Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
The baby’s tiny hand closed around Polly’s finger, and something inside her chest went soft and aching all at once.
“She likes you,” Yasmin said, threading a strand of dyed sinew through a bone bead.
Like Polly, she had been stolen from Earth, but the ship that had taken her had crash-landed on Hothrest and she’d been fortunate enough to find Rhaal almost immediately.
“She doesn’t grab just anyone. She screamed like she was being murdered when Zeeja tried to hold her. ”
Polly rolled her eyes. Zeeja was an arrogant female who muttered insults at her whenever Njkall wasn’t around.
“That’s because she has good taste.” She bent her head over the little bundle in her arms. The baby was impossibly small, with a fuzz of white fur covering her tiny body and bright blue Hothian eyes in a human face.
She smelled like warm milk and something clean and new.
Her fist tugged at Polly’s finger with a strength that seemed too fierce for someone so tiny. “Don’t you? Yes, you do.”
“You’re a natural, you know.”
“I’m holding her. That’s not a skill.”
“You’d be surprised.” Yasmin knotted the sinew and held her half-strung necklace up to the crystal light. “I can trip over my own feet. Thank goodness I’ve never done it while I was holding her.”
She laughed, but her eyes kept drifting back to the small face against her arm.
The baby had drifted into that boneless, trusting sleep that only the very young managed, mouth slack, one cheek squashed against the crook of her elbow.
And a thought slipped in before she could stop it, quiet and dangerous.
What would it be like to hold my own baby?
She could picture it all too clearly, which was the trouble.
A baby with her dark hair, or maybe white fur.
Deep blue eyes or her grey ones. She imagined Njkall’s enormous hands, hands that could crush stone, cupping something so fragile with all that terrible gentleness he possessed, and her throat went tight.
She pushed the thought back down where it belonged.
“You’ve got that look,” Yasmin said.
“What look?”
“The one where you go somewhere else and come back sadder.” The other woman put her work down in her lap and gave her a thoughtful look. “So. You and Njkall.”
She sighed. She should have known this was coming. Yasmin had a way of circling a subject three times before she pounced on it, and she’d been circling this one since she arrived.
“There’s no me and Njkall,” she said. “Not like that.”
“You sleep in his bed.”
“I sleep in my own bed.” The lie was small and unconvincing, and Yasmin’s raised eyebrow said so. “Mostly.” Rarely. “Sometimes I wake up and I’ve… I end up in his bed. I don’t decide to. My feet just take me there.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s not like that,” she said again. “He’s never… He wouldn’t. He’s a perfect gentleman. Too perfect.” The last words came out before she’d thought them through, and heat crawled up her neck.
Yasmin grinned. “Ah. There it is.”
“There’s nothing.”
“Polly.” Yasmin leaned towards her, careful of the baby between them. “Do you want there to be something?”
The fire popped in the hearth. The baby made a small snuffling sound and settled deeper into sleep, and she looked down at the baby rather than at her friend, because it was easier than facing her.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Sometimes I think—” She stopped and took a deep breath.
“This morning the furs slipped, and I wasn’t wearing anything, and he told me I had to start covering up.
Because he’s—” She lowered her voice as though the sleeping infant might report her.
“He said it was because he was attracted to me. And instead of being scared, I felt—” She shook her head. “But then I ran away. Like a coward.”
Yasmin sighed.
“That’s not cowardice. You have reasons. You’ve been hurt, and you’re allowed to take your time. Even if your alien boyfriend is so attracted he’s having trouble looking you in the eye.”
She huffed a small laugh. “He is not my alien boyfriend.”
Njkall’s role in her life encompassed many things, but boyfriend wasn’t one of them. Boyfriend belonged to the old Polly. The Polly that attended classes and worked part-time at a coffee shop and never for a second believed that aliens were real. That Polly had died in a cell in a mining colony.
“Maybe you should tell him that. I bet it would help.”
The sound of her own groan made the baby stir, and she patted the little back automatically.
“I don’t know what to do.” Her voice came out small and lost. “I’m not… I don’t want to be that girl. The broken one.”
“You’re not broken,” Yasmin said fiercely. “You’re healing. You’re allowed to be wounded.”
“I don’t want to be. I want to be like you. I want to be normal.”
