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“We’re going to take the shuttle over there later,” Fiona added.
“I will accompany you.”
They turned towards me, and it was only then that I realized it was I who had spoken.
“Oh! You don’t have to,” Fiona said in a rush. “I know you don’t like going there.”
I would have bet all five of the claws on my left hand that no man enjoyed returning to the mountain of the foreign Gahn who’d once held him captive. It was not so very long ago that Gahn Thaleo had imprisoned Vaxilkai, Bariok, Oxriel, and me after finding us with Priya and Lerokan in his territory.
Fiona was no doubt referring to the first night our party had landed in this valley, when Gahn Thaleo invited us to eat with his tribe in his mountain. I had seethed at the idea of returning there and had nearly drawn a blade on him when I’d seen him. Valeria had scolded me, and it had been decided that I should stay behind to guard the new camp while the others went to Gahn Thaleo’s mountain without me.
I’d regretted it the moment the shuttle disappeared, taking Fiona with it.
I would not allow her to return to that territory without me again.
“Do not concern yourself with what I like or do not like,” I said, my voice coming sharper than I’d intended. I found it difficult to form calm words around her in that moment. My mind was still turning over question after question, each one erupting through me with the force of a death blow – did it feel bad did I taste bad what in the merciless stretch of the Sea Sands did I do wrong? – but I managed to grind out the rest of my response. “I am your chaperone. So I will chaperone you.”
“I don’t think you’re our chaperones,” Fiona said, frowning slightly at Tilly, and Tilly nodded her agreement. “I think it’s more that all the other Gahns wanted a representative from their tribes at the new Deep Sky settlement. You’re not our bodyguards or anything like that.”
“Have you forgotten,” I said tightly, my tail tensing, “that there are no unmated females left in Gahn Thaleo’s tribe? You may not think that you need guarding, but you do. I refuse to allow you to wander protectionless into the den of desperate males.”
“Desperate males? That’s not exactly fair,” she said, her frown deepening. “None of the tribes have enough single women. Gahn Fallo’s tribe included.”
“Not enough is not the same as none.”
She did not know. None of them did.
No new woman would be able to comprehend the ever-present ache that lived inside every unmated Sea Sand male. Sometimes just an itch at the back of the brain, and sometimes a breath-stealing wallop that came at you when you least expected it, when you were least prepared to fight against it. Like when you suddenly woke in the cold embrace of night and there was no one with you in your tent, and you realized with the grim bite of a blade in your guts that maybe there would always be no one. Just you and your hides and your weapons in the empty, endless dark.
She could not know what it was to find them, to find her, that surreal day out on the open sands. To drag her away from the lethal zeelk claws that snapped so close to her slender human throat. I protected her skin as my own. I protected her skin more than my own, because I bled at the end of that day, but by the sands I made sure that she did not.
She could not know what it was like to carry her, broken and barely breathing on my irkdu. So small and strange and new she was.
And so very, very female.
I did not wish to know what sort of expression I wore upon my face at that moment. Whatever it was, it had Fiona closing her mouth, swallowing back whatever retort had been rising up her throat.
“I am coming with you,” I said. “Do not bother arguing. You cannot win.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Fiona
Igave him an out, I thought as we piled into Valeria’s shuttle later that day. I told him he didn’t have to come. He’s a big boy and he can make his own decisions.
But... I still felt bad. It was too easy, sometimes, with our ra-ra-everyone-be-friends human shtick to forget that there were very real grievances and very recent wounds among the tribes of this world. Dalk, Vaxilkai, Oxriel, and Bariok had been imprisoned in Gahn Thaleo’s mountain when they’d come into the Deep Sky to bring Priya back after her disappearance. I didn’t expect Dalk or any of the others to forgive a thing like that. And I didn’t expect him to want to come with us to Gahn Thaleo’s mountain.
But here he was, sitting on the metal floor directly in front of my seat with his long legs bent awkwardly, his back to me. Valeria and Grim were seated up front in their usual spots. Nasrin and Tilly, like me, were strapped into two of the other chairs that folded out from the shuttle’s walls. Bariok and Vaxilkai had ultimately decided to stay back at Gahn Errok’s, though Oxriel had come, and Zoren, too, both of them on the floor, too big to fit into the fourth empty chair.
Why Dalk hadn’t stayed behind with Bariok and Vaxilkai was anyone’s bloody guess. Oh, apart from all that nonsense about desperate Deep Sky males. I wondered what went on in that big alien head of his. Did Dalk really think that some Deep Sky dude was going to pounce on me the moment that he wasn’t there and drag me screaming into some dark hidey hole to be his unwilling human wife?
I stared down at the top of his dark head, watching the way the muscles of his shoulders and on either side of his spine bunched and rolled with tension as the shuttle lifted off. Much like his Gahn, the infamous (or just plain-old-insane) Fallo, Dalk tended to wear more knives and blades strapped to his body than the other Sea Sand or Deep Sky men did. Two very long black blades made an X shape across the broad expanse of his back, plus smaller blades (that were likely just knives to him but machetes to me) fastened all along those straps. Then he had the belt with more knives, all topped off with a spear balanced with perfect power on his lap. With the movement of the shuttle and the awkward bend of his legs in his current position, the spear should have been wobbling all over the place. But it wasn’t. One hand curled long, dark fingers over the middle of the spear’s shaft, and that one point of contact kept the whole impressive length of the weapon tight and still.
“Who taught you how to handle a spear?” I suddenly asked him over the din of the engines.
It seemed to take a moment for Dalk to realize I was speaking to him. He twisted to look back at me, coppery sight stars shimmering into focus.
“My father died when I was very young. His brother Taraken taught me what I needed to know. He never had a mate. No sons of his own.”
