Taken to Lemora by Elizabeth Stephens

3

Raingar

I don’t like it. My horns are throbbing. There’s a tightness in my chest and for the past quarter solar, I’ve had to poop. Not poop so much as explode. And maybe not out of my ass but out of my chest, for certain. My heart is hammering, throwing itself against my ribs and always in the same direction — hers.

Merquin is smiling though she’s trying not to show it. I catch her smiling when I rip my gaze away from the female long enough to meet her stare. But the pain of looking away from the female is too much to bear, so I don’t bother trying again. It’s enough to know that Merquin is smiling. Reyna, Tana and Bebette, too. They’re all smiling. And I know why they’re all smiling.

They’re all smiling at my doom.

Merquin is standing behind Reyna and Tana at the controls. The only difference between the way we arrived and the way we’re leaving now is Bebette at the back of the transport on her knees in front of the female with the brown and red skin, doctoring her wounds with a healing torch.

The torch will clean and seal her cuts, but the sight of the bright red blood on her hands still makes me want to shatter something. The Egama, perhaps. He wanted her. He wanted my female. I want to go back there — need it. I want to plunge both my hands into his face and rip out his one great big eye and stomp on it.

My forehead erupts with a fresh bout of sweat, which is almost painful. We don’t sweat as a general rule of thumb, not even in the mines where we, well…mine. I shift and my tough skin ripples when I shudder. I feel panic and pain grip me in tandem. She hurt her hands. She hurt her hands and now she’s bleeding and I can see the blood and there’s nothing to do to stop it and I hate that and I hate that I hate it and most of all I hate that I let her hurt herself and that I let my horns and their pressure and her incandescent beauty rob me of fourteen tuns of kintarr…

“How could I let this happen!” I bark. The problem is that I’m speaking to Merquin, but my inability to look away from her means that I’m now shouting at her and it makes her jump.

She glances around in confusion and presses her lovely lips together. The worry on her face makes me grumpy and that’s a problem because I’m already feeling panicked and enraged. “I’m not talking to you! YOU ARE FINE,” I shout at her again only to realize how odd that sounds. Fine? I mean she’s doing fine. Performing adequately. Not that she looks fine — because she doesn’t.

Her eyes are large in her face and her pretty, dark brown lips are trembling and her trembling hands are bleeding and the sight of that blood is jacking up my pulse. Should I tell her this? What? What am I saying? Nob! I want her knowing nothing. Pagh!

“Merquin! How could I let this happen?”

Behind me Merquin just tuts. “If you think you had anything to do with this, then you are just as stubborn as I thought you were and twice as foolish.”

Ignoring her barb, I chuff, “I don’t like it.”

“You don’t?” Tana scoffs. “I’d say many males in your position would be pleased.”

Pleased does not begin to describe it. She’s the most beautiful creature in the whole of the galaxy — in the whole of history — and I’m sure that there will never be a female who comes close to rival her. She’s taken the top position as most beautiful creature in the history of the cosmos and shattered it so that all others who come next will only ever be able to hope for second place. A very distant second.

But the thought that I’ll have to take her back to Lemora where there are other males — and females — who would look at her and be pleased by her makes my bones ache.

My face heats as I stare at her, wondering how much of our conversation she understands. It’s clear that she speaks Lemoran flawlessly — a fact that I would have thought was bizarre if Igmora hadn’t said what she had.

“I’m pleased that this worked out as I planned for it to three rotations ago.”

I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what she’s ohring talking about as we wait for the other clan chiefs to arrive so we can get this ghastly sum sorted out.

She doesn’t need me to reply, however, she just crosses her arms over her chest and looks down the hall where her mate just fled. “Tyto had no faith in me either.” She laughs softly, “Males. You all are easy to manipulate and even easier to anticipate. I knew she’d be your mate the moment I showed her your image.”

“What are you talking about?” I grumble.

“She smiled,” Igmora’s eyes flash with something that horrifies me. It’s emotion. She doesn’t have emotions. At least, she isn’t supposed to. She glides one hand back through her hair, pulling a tangle absently out of the sleek black mass. “You were almost three rotations her senior — fully grown to maturity, then, and she’d been but a youngling. But it did not seem to matter. She liked your eyes. She said they looked kind. And I had a sense that Xana and Xaneru were looking out for the little female. And for me, too.” She laughs, and this sound is crueler. More like her. Callous in every way.

