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After Valeria and Grim came Tilly, difficult to see at first because she was so much shorter than the both of them. She was one of the few new women even shorter than Fiona. Nasrin came next. They all wore their human garb, their cloaks fastened up to their throats.
Well, all except Fiona, who was not there.
At first, no one else seemed to notice her absence. I was not sure how that was even possible. The lack of her, the hole she left, felt more fully formed than the presence of any other person.
“Where is Fiona?”
I felt immediately foolish for asking it. I knew where she was. She was in the sleeping cave she shared with Tilly. If she’d gone further into one of the other guest caves, the others would have noticed her.
And if she’d come through here, I would have noticed her.
No, what I was really asking was not Where is Fiona but rather Why is she not here?
As I said. Foolish.
But foolish or not, the question had its answer, not from any of the new women standing before me but from Fiona herself, her voice filtering out of the other cave in a sleep-thickened croak.
“I’m coming!” she called, the words immediately followed by the sound of stumbling, which in turn was followed by a half-swallowed cry of dismay and the sound of a small female body hitting stone.
My feet moved before I could even command them to.
“I’m pretty sure she’s OK, Dalk,” Valeria said from behind me. I scoffed at her, this leader of the new women who would not even deign to check on one of her own! I ignored the fact that Valeria was potentially correct, especially when the harried cry of, “I’m fine!” floated out of the sleeping cave. Fiona might have hit her head. She would not know if she was fine or not.
I would check. And I would be the one to decide.
No one followed me, but I was scarcely aware of that, because once I emerged through the narrow tunnel of stone all I noticed was her.
She was flat on her back on the floor beside one of the large Deep Sky beds. That position, with the back of her head on the stone and her arms splayed out beside her, made me think that maybe she really had hit her head. I hurled down my spear and crossed to her in three furious steps. My heart felt as if it had lodged itself in my throat like a stone.
The sound of my spear hitting the floor seemed to have gotten Fiona’s attention, because she lifted her head with a questioning look just as I reached her side and hurled myself down onto my knees.
“Dalk?! What are you-”
She neglected to finish her question, choosing instead to try to roll sideways and away from me. But she was no match for the reflexes of a Sea Sand male. I snapped my hand down against her shoulder before she could get to her feet, pinning her in place on her side, her back to me.
“Dalk!” she snapped, beginning to wriggle. I ignored her complaints and buried the fingers of my free hand in her hair, probing for the injury.
Like I’d dealt her a death blow, when my fingertips met her scalp, she went instantly silent and still. This only worried me further, because she was not typically the quiet sort, and perhaps the blow to the head was suddenly catching up with her. A quick glance at her face told me that at the very least she was not unconscious. Her eyes were wide open, staring at the bed ahead of us, a red stain creeping into her cheeks.
“What are you doing?” she finally said in a choked whisper. My fingers, being oh-so-careful with my claws, brushed behind one of her strange little ears and she shivered violently.
“Checking for a wound,” I grunted. I’d never actually touched her head like this. I didn’t know what her skull normally felt like. But there was no wetness of blood, and no obvious points of swelling that I could determine.
“Oh,” she said. Another quiver went through her body. That could not be a good sign. Normally, the new women only shook like that when they were cold. But it was warm in here, the fire crackling.
“Where is it?” I finally bit off, furious at myself for not being able to find the injury on my own. “Where did you hit your head?”
“I didn’t!”
Something pale flailed at the edge of my vision. I turned to see her kicking her leg at me.
“I didn’t fall flat on my back! It’s not like there’s an ice rink in here!” she said, sounding almost offended. “If you absolutely must know, I got tangled up trying to put on my trousers and fell on my knee. And then I just had this, like, ‘Why, God?’ moment and I flopped down on my back so I could fully appreciate my own clumsiness. Just stew in my own self-pity for a nice, long moment in private.” She emphasized that last word – private. “There. Are you satisfied?”
I did not answer her question. I gently released her head and let it go back down to the stone. She moved as if to rise, but my claws shot out, fastening around the ankle of the foot she’d been waving in the air.
She kicked wildly, and I grunted, tightening my hold on her ankle, my other hand going to the back of her thigh so I could better see her knee.
The first thing I noticed was that, though she clearly had fallen onto her knee, the injury did not seem to be a bad one, even for her vulnerable body. The skin was slightly scraped, reddish and inflamed, but there was no active bleeding.
