Chapter 22
For the next few days, we just waited for Kinnek and Zeddira to get back. There was a tension in the air that hadn’t been there before, but now everyone knew that something big was ahead of us all.
Inkiri, Fellisse, and Lissir spent a good amount of time with our Raiken guests. That included morning training sessions, which were bigger now and tended to last longer.
The morning after our planning session, I took up my spectator position. Inkiri brought the folding chair out every morning, and Fellisse generally checked I had my sun hat on or dropped it on my head if I didn’t.
Everyone was doing some slower warm-up stuff, but one of the Raiken guests peeled away from the group and came over to me.
“Hello,” he said.
I looked up. “Uh, hi.”
That seemed to be enough of an invitation, and the tall guy folded his legs under himself to sit on the ground next to my chair.
He put his hand on his chest. “Good morning. I am Tador. It is nice to meet you.”
He spoke with a heavy accent, but had the kind of careful pronunciation that told me he had practiced this. This wasn’t exactly new either—several of the Raikengana were testing out their language skills, sometimes with help from Lueris, but often simply doing their best with what words they had.
“Rory. Nice to meet you too.”
I gave the guy my hand to shake. It wasn’t a bagua thing, but some of them seemed very eager to try handshaking.
Tador beamed and carefully took my hand in his. He did three shakes. They all did that, and I figured they’d gotten some lesson that said this was the proper way to do it. His grip was loose, almost like he was afraid he’d squeeze my hand too hard.
“No training today?” I asked, making sure to speak slowly.
Tador shook his head, paused, then nodded. “Yes, training. Uh. Soon?”
“Oh. You’re taking a break.”
He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. “Taking…break?”
He mimed breaking something in two.
I shook my head. “Not like that. I mean…yasu. Taking a yasu.” This was one of the first Lugarran words I’d mastered, given that yasu meant there were cookies or iced tea instead of having to practice my writing while Kinnek told me to make it neater.
Tador lit up. “Ah! Yes, so is. Yasu.” His lips pressed tight, and he turned his head toward the others, who were just starting their sparring. “Lissir is…nice.”
I glanced at where Lissir and Fellisse were doing some sort of complicated-looking grappling. “Yeah, he is. He’s very quick with all the fighting.”
Tador frowned, tilting his head this way and that, his lips moving silently.
I’d probably been too fast for him, so I made sure to slow down. “He’s very quick. Quick, quick.”
“Ah, quick! Yes, quick. He is Rory sentenmen?”
I nodded. “Yup. Sentenmen. Family, I guess you’d say.”
He nodded, and there was a pause while he considered what to say next.
It shouldn’t have bothered me—honestly, we’d had plenty of exchange students at my high school, and how else was anyone going to learn?
—but I was never sure what a conversation with the bagua was about.
Sometimes, we’d exchange three words, and then they’d bow and all but run off, only to come back later to try the same three words again.
“Lissir sentenmen or senfesmen is?” Tador eventually said, his face blank, but his eyes sort of boring into mine. That changed his entire demeanor, and I realized the guy could be pretty commanding if he wanted to be.
“Uh…you mean… Oh. He’s just sentenmen. No fesmen, nope. We’re just really good friends, and he bought me clothes for my wedding day. When I wedded—married, that is—Ink. Inkiri, you know? He’s my senfesmen, real husband material. He’s the best.”
Tador’s eyes went wide, and I immediately felt guilty.
He couldn’t have picked up too much from that.
I hadn’t meant to blurt at him, but I couldn’t control when I got accidentally startled and started blabbering.
I wondered whether I should repeat myself, but there was a good chance I would make it worse.
There was always a good chance I would make it worse.
A shadow fell over my face. “Princess.”
Bless Vergis and his sneaky timing. I only jumped a little in my chair. “Hi! Uh, can you… I was trying to explain that Lissir is sentenmen and not senfesmen, but I think maybe I overshot.”
Vergis crossed his arms. He was standing there with the sun behind him, which meant all of him looked like one solid shadow to me.
“What else is fucking new.” He looked at Tador and went into a quick Lugarran explanation I couldn’t quite follow.
