Barbarian King’s Mate by Ivy Sparks

Chapter Fourteen

Garath

I watchedDaphne pause at the tunnel entrance. She gazed back over Caverncall with misty eyes. “It really is beautiful,” she said. “I didn’t think I would be sorry to leave it.”

My best friend, Tennar, barged past her and plunged into the passage. “Don’t feel too sorry. You’ll be back here soon enough, then you won’t be able to sit still until you leave again. It’s always that way. Trust me.” Tennar wasn’t as big as I was, but he was lean and quick, a perfect complement to my own fighting style.

“Let’s get moving,” I called over my shoulder. “The sooner we get to the glade, the sooner we can collect our evidence and leave.”

“The sooner we get to the glade, the sooner we can lose our heads to the Vorlax, you mean.” Tennar’s laughter echoed down the tunnel behind me. “I think you’re just in this for the chitin burgers.”

Daphne’s laughter joined his as they followed me away from the village. Nissaya brought up the rear. “I never heard of chitin burgers,” Daphne teased. “How do you make them? Grind up the exoskeletons and mix it with meat?”

Tennar guffawed again. “I have a better idea. You could mash the entire Vorlax into a paste and dissolve the chitin in their caustic digestive juices.”

“Gross!” Daphne groaned, but she was laughing too. “I can see traveling with you is going to be a lesson in disgusting recipes.”

“Gotta come up with some way to pass the time.”

I held the curtain of foliage aside for Tennar and Daphne to scoot out. We emerged on the mountainside where we started. Tennar and Daphne started down the path, side by side. They chatted like old friends, even though they only met a few moments ago. “You’ll need to learn to cook if you want to satisfy my friend Garath’s particular tastes,” Tennar was telling her. “He’s one of the fussiest eaters alive.”

She giggled and her eyes sparkled with fun when she looked back at me. “Really? He seems pretty easy-going to me.”

“That was just an act to get you to mate with him. You watch. The first time you cook something for him, he’ll show his true colors. It’s a good thing for him that his sister is a fabulous cook, otherwise he’d be a walking skeleton.”

Daphne kept throwing questioning glances at me while they chatted. I should have ended this conversation before it got out of control, but I couldn’t interrupt Tennar. I couldn’t deprive Daphne of his kindness, especially not when I was dwelling in this black mood of mine.

“I guess I could ask Nissaya for some cooking lessons,” Daphne remarked, glancing at my sister who was keeping a distance to watch the rear. “I don’t know how to make any Kavian dishes, so I might as well learn to make them the right way.”

“You better ask her!” Tennar crowed. “He’ll keep you slaving over a hot fire until you get it right—and don’t even get me started on adding too much bitter rubor to the ubos cakes. He’ll lock himself in a closet for weeks if you do that.”

Daphne burst out laughing. “Thanks for the warning.”

“The alternative is to cook him some of your native dishes,” Tennar prattled. “No doubt your expertise in the kitchen was one of your winning points in getting him to choose you as his mate.”

Daphne didn’t answer. She looked away, and the color drained from her cheeks. I sulked while I waited to see how she was gonna handle this one. Whatever she came up with was bound to better than any phony explanation I could give.

Maybe asking Tennar to accompany us back to the glade wasn’t the best idea. He could talk the ear off a hairless voko, and he was insatiably curious, especially about anything he hadn’t encountered before. He would bombard Daphne with questions about everything until he found out what he wanted to know. If I didn’t trust him with my life, I might have felt inclined to suspect him of trying to uncover our secret.

He instantly picked up on her discomfort. “Don’t tell me you specialize in chitin burgers on your home planet. You’ve been holding out on me. You’ll have to show me your chops the first time we skewer a Vorlax for supper.”

Daphne laughed again. “I wish I could. I can’t think of any better use for a Vorlax. We might as well eat them.”

Tennar guffawed in delight. “She made a joke! Did you hear?” He turned around and pointed at her, beaming at me. “Did you hear that? Eating them! Priceless.”

“I heard,” I grumbled.

Tennar snickered, hardly paying any attention to me. Or perhaps he was intentionally trying to ignore my bad mood. “Well, if you aren’t an expert in the art of the chitin burger, tell me some of your other native dishes. We have a long way to travel, and I’m hungry already.”

Daphne put a finger to her mouth thoughtfully. “Well, since you mentioned skewering, you might like yakitori.”

“Yakitori.” Tennar pronounced each syllable with care. “It sounds interesting. What is it?”

“It’s meat roasted over an open flame. It comes from a part of Earth called Japan. It can be dipped in a savory sauce.”