“Because I knew of your reputation, even then. That you do not negotiate. And I planned to be able to extort you for everything I could. It has worked. I am now a very wealthy female. And my progeny is now in the hands of a male with kind eyes who will want her for more than her ability to breed little hybrids for him.

“It is a good thing I managed to place her in your path. Had this not worked out, I would have not succeeded in deterring Tyto from claiming her.”

“TYTO!” I shout and all the blood rushes from my horns’ base to my big blocky toes encased in big blocky sandals. “Tyto is…he’s…he’s…”

“He’s lusted after her since she received her first moon tide.”

An urge to slaughter ruthlessly grips me. By it, I am nearly undone. “But he’s your mate!”

She looks at me as if I’m the most foolish creature in all creation. Moving with the elegance of water, she crosses her smooth, lovely arms. “It is only a matter of time, clan chief.”

“Time? Time for what?”

She blinks at me. “It is only a matter of time before I kill him or he kills me. And I assure you, it will not be the latter.”

I did not doubt her in the least.

Fighting off the sour taste in my mouth that this female was groomed for me by the two most abhorrent creatures across all kingdoms, I return my focus to the female who speaks Lemoran as if she were born and raised on planet. Clearly, the language isn’t an issue, but if the subtleties of my actions were lost on her, then maybe — just maybe — Igmora did not prepare her for what it means for a Lemoran male to see her and for his horns to begin to flake.

I can’t decide if I’m relieved, or if that makes me want to give into that base rage all over again. I’ve never been angry like that. When the Egama looked at her and staked his claim, I knew with certainty that I’d die before I let that happen. And I’ve never wanted to fight anything ever in my life and I never want to fight anything ever again. Unless it’s for her. That I’d do without question.

I look down at his dried blood on my fists and shake my head gruffly, wishing I could somehow resurrect him and start our war all over again. This time, I’d win. I want her to be sure I can protect her. I hate this! I hate feeling all of these foreign emotions! Pagh!

“Pagh! That’s not what I mean and you know it. These things are a nuisance. I have too many other things to worry about besides going through…” My voice catches. I can’t get the words out past the barrier of my teeth.

“The change?” Reyna, bare-chested, offers impishly.

Bebette giggles. Tana flat out chokes on laughter. Merquin offers nothing. The female — my female — looks like she’ll say something, which floods me with a lethal combination of both panic and yearning, then she flays me alive when she decides against it.

“Don’t call it that,” I huff, feeling more exhausted even as an unfamiliar energy zips and zings through me. “I hate it.”

“It is a change,” Tana insists and then her pitch gets softer and infinitely more evil. “I can already see your whites peeking through.”

My stomach drops and my bones harden. I think about what I saw in the reflector Merquin held up to me when I cornered her in the hallway. She’d said something similar. Your whites are showing through.

All Lemoran are born with dark grey horns that remain that way until the solar their big blocky bodies die and they get burned up in pyres built atop kintarr sands that, when lit, bring about bright, colorful flames.

Unless…

They find their true mates. We’ve taken to calling our mates Xiveri, in the Voraxian fashion. We don’t believe in Xana and Xaneru, their deities, but we do believe in the universe and we understand the power of our horns. The power of true affection. Because when our Xiveri Mates come along, the dark coating that sheathes our horns flakes off and white horns are what’s left beneath.

Merquin is the only mated clan chief and she wears her white horns with pride, even if they are dulled with age at this point. She and her Xiveri found one another rotations ago, before it had ever occurred to me to run a clan. I hadn’t wanted to, then. I hadn’t wanted a mate either, or white horns, or the responsibility that is said to come with it.

But something happened in that room with the Egama — and I don’t mean that sniveling Igmora’s perfectly designed altercation that was all but guaranteed to end in a fight. I mean, something happened in me and I just…snapped.

The Egama stepped into the room and made his challenge to me and I didn’t care about that. The Egama stepped into the room and made his threat to her and I cared…I cared a lot. More than all the Walrey honey in the Walrey’s central hive, I cared about that threat and when the Egama came towards me, two things became absolutely clear.

I would never let him hurt her.

I would never let anything hurt her.

And also, as an aside, my horns ohring hurt.

Merquin may no longer be the only mated clan chief now…

As if I said something out loud, her stare widens and flicks up to my horns. “Don’t look there, female!” I shout at her. I reach up to grab my horns and block them from her view only to realize that I’m already holding them. “Pagh!”

