to fight. Knew how to give blows and receive them. I could break, and I could bleed, because I’d done those things countless times before, and somehow all of that was far less painful than this. This – watching Fiona smile at another man and not knowing what to do about it.
Besides kill the other man, that is.
I did not know how to smile winsomely at a tongue-twistingly pretty female in such a way that she would deign to smile back.
I did not know what to do with all this jealousy.
Well, I did know what to do with it. What I should do, anyway. Get rid of it by any means necessary. Uncle Taraken had warned me about it so many times. Jealousy is a burning poison, he often said. It will kill a man and leave him dead even while he’s still walking.
Usually, though, he was talking about boyhood jealousies he observed in me. Anger over another cub besting me at something, for example. Even as I matured, we did not speak much on the topic of females. He’d never had a mate, so in that area he was just as groaningly clueless as I was, I supposed.
How come Warrek was not clueless?
How come Oxriel, clueless male that he most certainly was, could still get those smiles out of Fiona anyway?
Gahn Thaleo’s voice shook me from my seething questions. And for once, I was glad for the words the foul Gahn uttered.
“The ceremonial meal is complete,” he called out, still standing beside Nasrin. “The time for combat has come.”
If I could not fight these feelings, beat them down and make them bleed...
At least I could do it to a man.