Tennar smacked his lips. “I’ll have ten of them!”

Daphne’s musical laugh sounded sweet and soothing to my ear, but I couldn’t be happy about her getting so congenial with Tennar. One slip and he would find out the truth.

His conversation certainly seemed designed to make her do just that. “If you aren’t from that part of Earth, which part are you from?”

“Me? I’m from a part of Earth called Vermont.”

“Is it nice there? It sounds very nice.”

She laughed out loud. “I never said anything about it one way or the other.”

“Really?” He rubbed his chin comically. “Fancy that.”

She punched him in the shoulder. “Cut it out. You’re messing with me.”

“So tell me more about this mythical country of Vermont. What is it like there?”

She cast a glance at the surrounding forest. “It’s a lot like this, but it gets very cold in the winter. The foliage is different too, of course.”

She took that device of hers out of her pocket and pointed it at a tree. Tennar watched, fascinated. “What are you doing?”

She stuffed the device into her pocket. “Sorry. It’s an old habit. I’m a botanist and I came here to study the local flora. I guess I just haven’t broken the habit yet.”

Tennar’s eyes widened. Bull’s eye. “So you came here to study this planet. Did you find anything of interest?”

She forced herself to turn away. “Not really. We were…”

I almost intervened to stop her from revealing anything else. I couldn’t let her tell Tennar—or anyone—about what she’d been doing when the Vorlax attacked her. Above all else, we had to maintain the facade that we intended to mate all along and that I didn’t bring her to Caverncall to save her life.

I didn’t have to intervene, though. She broke off without saying anything and made a point of not making eye contact with Tennar. In a little while, she broke away from him and dropped back to walk next to me instead. Talking to him could be hazardous.

The rest of the day passed without incident, but only because Daphne stuck close to me. She resisted Tennar’s attempts to get to know her better. She handled it in good grace, though. She could throw jokes around with the best of them. She just didn’t let him steer the conversation into anything more revealing.

In the evening, we made camp in the dense jungle near the hut where I first spent the night with Daphne. My blood boiled to take her back there, now that we were officially mated, but I couldn’t do that with Nissaya and Tennar around.

Nissaya built a fire and pulled out a bundle of food from her backpack. “I hope you like ubos cakes.”

Tennar groaned. “Don’t you at least have some yakitori?”

Nissaya frowned at him. “Yahkey what? What are you talking about?”

Daphne laughed again. “If you want yakitori, why don’t you go catch yourself a nice nichi or something? Garath says you’re a top hunter.”

Tennar looked down at his hands in his lap, and I swear he was blushing. “Maybe not top. I’m not as good as he is.” He gave me a deferential glance.

Daphne pointed at his arms and chest. “How come your tattoos are smaller than his? They’re even smaller than Nissaya’s. Why is that?”

He shrugged the question away. “I’m not the son of the clan King, am I? His tattoos are a mark of his status. He’ll become King himself as soon as the old man kicks off. Then he’ll get inked down past his waist. The shaman will carve the genealogy and the King’s sworn oath into his skin down to his thighs.”

“Wow!” Daphne turned her deep brown eyes up at me, and her pupils dilated. “I didn’t know that.”

“Why do you think Zixor wants to end him?” Nissaya cut in. “If the clan King dies without an heir, his closest advisor becomes King in his place. If Zixor can discredit Garath and get him banished from Caverncall, Zixor will be in line to take the throne instead.”

“That’s enough,” I snapped before I could stop myself. “What Zixor does doesn’t bear on anything related to anyone but himself. If he poisons the King against me, that’s nothing the destruction of Kavius didn’t already accomplish.”

A tense silence fell over our little party. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like Daphne gazing up at me like some kind of hero, either. I stood and strode into the trees to find a higher vantage point to survey the countryside.

The forest floor was infuriatingly flat. In the end, I climbed a tree and surveyed the miles of jungle. The glade showed up as a splash of green where the taller trees lined the river.

I stayed in the branches for a long time, but being alone did nothing to quiet my thoughts. I would have spent the night up there, but I worried about Daphne. What if Tennar was prying again?

I dropped to the ground to return to the camp, but I stopped when I discovered Tennar himself waiting for me. He reclined against the trunk, inspecting his knuckle spikes and whittling them with his dagger blade.

I stiffened. He didn’t come out here to trade jokes—not with me. He shot a lazy glance into the trees. There was nothing over there. “That new mate of yours—she’s hiding something. You can’t be stupid enough not to notice it.”