I don’t know what to do. Should I get up and go to the void room and hide there for the rest of the trip back to Lemora? Nob, then I won’t be able to see her and I can’t stand that. Should I…get closer to her? I inhale deeply, panicked and exhilarated at the thought. Oh nob, nob nob nob…beneath my trousers, my typically silent cock begins to chirp.

I jump to my feet but just when I’m about to stomp angrily to the void room, I’m arrested by the sound of her voice. “Essmira.”

I blink down at her, lost. So utterly lost I can’t breathe. “WHAT!” I gasp.

She flinches from the volume of my voice and I take a half step back and then another half step when Bebette growls up at me, “Calm down, Raingar.”

HOW CAN I CALM DOWN? HER VOICE SOUNDS LIKE WALREY HONEY AND IT’S NOT POSSIBLE FOR IT TO SOUND LIKE THAT!

Something flashes behind her gaze. The same thing that flashed instances before she grabbed that stupid sculpture and lobbed it at my head. I flinch, looking around as if expecting an assault. Finding nothing she could use to throw at me, I’m left with no other option but to look back into her eyes. But that’s too hard. She’s too stunning. We’re all just rock creatures. Nothing on Lemora has and ever will look like that.

I stare at her hands as Bebette finishes wrapping them, instead and bark, “What?”

Some of the fire in her voice dims. She clears it. “Apologies. I did not mean to speak…out of turn.”

I growl, hating this voice. Hating it a lot. It’s the same voice she used on Igmora and Tyto — on me — all but that one time when she pushed me and hit me in the head. Does she view me as a master, just as dreadful as her previous two? Or is she…upset that she didn’t escape? My jaw works and rage builds in my chest. I’m not used to it and it overtakes me quickly.

I glance over my shoulder at Merquin for help. She’s frowning at me. Very subtly, she shakes her head. I wish I knew what it meant, because the motion feels significant, but I don’t know, so I ignore her entirely and round on the female. “What did you say?”

The fire flashes. She closes her hands into fists on top of her knees, which she keeps clutched quite close to her chest. “Essmira!” Her voice is a shout that makes Bebette flinch back. She’s smiling as she plops onto her rear.

“Essmira, nice to meet you. I’m Bebette.” She touches the center of Essmira’s forehead with two fingers.

Essmira blinks quickly before her gaze swivels from me to Bebette. I don’t like that, but I like the smile that tilts the wobbly corners of her mouth up. Oh nob, maybe I don’t. Because my cock. My ohring cock! Need blasts through me and it’s a crippling, beautiful thing. I massage one hand across my bare chest and when her gaze drops to my fingers I stop breathing.

Essmira lifts her hand and touches the center of Bebette’s forehead with two fingers. “Thank you, Bebette. It was kind of you to fix my hands. I hope there might be some way I can repay you — repay all of you — for the kindness you’ve shown me. I still don’t…understand…what happened. I know you all said that…”

She swallows when her voice gets stuck, like emotion is lodged there and it hurts her. It brings me pain. My hand on my chest stops rubbing and starts clenching, like I might dig through the skin, tear out my upper heart and hand it over to her. Will that help?

“Apologies.” Her eyes flutter. She must be exhausted. Is she tired? Does she want to sleep? Is she… “I don’t mean to put pressure on any of you. Please, don’t think that I am…”

Movement behind me pulls her attention up and over my shoulder. Merquin is suddenly there, pushing me out of the way. She waves away Bebette and drops down to one knee in front of my female. Merquin is a good, strong female but in this moment I tense, prepared to intervene if she…if she what? I’m not sure. But I hold my breath, anyway.

“Hello, Essmira,” Merquin says, voice kinder than it’s ever been when she’s spoken to me. She greets Essmira by touching her forehead. Essmira does the same and it seems to ease her. Not by much, but enough for her to stop shaking so violently. “My name is Merquin.”

“Hello, Merquin. It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m sorry if I’m asking too much. I promise that I am deeply grateful for everything you all have done for me so far. I…” Oh nob. Nob nob nob nob. NOB! She sniffles. Just once, but it’s enough to ruin me. Merquin, say something! Stop this! But she doesn’t. She just nods along and allows Essmira to continue.

