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A woman.
No. I could not have her. I would not.
I would probably do something wrong and hurt her or harm her or Empire forbid, break her. We were convicts, reviled by our own people, left out here on this distant planet to rot for so long that there was no hope of ever rehabilitating us. What could I offer a female? I, a white-eyed feral fool, as the warden had so aptly pointed out?
I knew cattle. I knew how to tell when a storm was brewing simply by the slant of the light. I knew which grasses were toxic and which could heal. Which holes housed venomous ardu serpents.
I knew nothing about keeping a wife. Nothing.
“I’ll take one.”
The warden scowled at me. Fallon did not appear to breathe.
“You’ll take one what?” Warden Tenn asked.
“Maybe he means to take a break. To consider!” Fallon said in a rushed exhale. “Give the man a moment and let him think! This is the most important decision he is ever going to make!”
“I will not take a break,” I replied. “I meant-”
Someone slit my throat and stop me. I’m a fool.
“-I’ll take one. A wife.”
Fallon leaped up. His tail, still wrapped around the chair leg, sent the whole thing clattering backwards to the floor. He stood, his frame seeming to buzz with energy. It was as if he wanted to do so many things at once that all he could manage was to stand in place and tremble with the force of his fraying desire.
The warden tipped his hat again. “Three ayes against two nays. The vote is cast and the bride program will commence,” he said.
Zohro hissed a sigh. Garrek said nothing, though – and this was strange – he did not look disappointed that the vote had not gone his way.
“When will they arrive?” Fallon asked, white blooming hot and frantic in his eyes.
“That is not the question you should be asking,” Zohro said with a dark smirk. “The question you should be asking is, what is wrong with them? No decent Zabrian woman would agree to come here. To be cut off forever from Zabria and marry convicted outcasts like us.”
“Oh. Did I not say it before?” the warden asked with a frown. And then, casually, as if he were not dropping something as stunningly obliterating as a boulder atop our heads, he added, “They are not Zabrian females. Your brides will be human.”
2
SILAR
“Do you know what a human is?” Fallon asked quietly as we both unwound the reins of our mounts from the posts we’d tied them to outside the warden’s base. Warden Tenn was still inside with Zohro. Garrek had already departed, eager to get back to check on his new convict-ward and make sure, in his words, “the boy hadn’t burned the place to the ground and let every one of my blasted cattle loose into the wilds.”
Therefore, I was the only one to hear Fallon’s question and I supposed it fell upon me to answer.
“No,” I answered him. I’d heard of the human-run commerce hub Elora Station. I knew some Zabrians travelled there for trade. But before coming to this penal colony, I’d never been off-world before and I’d certainly never glimpsed a creature called a human. I doubted any of us had, besides perhaps Zohro, the lone male among us who’d come from a family with any sort of wealth.
“Well,” Fallon said, his face pulled in an odd grimace of troubled hope. “They are female, and they are willing to marry us, and that is what counts, I suppose. As long as they are healthy and hardy and biologically compatible-” He gave me a startled look. “You do think we will be biologically compatible with them, don’t you?”
“Don’t know,” I grunted, swinging myself up into the saddle upon my mount, Tarion. Tarion was a shuldu, a large four-legged herding beast native to this planet. I patted his neck, his short-haired hide the same colour as the reddish dust caked along the hard, dry ground beneath his hooves.
Fallon mounted his black shuldu, taking some time to rub dust from his mount’s horns with a spare rag before casting me a wistful look.
“I wish one of us besides Oaken had a fully working data tab,” he lamented.
We all had data and communication relay tablets – in various states of disrepair – that Warden Tenn used to communicate with us. But only Oaken had been able to restore visual data – though grainy – to his tablet’s screen. The rest of us only had audio capacity.
“Maybe then we could try to look humans up in the Zabrian Imperial Database,” Fallon went on. “There might even be an image or two…”
“You should have thought about these things before you voted,” came Zohro’s voice from behind us. He strolled from the doorway to the furthest post where his golden mount was tied.