“Oh, honey. I am many things, but normal is not one of them.” Yasmin leaned back, a wry smile on her mouth.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said. “That’s the truth. I don’t know what I want, and even if I did, I wouldn’t know how to… how to tell him. How does anyone even start?”
“With Hothians?” Yasmin snorted and picked her necklace back up. “They don’t really do subtle. So you start by saying it plainly, in words, using your mouth.”
“I don’t think I can do that.”
‘Well, there’s always the more direct route.” Her friend waggled her eyebrows and Polly’s cheeks flamed again.
“I don’t think I can do that either.”
Yasmin’s eyebrow went up again. “Njkall would sooner walk into a blizzard than push you a single inch you didn’t ask for.
He’s decided your comfort matters more than what he wants.
Which is lovely and honorable and all that.
But it also means that if you sit around waiting for him to make the first move, you’ll both be old and grey and you’ll die having never said a word. ”
She turned that over in her mind. It fit. It fit so well it was uncomfortable, like a mirror held up at an angle she’d been avoiding.
“He values my freedom,” she said slowly. “More than—”
“More than his own happiness. Yes. I know. It’s maddening.
” Yasmin held out her hand. “Now give me my daughter before she wakes up starving and ruins this whole peaceful morning, and pass me those red beads. If we’re going to solve your love life we might as well make something pretty while we do it. ”
She passed the baby over, careful to keep her head supported, and felt the little warm weight leave her arms with a pang that surprised her. Then she reached for the tray of beads, and for a while they simply worked, heads bent together, the fire warm at their backs.
It was the best kind of morning. The kind that a year ago she would not have believed she could ever have again. Two women, a sleeping baby, a bowl of colored beads, and no fear in the room at all.
She strung a necklace of pale carved snow-crystal and river stone, and while her fingers worked, her mind kept sliding back to what Yasmin had said. Say it plainly. As though it were that simple. As though the words wouldn’t stick in her throat like fishbones.
But maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe that was the frightening part. Maybe she was one honest sentence away from something she’d wanted longer than she’d let herself admit.
By the time Yasmin gathered up her baby and her half-finished jewelry and wrapped herself in her thick furs for the walk back to her own cave, the sun had climbed high enough to send a thin, cold light down through the light shafts overhead.
“Think about what I said,” Yasmin told her at the entrance, the baby a snug bundle against her chest. “Plainly. Words. Mouth.”
“I heard you the first time.”
“I’m saying it again because I know you.” Yasmin kissed her cheek. “You’re braver than you think, Polly. You just always find out about it last.”
And then she was gone, her footsteps fading down the passage, and she was alone in the warm quiet with a lapful of beads and a chest full of things she didn’t have names for yet.
She’d barely started tidying the trays when a brisk, business-like knock came from the cave entrance. A knock she recognized immediately.
“Come in, Cera.” She rose to meet the clan header. “Is something wrong? Is Yasmin—”
“Yasmin’s fine. Rhaal was waiting to take her home.
” The old female stepped inside, shaking snow from her white fur, and her sharp eyes swept over the cave before settling on her.
Cera was not a female who wasted words or motion.
She’d sat with Polly during some of those terrible early nights, and she trusted her more than anyone other than Njkall.
“I need your help. If you’re willing to give it. ”
“My help?” Her hand clenched nervously. “With what?”
“A patrol found someone this morning in an old cave up past the north ridge.” Cera sighed, watching her face. “They found a human female.”
Her heart skipped a beat.
“Human,” she repeated.
“Half-frozen. She’s dressed in nothing that would keep a Hothian child alive out there, let alone one of you naked skins.
She’s also exhausted, dehydrated, and terrified out of her wits.
” Cera’s voice stayed level, but Polly could see the worry in her eyes.
“She won’t let anyone near her. The moment a warrior came within reach she came up swinging with a metal bar and almost took his ear off.
We had to back off entirely. She’s cornered in that cave like a wounded skarn, and she’ll die of the cold before she lets one of us close enough to help. ”
Her hands had gone cold. She knew that cornered feeling. She knew, down to her bones, exactly what it was to see something enormous and alien and fanged loom up out of the dark and be certain, absolutely certain, that it had come to hurt you.
“You want me to talk to her,” she said.