“I promise that I will work very hard and perform whatever tasks that are required of me. I only ask that, if there is occasion for you to sell me, that it not be to an Oosa or an Egama or an Oroshi.” Her voice cracks again and she sniffles three times consecutively and then…nob! A tear falls from each of her eyes, tearing pathways over her brown cheeks.

I drop dead. I black out. My horns…the pain that’s hurting them cuts through the rest of me. I reach out and grab something only to feel Tana on my right arm, supporting my right side. I need to go to her…to touch Essmira…only she can take this pain away…but when I move forward, Tana yanks me back. I try again, but her grip on my arm is fierce.

“Nob,” she hisses under her breath. “This isn’t about you.” I shake my head, rage and confusion and a deep, deep sadness making me feel unsure. I’m flayed.

I’m about to yank away from Tana for good and ignore her completely when Essmira tightens the hold she had on her tears and whispers. “I thought I was ready…Igmora ensured that I was ready…but seeing them in person was so much more overwhelming than I thought it would be. The thought of mating with that Egama was…hard.”

Her voice gets smaller and smaller. “And the Oosa delegation was very…” She shakes her head, flicks her gaze to me, breaks it just as quickly. “I know I have no right to ask anything of you all, but if you are displeased with me, I would accept any punishment happily other than being sold back to Tyto or a pleasure house where Oosa and Egama frequent.”

Everything about her is coiled so tight. She looks so close to the edge. Like she might shatter into one trillion pieces and if she does, there will be nothing left. Not of her. Not of me. I grab onto my right horn but the outer shell is so abruptly sensitive that I have to hiss. I drop my hands and fist them by my sides while Tana continues to hold me in place.

Merquin lets the silence linger for just a breath before she speaks and, when she speaks, her voice is calm, a balm that soothes everything in the blast radius. “You are a brave female, Essmira, to survive what you have. You were stolen from birth. Your parents, wherever they are now, would not have given you up. They loved you.”

Essmira’s eyes widen and her voice hitches. “How…do you…” She swallows and when water starts to accumulate on her lower eyelids, I can’t breathe through the agony of this moment. “Do you know of them?”

Merquin shakes her head. “Nob, I don’t. We had never heard of your species before this solar, but we know Igmora and Tyto and their nefarious ways. They stole you because they have a good sense of beauty and you are beautiful. That’s clear to everyone. But we didn’t purchase you because of your beauty. We purchased you because we don’t support the buying and selling of beings and we wanted to liberate you.

“Our hope is that, even though we aren’t your species, we might serve as an acceptable substitute for companions and maybe, even, if we play our tokens right, family to you. Lemora is a diverse planet filled with many different types of species. My mate, for example, is Hypha. She was exiled from her community for rejecting the mate proposed to her and she knew Lemora to be an accepting place — wild and rugged, certainly, without the gadgets of the Niahhorru pirates or the rigid governance structures of the Voraxians — but a good place. An easy place.

“She came and when I saw her at the market, I knew immediately that she was the female for me. We have been together nine happy rotations. Likely the length of your entire lifetime. And if she ever found out that I purchased a living being for fourteen tuns of kintarr with the intention of using her, abusing her, or selling her, she would leave me. And there is no kintarr in the world and no amount of beauty that would ever cause me to risk what I have with my mate. She is everything to me.”

Essmira’s shaking has gotten so violent that she can’t speak even though she’s trying. She covers her face with her bandaged hand.

Merquin reaches for Essmira, but curls her hand into a fist before she touches her leg. Then she says words I certainly wouldn’t have thought to ask. “May I touch you, Essmira?”

“Yeffa!” The word blasts out of Essmira’s throat and a moment later, Merquin’s arms come around her. She forces Essmira to untangle her arms from her legs and removes her hands from her knees so she can wrap Essmira fully in a hug. Bebette, who I’d forgotten was so near, suddenly fans her face. She’s got tears on her face, too.

“I want to join!” She drops to the ground and wraps her arms around Essmira’s back, hugging her from behind.

“Out of my way!” Tana shoves past me and goes and wraps all three of them up in her arms, her exposed breasts swinging wildly as she lunges for them and doing absolutely nothing for my cock.

“What am I missing?” Reyna shouts from the front of the ship. “Raingar, move your giant butt out of the way. I want to see!”

