Chapter 8
Oljin
“ C laws,” I tell her, flexing them in and out. She seems fascinated, tracing along their shape. I love how excited she is to learn anything she can. We have that in common.
I examine her claws just as closely. Hers are smooth and flat, blunt like her teeth, and they don’t retract. I wonder how her people cut their fabric or shave or butcher their meat. Perhaps they don’t do any of those things. I have so much to learn, and a lifetime with her to learn it.
But first, she must heal and regain her strength. I finish combing her hair. I’d thought its wild texture was a product of the tangles, but even with them removed, her hair doesn’t hang straight like an Irran’s. It loops and swirls and makes graceful waves over her shoulders, like it’s tracing the path of the wind.
“Your hair is beautiful, Alara,” I tell her, unable to stop running my fingers through it, admiring its unusual brown color.
“Hair,” she says, practicing the word. The bath has made her soft and dreamy, eased some of her brittle tension.
“Yes. Beautiful hair. Beautiful Rose.”
She catches my hand in hers. “Beautiful claws?”
She’s so earnest, I try to smother my laugh. “No, they’re not. You can call them sharp and deadly if you want. But you are the only beautiful thing I see. Everything pales next to you.”
Despite my oath to spare her my interest, my cock twitches, brushing against her thigh. I’m sure she feels it. Sure it will frighten her. I start to lift her off my lap, but she places her palm against my chest, stopping me.
She lifts my hand again, pointing to my palm rather than my fingertips. Her brow furrows as she struggles to remember the word. “Hand?” she asks, her pronunciation only slightly off.
“Yes, hand,” I tell her, naming my wrist, arm, shoulder, chest, and neck when she asks. She brushes each body part in turn with her featherlight touch. I move her fingers to the small flaps of skin tucked beneath my jaw. “Gills.”
She sucks in a surprised breath, tracing their sensitive openings as she repeats the word. The sensation is too much. I can’t hold my pigment back. It blooms over my skin in shades of lavender and red and pink, full of affection and desire for her.
She can’t understand that any more than I can understand scrolls written in the old tongue, but she doesn’t miss the burst of color. She follows some of the channels with her fingers, chasing the pigment’s path.
I don’t stop her. I’m satisfying her curiosity, I tell myself. I’m indulging her scholarly interest. Doesn’t matter that it gives me more pleasure than I’ve felt in the rest of my life put together with her little fingers walking all over my skin.
“Pigment,” I tell her, like teaching her the word somehow excuses my indecent enjoyment.
“Beautiful pigment,” she murmurs. This time I don’t disagree. These colors are for her. “Beautiful Oljin.”
She slides her hand down toward my abdomen, and my muscles tense involuntarily. “Chest. Ribs. Belly,” I hiss out, so I don’t have to tell her to stop.
Alioth save me, I won’t even keep my oath to her for a day at this rate. What am I doing, letting my cock think for me? I’m as bad as Chanísh looking for his Alara in the pleasure houses. Worse, maybe, because Rose is still weak.
Her fingers dip below the surface of the bath, and my cock strains toward them. She bites her lip, leaning into me.
“No, Rose.” Abruptly, I stand, lifting her out of the water with me. I wrap her in a grasscloth sheet and carry her back to the valith, pigment pounding through me.
“You’re dripping on my floor,” Saana complains when we enter, but she immediately softens, adding, “I’ll find her something clean to wear.”
I lay Rose on her pallet, only to find her eyes shimmering with tears. I drop to my knees beside her. “Alara,” I groan, resting my head on her fabric-covered stomach. “I’m not rejecting you. I want you to name every part of me. But my self-control is weaker than you are. I had to stop so I didn’t push you too far and interfere with your recovery. Do you understand?”
Of course she doesn’t. She can’t. But she will someday. Probably someday very soon, given how quickly she’s learning.
“Belly,” she says, the soft, flat surface jumping beneath my forehead.
I can’t help but smile. “Beautiful belly,” I agree, dropping a kiss in the center of it. She cups my face, brushing her thumb over my lips questioningly. “Mouth,” I tell her, swallowing my need to taste her.
She tugs my face impatiently, urging me up her body. “Oljin mouth, beautiful mouth, Rose mouth, yes,” she says.
The words tumble out in a strange order in her strange accent, but her meaning unmistakable. How can I resist such a determined request for a kiss? I only swore to wait until she asked, and here she is, asking.
“Don’t bite me, Alara,” I warn her, only half joking, before I brush my lips over hers. It’s a chaste kiss, but the feelings it ignites in me are anything but. I’m the one holding back my bite.
Her lips are chapped and trembling, too-cool after getting out of the thermal bath, and the most perfect, delicious thing I’ve ever tasted. I have to brace myself not to devour her whole and instead take her in mouthfuls, pausing between kisses in the hopes my hunger for her settles.