I pushed past him. I had to get back to Daphne. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

That line of nonsense never worked on Tennar. He was just too curious for his own good. He hustled past me, rattling in my ear. “Aren’t you even marginally curious to know what it is she’s hiding? It could be something dangerous. She could be in league with Zixor for all you know.”

I snorted. “She isn’t. I know she isn’t.”

“You owe it to yourself to find out everything about her. She could put the fate of our clan in jeopardy. You could get yourself banished for neglecting something as important as…”

“I won’t get banished for neglecting it because I already know what it is.” The words slipped out by themselves, but I didn’t try too hard to stop them. Tennar put his life on the line to help me on this trip. He deserved the truth, and I didn’t want him getting it from Daphne.

He stopped dead in his tracks so I had to stop to face him. “You know? Did she tell you?”

I sank onto a fallen log. It looked an awful lot like I was about to spill my guts. “She didn’t have to tell me because I was there. She’s hiding the fact that I didn’t bring her to Caverncall to make her my mate. I brought her there to save her life from the Vorlax. I planned to keep her a secret, then send her back to her people, but Zixor found her first. Father would have thrown her out to die. I claimed the ritual to save her. There. Now you know.”

Tennar gaped at me with his eyes agog. For a second, I thought he might have become catatonic, but all at once, he exploded in raucous laughter. He slapped his thighs and hooted to the skies. “Oh, no you didn’t! You sly dog! I never put you down for such a trickster! You didn’t! You didn’t, really.”

I nodded. “I did. Really.”

He charged me and clapped me hard on both shoulders. “How did you do it? Tell me everything! How did you fake the ritual? How did you convince everyone without going through with it? Oh, man, you had me so fooled. You fooled everyone, even your old man.”

“I didn’t fake it. It was real.”

Tennar froze. His jaw dropped all over again. “Real? Then you’re… You and her…” He pointed to one side and then back at me while the wheels turned in his head.

I nodded again. “We’re mated—for real—at least, I am. I don’t think the ritual affects humans the same way, but don’t tell her that. I gave her my word of honor that I would send her home to her people. I won’t go back on that.”

“Are you insane?” he gasped. “You can’t send her away—your own mate! Do you realize what this means? You’ll be…” He broke off. He couldn’t say it. It was too horrible to consider.

I didn’t want to think about it, but now that I told him, I didn’t want to hide anything anymore. At least one person on this wretched planet knew the truth. Not even Daphne knew.

“You’ll be half-dead if you let her go,” he went on. “You’ll probably go out of your mind. You’ll be a shell like your old man. You know that, don’t you?”

“I know. Trust me. I know.”

“You’ll be damning yourself to a lifetime of agony,” he thundered. “You’ll lose every trace of care and concern for everyone and everything. Your life will be a hollow wreck.”

“Okay. I got it. You don’t have to rub it in.”

“You can’t do this, man,” Tennar insisted. “You can’t send her back. It’s unheard of.”

“I have to. I told you. I gave my word of honor. I might as well be dead if I go back on that.”

“But you just said she doesn’t know! You just said it doesn’t affect her the same way. Why don’t you tell her?”

“What for—to obligate her to stay with someone she despises?”

He gasped out loud. “Despises! You are not standing there telling me she hates you. Don’t you dare insult me like that. I was in the court during the ritual, in case you were too preoccupied to notice. There is no way under Heaven you can convince me she hates you. I wouldn’t be surprised if the ritual worked on her. She certainly went through with it like it did.”

I looked away. I couldn’t afford to believe that.

Tennar drew a shaky breath. He lowered his voice to a croak. “Listen, brother. I understand why you have to go through with this, but at least tell her. At least send her back knowing the truth about what it’s going to do to you. If she’s your true mate, she has a right to know. She has a right to make that choice knowing all the facts.”

I couldn’t look at him. My throat tightened against my will. How I wished more than anything I could tell Daphne how I really felt. No one knew better than I did what losing her would do to me. It would destroy me. I only had to look at my own father to see what losing a mate would do to someone.

When I still didn’t say anything, Tennar turned into the trees and headed back to the camp. There was nothing to do besides follow him, but before we reached it, he stopped in front of me, blocking my path.

“I’ll help you,” he whispered. “I’ll help you send her back, and I’ll keep your secret to myself. It’s not for me to make that decision anyhow.”

“Thank you,” I breathed. “You don’t know what this means.”

His eyes softened, and I saw an aching behind them. “Of course I do. It means I’ll be losing my best friend.”

Tennar then turned on his heel and stormed off.