Taken to Lemora by Elizabeth Stephens

13

Essmira

I wake with a start and with a sickening realization that there is a male in my bed and I will be punished for it brutally.

If Tyto finds out that I was with another male, even in sleep, he will make me run pleasure simulations for him for the next several solars, without rest, without food, without anything to drink. He’s done it before for offenses much less grievous.

My stomach roils and churns, turning over on itself like a wave. I lurch up and out of the male’s arms and stagger off of the bed. I double over. Oh stars. I’m going to be sick. I glance around and see a door against the right wall and try it, but it opens onto a ledge and beyond that is empty space.

I rush back inside and try the second door and find a chamber pot that smells…the smell is enough for my stomach to finally lose the battle to the bile raging within it. With a great heave over the chamber pot, I give it all up.

I heave and I heave…and I heave…I heave until I can’t heave anymore.

Eventually, I manage to stand up straight. I’m dizzy and disoriented and I’m not sure what to expect because I’ve never felt like this, so when I stagger dramatically into the main room only to be caught in arms, I’m quite shocked. I’m carried to a bed — nob, I’m carried back to the bed — by the male I know to be my master.

Wait a moment.

There’s no master. There’s no Tyto. Not anymore.

I am something else. Something that starts with an m…

“Stay here!” Raingar shouts in a panic, “You’re sick! You weren’t supposed to get sick! Lemoran don’t get sick from lobba! Here, drink this water and I’ll be back soon with food and a healer and all the things!” Stomp stomp, slam slam. He’s gone and I just lay there, wishing for the end.

My stomach bubbles and churns disgustingly and I get up when my body no longer allows me to lie still and I heave and heave and heave over a pitcher that’s been placed out for me. The water within has been emptied. For this purpose? I hope not. I’m miriga…and I’m ohring embarrassed.

Eventually — a miserable lifetime later — I’m dragged by my hair into the present. I recognize I’m in a room that I don’t recognize and that I shouldn’t be here because I escaped through the hatch with the rope Gorman told me to get out of the chest and last thing I remember before that is shouting at Raingar and him shouting at me.

Only we hadn’t been shouting anymore, had we? We’d reached a tenuous middle ground, that dangerous truce. And then he came for me. Flashes of memories come back. Raingar stomping by my side…dancing. He danced with me all through the lunar.

I want to go to him, shout at him, and tell him I forgive him…I want to do all of this, and then I want to lay down and die.

I make it to the door and then out onto the landing, which overlooks a room full of beings sprawled out across floor and benches and the one great table. I blink and in the haze, manage to spot a female I recognize.

“Charana,” I croak.

She lifts her face from the table, fins curling up as she grins. “Miriga,” she says, and then she tips her face forward. She has no differentiating marks from the males of her species, however, she is slighter and her eyes and mouth are both larger. Her fins aren’t as impressive, but that doesn’t make her any less impressive.

“I…” My stomach heaves and I slap both hands onto the table.

“Essmira, are you alright?”

“I’ve never…” I grip the edge of the wood so hard that my arm muscles burn all the way up to the elbows. “I’ve never…”

She starts to chuckle as she rises to her feet. Her hands grip my outer arms and give me a gentle squeeze. “Why don’t you go back to bed? Raingar’s been fretting around. He’ll have more water and food and likely every healer in his clan and the surrounding ones on your doorstep soon.”

“Raingar?” I shake my head and squeeze my eyes shut tight as another bout of nausea threatens to take me off of my feet. “I need to tell him…something…”

“Oh stars help you. You’ve never had spirits before, have you?” She gives me a dull pat on the arm.

“The…my sickness is from the ale?” Cursed thing!

“Yeffa.” She laughs a little harder and tries to pry my fingers off of the table. I’m resistant. “Come on. Let’s get you up to your room before Raingar has a nervous breakdown.”

I shake my head, not sure how to answer as I lean against her, letting her take my weight. I’m sweating. And I stink. “What ohring torture is this?”

“Ah, it’s one of a kind.” She chuckles and kicks aside a foot belonging to a very large male asleep on his back on the floor.

“I stink.”

“Yeffa. But everyone else stinks more. I think Carvern pissed himself last lunar.”

“Who is Carvern?”

“This idiot,” she says, shoving a male roughly aside as we reach the stairs. He topples off of them, dead weight, and hits the ground face first.

I’ve just gotten the dry, dusty railing firm in my sweaty grip when I hear a booming voice slash through the space. “ESSMIRA, ARE YOU OKAY!”

Charana helps me turn, catching me when my foot slides off of the top stair. The soles of my feet are bare and sticky.

Raingar stands in front of an open door with the proprietor of the inn just behind him. She’s a Lemoran female with bright white horns and among the kindest dispositions I’ve encountered yet. She’s carrying a tray. There are two more Lemoran females with a huge tub suspended between them. Raingar’s got his arms laden with jugs and a large leather satchel and that’s when I spot Moreth in the back of the small cluster.

My stomach floods with fear and dread. “Are you…what is this? Are you taking me back…”

“Essmira…what? Nob! Nob nob nob!” I feel like there’s so much I’m not remembering, but I can’t focus.

I start to sweat even more profusely while even more violent chills ransack my body. I’ve never felt like this. I’ve been sick only a handful of times my entire life — Igmora and Tyto made sure of it — and never so miserably.

I lower my gaze to the floor and tighten my muscles, trying to clear my head and gather my thoughts and prepare for battle, if there’s going to be one — between Raingar and I, it seems there always is.