I pull back when Saana returns, only to see my Alara is crying again, but she’s smiling through her tears. She presses her hand to the center of her chest and says her phrase of gratitude. I cover her hand with mine and repeat it, adding, “You are the one who has gifted me. You are a gift yourself.”
Beside me, Sanna sighs. “I don’t know if this is good for her or not. Normally, I would keep an animal calm while it heals. But R’Hiza take me, I can’t forbid it when the two of you look at each other like that.”
“Good thing. I doubt I could follow that rule.”
“I’m sure you couldn’t,” Saana chuckles, passing me the folded sveli. “You’d tear down this valith first.”
Rose is exhausted. After we help her dress, I let her rest and assist Saana with the heavier outside work. The strain on my muscles and starlight on my shoulders feel good. Feeding the braxa, mending their enclosure, washing pelts...it takes me back to another time. One when I was merely a greenling visiting his friend’s home, no responsibilities to shirk.
It feels even better ending the day with my Alara in my arms, sharing lastmeal and words in our languages. For a few more days, we eat and learn and sleep and wake in each other’s arms.
Every day, Rose grows stronger. Every day, I love and understand her more. Every day, I wish I could live this life forever.
But I can’t. Because every day I stay in the grasslands, I’m neglecting my duty.
And today while I’m doing chores, I glance guiltily in the direction of Gren’Irra. Its steep cliffs are just a fuzzy line in the distance, a mere smudge on the scroll of the grassland, but a plume of golden dust rises from the footpath.
Someone is coming.
My absence has been noticed by now. My mother must be worried, though Chanísh is surely bursting with hope that I won’t return. The Frathik delegation, who expected the flattery and attention of both Grenzar’s sons, may have left out of impatience or offense.
Undoubtedly, warriors were dispatched to find me. They’ve probably upended the palace. Interrogated my friends. Emptied every fighting pit and pleasure house. And now they’ve widened the search. I have to get ahead of this somehow.
I sprint back to the valith and scoop up Rose. “Someone’s coming,” I hiss to Saana on my way out, who immediately scans the room for evidence of our presence and begins dissembling the pallet.
“Go. Now. I’ll take care of it.” She shoos me impatiently out the back.
I can’t use the footpath or risk meeting whoever seeks me, so I hug my Alara tight to my chest and plunge downwind into the grass. Long stalks flick past as I run, thrumming the tips of my ears. Blinded and deafened by the thick foliage, I crash on for long, tense minutes, protecting her with my forearms, desperate to put as much space between us and the traveler as I can.
When I finally stop, chest heaving, to tamp the grass down in a circle, my forearms are raw and sticky with blood drawn in delicate, stinging slices by the resentful blades. Rose is not unscathed: one ankle has felt a cut.
I place her in the center of the cell I’ve created, open to Alioth above but walled in by dense green grass, and kneel down to examine her wound. I’m relieved when it proves shallow, blood only beading and not flowing. Using the hem of my sveli, I dab it away.
She gasps when she notices my injuries, her hands hovering worriedly over the red-smeared skin. “Oljin arm no!” she begins, but I squeeze her ankle, cutting her off even as my pride swells that she called out the words so fluently. Unfortunately, they may carry far enough for sharp Irran hearing.
In fact, when I tilt my ear toward the valith, I can pick up the murmur of voices. I point back the way we came, though the grass has already swallowed our path. Then I touch her lips to indicate she should be silent.
She understands, and I squeeze her again to thank her for her caution. But even though I regulate my breathing and trade smiles with her, keeping my skin a careful green to match our surroundings, a storm rages beneath my camouflage as I eavesdrop on Saana’s conversation. My pigment clashes in its channels, anger and fear warring for space. Keeping it from the surface is arduous, but if I let it go...I’m not sure I can hold myself back.
It's a warrior, not a messenger. He’s looking for me. Someone saw me take Rose from the circus. Someone else reported me leaving the cliffs with a foreign female in my arms. The priests suspect she is a spy, that I may be plotting with a foreign power. They sent warriors into the grass to find us both.
They must be panicking if they’re already trying to discredit me—and her.
I do not fear they will take her from me. I fear how many I kill to keep her safe. And I am angry that it’s come to this. Angry that I have to hide her when she should be worshipped. Angry that she has to cower when she should be wearing a crown.
If the priests truly loved the goddess, they’d fall at my Alara’s feet regardless of her species. They’d welcome her and learn her ways. If my brother truly loved his brother, he’d defend me against their lies. I want to punish them all .
A growl slips out of me. Rose stretches to place two fingers against my lips, reminding me to be quiet, and it’s like something snaps. Maybe it’s the scent of her skin so close to my nares, but the bond between us tightens, knotting us together.
She is mine .
Not the goddess’s. Not Irra’s. Mine. And I will keep her safe above all else.
I pull her into my lap, folding her in my arms, and find her quivering in fear.
This time I press my lips to her lips, trying to communicate everything with my kiss. We can’t speak aloud, but I can say this: Give me your fear. Give me your pain. Let me hold you until the danger is gone.