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“Alright. Hit me.”
Oh, this was entertaining indeed. Because once again, a new woman had managed to find a chink in his hard exterior, get her claws into it, and crack it wide. Gahn Thaleo balked.
Valeria’s comment had not translated well. I felt myself puffing with pride that I recognized the meaning of the phrase from time I’d spent around Fiona and the others.
“I understand you are a warrior,” Gahn Thaleo said slowly, regaining some of his composure, “but it is not our way to hit a female.”
“That is not what it means,” I could not stop myself from snapping at him, seething with vicious delight at his confusion. The hand at my back pressed a little more firmly now. A warning.
“He’s right,” Valeria said, whipping her head back and forth in that distinctly human way. “It just means... Like, lay it on me.”
Gahn Thaleo paused. His men glanced at each other.
Ha! Fools. They think they can house the new women? They cannot even understand their strange phrases!
It was much easier to indulge in the feeling of superiority than it was to examine the uncomfortable fact that I, too, often had these moments of confusion with the new women. I remembered, rather unwillingly, the moment earlier today when Fiona had told me that other word for breasts and I’d just about knocked my own head from my shoulders by crashing into a boulder in response.
I still maintain that it was the boulder’s fault for being in my way.
“What should I lay upon you?” Gahn Thaleo finally grunted. He glanced at the cloaks the new women wore, then up at the sun. “Surely you cannot be cold.”
Oh, how he hated this. I could see it in the tight vibration of his sight stars. He felt uncertain. In that uncertainty, he was weak. And he knew that we could see it.
“No. Sorry,” Valeria said quickly. “It just means, ‘tell me.’ Tell me your other condition.”
“Ah.” Gahn Thaleo paused again, and in that pause I was sure that there was thunder in his head. “The other condition is that if any of my men get a mate vision for one of the new women left back in the Sea Sands, then she will journey to the Deep Sky to join him.”
Valeria’s jaw tightened.
“I don’t think we can agree to that,” she said. “We wouldn’t do that for Gahn Errok when he saw Stephanie in his mate vision. And we won’t do it for you or one of your men, either. If one of your men sees one of the women at the settlement in his mate vision, he’s welcome to travel to the Sea Sands to meet her and then they can make their decisions from there. If she wants to come back here, that’s fine. If she doesn’t... Well, they’ll have to figure that out on their own. But...”
There was a hesitation, like she wasn’t sure how he would take the next part. But Valeria was a bold new woman, a commander in her own right, and she was not easily cowed by any male. “But I should tell you that there aren’t many single human women left at the Sea Sand settlement.”
“How many are there?” Gahn Thaleo asked with what had to be feigned calm.
“Three,” Valeria told him. “Miriam, Catalina, and Sloane.”
The Deep Sky warriors flanking Gahn Thaleo looked at each other uneasily. Three was not a very large number. And even with the unmated new women here, it only became five.
Five, not six, because I had already decided to kill any other male who tried to claim Fiona, so she did not count. As far as I was concerned, she was unavailable. Even if she was not mine.
Even if she told me she’d never kiss me again.
Blast. How that blackened my insides.
It’s been far too long since I’ve hit another male.
“Fine,” Gahn Thaleo said abruptly. “We are in agreement on all terms.” His sight stars found Nasrin once again. She met that gaze steadily, if tensely, from behind her eye-shells, as Gahn Thaleo uttered his final command. “The first set of seven days in my mountain begins now.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Fiona
Well. This was certainly going well. Just dandy. Absolutely fine. We’d come here for a short visit and now we were stuck here for seven whole days. And there would be another seven after that. And after that. And after that...
Honestly, on the surface of it I didn’t really mind that much. Gahn Thaleo’s mountain was just as comfy as Gahn Errok’s. And for all of Gahn Thaleo’s intense staring and presumable horniness when it came to Nasrin, he’d never actually done anything overtly weird to her or any of us now that the alliance was in place.
Well, other than Errok, I guess. But I also knew that, as bad as that whole taklok/attempted murder situation had been, Errok had been a brutal enemy to Thaleo and maybe, just maybe, just the teensiest, tiniest bit, had kind of deserved an arrow through him. I felt a bit bad thinking that about Errok, even just inside my own head, but I knew enough about how badly Thaleo’s people were hurting for hunting grounds and resources before his territories were expanded in this alliance to know that Errok, though good to us and his people and Stephanie, had not been good to Thaleo’s tribe.
