AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Still in her odd half-crouch, Fiona hadn’t yet picked up the tray. It lay on the stone between us. I grasped up all the remaining felkora meat between my claws, crushed it into a fleshy ball, and shoved the whole thing into my mouth. The stretch actually did make my lip burn quite uncomfortably, but blast if I would let it show.
“Dalk!” Fiona said, sounding too astounded to be angry with me. Yet. “That was for all the competitors!”
I swallowed – a rather difficult feat, it turned out, because that had been more meat in one go than I’d actually anticipated – and fixed her with a hard stare as I dragged the back of my hand across my mouth.
“Give them the other things, then,” I told her. “The sweets and the jellies.”
Sweets and jellies meant nothing. Less than nothing.
Meat was sustenance. Meat was life. And if any food on that tray was meant to represent something like a mate bond, it would be the meat. The other men could have the odd and chewy Deep Sky trifles.
But the meat from Fiona’s hands was mine alone.
“OK. Wow. So not only are you a Mr. Grumpy Grabby-Hands, you’re also a Greedy Gus.”
“I do not know what those words mean.”
“Yeah. I said them in English to maintain the alliteration. It’s a literary device that... You know what? Never mind. I don’t even know why I’m still talking to you.” She snapped her legs straight as she stood, then bent to retrieve the tray, snatching it out of reach as if worried I’d try to take the rest of the food. “God, it’s a good thing Tilly and Nasrin’s trays are bigger than mine,” she said, looking over my head to watch her friends wind through the group of men behind me. “They’re already on their second rounds and luckily there’s still meat to spare.”
That was fine by me. I didn’t give two discarded claw trimmings about the contents of Nasrin’s or Tilly’s trays, or whom they chose to distribute their meat to.
But even so, I did twist in my place to see them. Nasrin was approaching a seated warrior whose face I could not see, and Tilly was bending to offer her tray to Warrek, Gahn Thaleo’s closest man. Although I almost didn’t recognize him, because his face, usually as serious as his Gahn’s, was stretched in a wide smile, fangs glinting.
“So we meet again,” Warrek said, still smiling, staring up at Tilly.
“Yes!” she said with a bright laugh. “I certainly seem to be making the rounds! There’s a lot of food on these trays! Want anything else?”
“There is something that I want,” he said, sight stars keen on her face. “But it is not food.”
Tilly stood awkwardly bent, her tray held out before she straightened and withdrew it.
“Oh?” she said, somewhat cautiously, “and what is that?”
Warrek got to his feet, looming over her. Tilly usually wore her kinky-curly hair in a round puff tied on the top of her head. This added a bit more height to her frame, but even so, she was one of the shortest new women I’d seen.
“I noticed,” Warrek said, leaning down slightly to her, his near-black hair turned shockingly blue where the sun hit it, “that you bear the face of the warrior Oxriel in your hands while you watch the vaklok.”
“Oh! Yeah. We just... Well, we wanted to cheer them on,” Tilly said. “There are only three of them compared to, what, more than fifteen of you competing? Plus, we just didn’t have time to make them for everyone.”
“You did not need to make them for everyone,” Warrek countered. “Only one other man.”
Tilly looked like she was about to say something, then hesitated. Warrek sliced into that silence like a hunter.
“I hope that in the next vaklok, it will be my face you hold up,” Warrek drawled. “Or perhaps even more than that, I hope that in the next vaklok I will not be competing at all. And you,” he gestured a claw at Tilly’s tray, “will not be handing out food with the unmated women as you do now.”
He walked away then, turning and heading over to his Gahn, leaving Tilly to stare after him, her small brown face furrowed with confusion as his words slowly sank in. But that confusion would not last. Tilly was clever and she would glean his meaning soon, fully understanding what Warrek had just insinuated.
That by the next vaklok, the two of them might be mated. That he openly wished for it, in fact.
I watched realization dawn, smoothing out her features. I expected those features to then pull themselves into some sort of grimace, or maybe an expression of outrage at Warrek’s boldness.
But curse me for thinking I knew a single blasted thing about the new women, because she tipped her face down, casting it into further shadows. And in those shadows, she smiled.
“Did you see that?” I hissed at Fiona. Tilly smiled! Smiled at such an outrageous claim made by a warrior who grinned so boldly at her he practically leered!
When Fiona did not answer, I jerked my head back around to find her gone from me. She was now chatting away with Oxriel, or Ox, as she infuriatingly insisted on calling him. Like Tilly, she was also smiling. Fortunately I could at least count on Oxriel to be just a little too timid to openly proposition a new woman and claim her as his future mate before a bond was even established.
The meat churned in my stomach. I stood rapidly, unable to remain still and seated any longer. Confusion lurched through me like a limping animal. Could such boldness as I’d just witnessed from Warrek, such a direct and confident declaration of desire, really be effective?
