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“No. I’m Irish, remember?”
I was about to bite out that if she was not Italian, whatever in the Sea Sands that meant, then I really had no interest in learning anything more about it. But then would come the question of why I’d be willing to learn more about it if she were a so-called Italian, and that was not a question I was willing to broach even in the sanctity of my own head, let alone in conversation with her. So I kept quiet.
Then I tried to foist the pee-tzaw on her, as if by abandoning the soggy thing I could escape the discomfort of this entire conversation. “Here. You take it,” I growled.
But, shocking me to my very core, she was too quick for me. Her hands shot behind her back. It was cool out here, cold by the new women’s standards, and I could not see the intricate drawings beneath her cloak’s sleeves tonight.
“Nope. You have to eat it now.” The dark sight stars in her white eyes glimmered. “I dare you.”
“What does that even mean?”
The pee-tzaw was growing limp and cool in my hand. A fat drop of the red fruit sauce fell from one end of the tube, and it was only my warrior’s reflexes that had me moving fast enough to keep it from landing directly on one of my toe-claws.
“It’s like a point of honour among humans,” Fiona said. Her voice was much sterner than the look of giddy challenge pulling her mouth into a smirk was. “If someone dares you, you have to do it, or be labelled a coward.”
I inhaled sharply, and then fought down the instant need to defend myself against such a ridiculous charge, though Fiona had not technically charged me with such a thing at all.
She did not say you were a coward. This is fine. This is all fine and you are acting like a fool.
“The customs of human males are stupid and I do not abide by them,” I said finally.
“What about the customs of human women?”
She waited, that look of challenge hardening on her face. She was trying to goad me into making a mistake – testing me, seeing if I would call the ways of the new women, and therefore her, stupid.
But she knew as well as I did that I couldn’t say such a thing. Wouldn’t. Why that was was anyone’s blasted guess at this point. I would have had no problem calling any number of new women’s quirks foolish in front of Valeria or Priya or even Zuh-Tephanie as her ridiculous strutting Gahn threatened to bash my head in for the insult.
But with Fiona...
I just couldn’t. Not tonight.
If my great Gahn Fallo could only see me now. See what his man Dalk had been reduced to – standing in the middle of some new day’s eve party holding a sodden tube of misery while a new woman stared at him and tried not to laugh.
“If you want to test my courage or might, may I suggest a more worthy challenge?” I ground out. I was excellent with a spear and even better with a sword. I narrowed my gaze and fought the urge to shift from foot to foot like a child.
“A more worthy challenge? I don’t care about worthiness. I care about the original challenge issued,” she said with surprising formality, sniffing slightly. Absurdly, I suddenly wondered what I smelled like to a new woman, if she could even smell me from there with her decidedly weak human nose at all. She held out her hand half in triumph, half in feigned defeat. “But I suppose I’ll take it if you’re not willing to-”
She swallowed her words just as I shoved the entire tube of pee-tzaw into my mouth. Slimy sauce coated my tongues and the hardened milk topping curdled in my throat. I refused to spit it out or even to cough. It settled uneasily in my guts, and I glared down at my tiny adversary, smashing her dare to bits.
“There. Now you see I am no coward.”
That brought forth a laugh from her, strong and hearty and musical. Her mouth went so wide I could have counted her shiny blunt teeth if I’d wanted to.
I got to twelve before she closed it.
“No. Definitely not. So, how was it?”
“Foul.”
She laughed again, this time more softly.
“You’re so dramatic. It’s pee-tzaw. What’s not to like?”
“I have three tongues,” I muttered, crossing my arms once more, the way I’d been standing before Oxriel had wandered over like some over-eager, untrained irkdu pup. “Therefore, any very bad taste is multiplied by three.”
I was not sure why I expected her to laugh again. I was not joking – the pee-tzaw really was quite awful – and I’d never been considered a particularly good-humoured or funny male. But for some reason her lack of laughter came as a surprise to me then. Her sight stars, black in the night – though in brighter times of day they were much lighter, warmer, verging on dawn-gold when the sunlight hit them just right, not that I’d been looking too closely of course – lingered on my mouth for a moment. Then she did that odd human gesture of nonchalance, lifting her narrow shoulders up and lowering them down.
“Well, fair enough. If you don’t like it, you don’t like it. What do you think of all this, though?”