But…there isn’t.

Because Raingar stomps through the inn, several curses and pained cries going up when he steps directly onto creatures’ limbs, or uses his blocky feet to shove them aside. He unloads all of the things in his arms on the table where Charana once sat, and then his body drops hard onto the ground at my feet.

Thud. His palms face up, reminding me far too much of my position pose, and he looks up at me with a look of pure helplessness in his gaze. It startles me. I blink a little wider, nausea and delirium parting as a lucid memory slashes through my illness. Raingar dancing with me on the tables. Raingar tucking me into his chest and holding me close. Raingar telling me beautiful, soft things in the heat of the lunar. He said he’d try for me.

I’ll try for him, too. Did I tell him that?

“Essmira, I…” He shakes his head and then he does the unthinkable. He tilts forward, bending so that his horns graze the floor right at my bare toes, some brown, some red. “Forgive me, miriga. Forgive me.”

My shaky legs finally give out and Charana isn’t quick enough to hold me up. I plop down onto the floor directly in front of Raingar, close enough to reach out and touch his horns. I lift a hand. Everything else falls away. The entire room. Everyone in it but us.

I concentrate the best that I can as I bring just my middle, longest finger to Raingar’s left horn. I stroke it from the white tip to the black base. It brings me closer to Raingar, so close I’m leaning over him. So close, I can see his rough skin ripple and smell lobba and sunshine on his skin. He shakes once, with force, before tipping his face up to meet my gaze. He looks so hesitant and unsure, a little afraid.

I lick my lips. He looks at my mouth. He licks his lips. I focus on his.

And then I whisper, “There is nothing to forgive.”

“You know that isn’t true.”

“It is. Before I got to Winter’s End, I’d already forgiven you.”

The shock on Raingar’s face is clear enough to make me snort and laugh and hiccup, but the abrupt movement makes my stomach lurch up into my throat. I try to back away as bile pitches and churns, but Raingar comes forward.

I hold up my hand and back up onto the lowest stair, but Raingar keeps coming forward, and closer, and then…it’s all too late. A violent surge of nausea hits me and I’m sick all over my mate.

I choke on sick and then I heave again, giving everything in my stomach up…all over his lap. Raingar, with bile all over his knees and chunks of…I’m too horrified to even think of what…staining his pants, bursts into wild ruckus laughter. It doesn’t take long for Charana to laugh…or for the whole inn to laugh with her.

Raingar stands and I hear a male somewhere shout, “Wouldn’t want to piss off that female!” Another chorus of laughter goes up and I’m horrified and so embarrassed I could die — that is, if the lobba doesn’t do the job first.

“Don’t worry, I think I’ve learned my lesson,” Raingar quips, returning to my side with a bucket and a damp rag. He sets the former underneath me while he presses the cool cloth to my forehead and then the back of my neck.

“Just breathe through it. You’re alright.”

“Nob, I’m notttttt,” I moan, starting to cry.

He chuckles. “Yeffa, you are. You will be.”

“Awm so sooooooosawee…” I wheeze before the next surge of bile shoots up my lungs and into my mouth and then into the bucket. The splatter…the splatter is so horrible. The little spray of acidic, disgusting, wet, bile. I’ve never… My brain shorts. I cringe away from my own sick in disgust as huge, heavy hands come against my back and rub up and down in awkward, jerky movements. Raingar.

“I told you not to apologize to me anymore.”

“I throoooawp on yoooo,” I groan.

“What did we talk about yesterday? We’re trying for each other. This is you trying. I’d say, it’s going pretty good. Besides, you think you’re the first creature to throw up on me in this ohring inn? Not even close.” He hacks out a laugh that makes Charana beside me laugh even harder.

“You bloody wench, you’ve got no right to laugh,” Raingar barks at her, shaking his fist in her face. “This is entirely your fault.”

“My fault?”

“You plied your miriga with lobba and got her sick. No more lobba for you, Essmira,” he scolds, full of irritation.

“Daaawntell me whaz to…doooooo.” I throw up all over again, brain frying as the inn comes to life around me. Embarrassment can’t touch the female I’ve become.

Raingar chuckles, “Wouldn’t dream of it, miriga. Just get it all out. Then we’ll get you back to bed. Moreth brought healing salts for your bath. He also brought giri to help settle your stomach. When you’re feeling better, Celia has a large platter prepared for you. You can eat it a little at a time. And then sleep. You need lots of it. Here, or we can take you back to Merquin’s. Or, if you’d like, you can move into my chambers. I’d like for you to have them. The keys, I mean. And the chambers. They’re yours. I’ll sleep somewhere else. Or there, if you want me to. But I won’t…you don’t…you don’t ever have to fear being kept anywhere. The keys to Lemora belong to you. I swear it, miriga.”

And the funny thing is, as I throw up for the hundredth time, I believe him. I try to smile, but heave instead, making good friends with this bucket below me. In between the dry heaving, I manage, “I thrust you, Raingar.”

“You…you what?”

“Trust…trust you.”

“Nob,” he says, touching the top of my head and gently stroking his fingers through my hair. So, so gently. With extreme care. “You don’t yet. You can’t. But you will. First though, I’ll give you a reason to.”

They weren’t necessary, his words, though I liked hearing them anyway. And, if I could have answered the dumb brute then, I’d have told him that I loved him.

Too bad the lobba got in the way.