Verbs did a lot of grammatical acrobatics in that language, and I wasn’t great at keeping track.
Tador and Vergis exchanged a few more words, and then Tador smiled at me and bowed. “Yasu end.” He did the thing normal humans like me couldn’t, where he went from sitting cross-legged to standing without using his hands to get up and rejoined the others.
Vergis groaned, and when I looked up, he stepped to the side so I got the sun directly in my face. It made me flinch and pull the sun hat farther over my face.
“He’s trying to figure out his chances with Lissir. Get up, we’re going to the roof.”
I frowned. “But I’m watching the guys. Inkiri likes me watching.”
“Your mate could probably use a morning of sparring where he doesn’t have to try his best to throw everyone so as to be the most entertaining fighter for you.”
“He doesn’t do that… He doesn’t, right?”
Vergis gave me the flattest of flat looks.
I sucked on my bottom lip and glanced at Inkiri. “Does he do that?”
Vergis sighed. “I have mini pretzels.”
I hadn’t had junk food in ages. “You do? Did you steal them?”
Vergis rolled his eyes and walked off. I blamed the way pre-apocalypse consumerism had conditioned me to respond immediately to the siren call of junk food for how quickly I jumped to my feet, jogged after him, then stopped.
“Ink!” My mate sidestepped an attack—fudge, I should’ve checked what he was doing before calling his name, but he was okay. “Uh, I’m—Vergis needs my help with something. We’ll be on the roof.”
Inkiri nodded, grinned, then did a spin-kick thing to his attacker that connected and knocked that bagu down on his ass. Yup, he was showing off for me. It was kind of hot.
I caught up with Vergis on the back stairs. “Why do you have pretzels?”
“What do you mean, why? For eating, obviously. It’s sort of a secret stash. Dad doesn’t like snacks with ‘negligible nutritional value.’ But I figure you’d make a good food crime accomplice.”
“Yeah, totally.” I hung my hat on its hook in the mudroom and followed Vergis upstairs, then up the ladder to the roof.
We’d hung out up here a few times—no drugs for me, but Vergis generally gave me the hammock, especially after Fellisse had insisted it needed a sun sail over it so delicate human me didn’t get struck down with sunstroke sickness while napping.
I sat in the hammock and watched Vergis open a cooler and pull out a big old family-sized bag of salted pretzels.
He held it up but made no move to hand it over. “You’re not telling Kinnek about this.”
I nodded, my mouth watering. “I’m not telling Kinnek about this. Oh! Are we only doing this because he’s out? Is this like your version of a wild party?”
He didn’t move for a good ten seconds. “Do you want some or not?”
I bobbed my head a few times. “Yup. Not telling no one, except actually not with the double negative.”
Vergis took a deep breath. “Of all the human twinks—fine.”
He opened the bag and poured about half the pretzels into a metal bowl we’d used for snacking up here before.
I stretched out on the hammock while Vergis unrolled the camping mattress across the Astroturf, the bowl between us, and for the next couple of minutes, all we did was crunch down on pretzels and stare up at the blue summer sky.
I could hear the guys sparring down in the garden, but there was also birdsong, and…
Did the way a pleasant summer day sounded out in nature have a name? I wasn’t sure, but it was that.
I started to fantasize about how everything would work out perfectly with us closing the veils to the monster world.
We’d help kill off the monsters, and while that wasn’t much, me helping do that would at least make up for a fraction of the part I’d played in bringing about the apocalypse in the first place.
The Raiken would take care of the cola ash people and the human mages who’d started this whole mess, then they would sign some kind of treaty with the human survivors, and everything would be better for everyone.
Religious people wouldn’t be allowed to abuse children anymore, because as part of their treaty with the humans, the Raiken would insist on having a sakkir clause in there.
Maybe more bagua would find their human mates and live happily ever after. The world could be good again.
The pretzel bowl was getting low, and I was about to ask Vergis to refill it so we could destroy every trace of the contraband when a bloodcurdling scream made both of us jolt upright. It came from the garden, in the general direction of the gazebo.
“Shit.” Vergis jumped up. He was down the hatch before I even managed to climb out of the hammock.