I shuffle to the right absently, dumbstruck by the scene. Gobsmacked. Essmira belts out a sob. She breaks down. Falling into pieces. Into little fragments of pieces. I wonder what she sees as she falls apart. What she feels. Because what I see is enough to make me want to fly this ship back to that atrocity of a planet, find Igmora and Tyto and rip their hearts out through their mouths. What did they do to her?

I watch her cry in the arms of my clanswomen for an eon. Long enough that the pain in my body recedes into the background — not gone, never gone, it seems like, but reduced to a dull throb.

Finally, she starts to breathe a little easier and in between the broken cracks of her voice, she manages a whisper, “If you all don’t…don’t like flesh peddlers…why did you buy me at all?”

Merquin pulls back, disentangling herself from the bunch. “Raingar.” She jerks her thumb at me over her shoulder and I clutch my chest again, with both hands this time, to defend against the dagger she just lobbed at my heart. “He told us that it was the right thing to do.”

Essmira looks up at me and I feel like dung. Merquin makes me sound like an ohring hero. Because that might be what I said, but it wasn’t what I meant. I meant that it was the right thing for me. I couldn’t stomach the idea of leaving her. Nob, I couldn’t have left her. It would have been like trying to leave both my legs behind and walk on outta there.

But I should have been thinking of her. I should have been.

I hadn’t been, but I should’ve.

I’m an ohring bastard and a piss poor excuse for a mate.

I’m a mate. I’m her mate. My horns choose that moment to vibrate. I cringe. Behind me, Reyna yells, “Alright. We’re home.”

What?

I turn around and outside the world is dark, illuminated only by floating orbs we buy from the Eshmiri. In the lunar, they light our winding dirt and tarnished-yellow cobblestone roads. Several other ships are docked here on the circular, mossy ledge. Ringed in lights, the glow of the Eshmiri orbs gleam on the outer hulls of the other ships. They sparkle in all the colors of kintarr, while beyond them the ledge drops off. Only the height of a body, the elevation still makes the world below seem darker and more sinister. And Essmira’s here now. My mate is here. And I will have to defend her against all of it. My stomach hollows. I feel so empty. Nob — so full, but it’s alive, what’s inside. Alive and terrified and hungry.

I hear shuffling behind me on the ship and the sound of the ramp lowering to touch the mossy floor of our dock. Cold air billows into the space. Too cold for me without a cloak, but for Essmira it must be freezing. I turn to shout at someone to give her their shirt, but I already see Merquin draping a blanket over her shoulders and guiding her down the ramp and off of the ship.

“Pagh! Merquin! Where are you going?” I bumble after them, feeling tension ripple over my bones and then ripple some more when her scent wafts to me over the clean, mossy scent of my home. She smells just like it. Just like it, only stronger. A thousand times more. Like moss and wet dew and silk and Walrey honey and also like the bloodstone we harvest deep in the mines that, at their cores, hold small droplets of water. She smells like the Dark Flats, too, wild and rugged. There, where kintarr sands ripple with constant colorful explosions. She smells like the sweet stalls at the markets.

I crash into Tana’s back and when I back up, I crash into Reyna. “Opf,” I grunt, trying to shake the other clan chiefs free and reach her. I end up standing facing all four of them, Essmira tucked slightly back, Merquin’s hand on her shoulder. Essmira’s perfect face looks slightly swollen around the nostrils and mouth. Her eyes are also puffy and red. It makes my knees hurt and I have trouble not giving in to the urge to collapse.

“Where are you going?” I bark at her.

She blinks at me with round eyes. Her lips part. They’re dark brown on the outside, but on the inside, they’re the same blood red that parts of her skin are. Ohr, I want to know how far the red goes. I want to know badly.

She looks up at Merquin who pegs me with a glare before softening to a female I don’t even recognize as she looks back at Essmira and says, “If you’re comfortable, I have a room and spare clothes you’re more than welcome to. There’s no time limit on this invitation either. You can stay as long as you like.”

Essmira bites her bottom lip and I feel my heart hammer towards her again in that sickening habit it’s developed. She nods. “Thank you.”

“Good. Then that’s settled.” Merquin looks back at me. “You have your answer.”

“But!” I jerk, whole body rising with anger as she dares to steer my female away. “Merquin, I need to talk to you in private right now.”

“Sure.” She rolls her eyes but follows me back onto the ship regardless.

I shove my finger in her face and seethe as quietly as my rage will allow for, “You have no right to keep me from my mate. She should stay with me!”

“Raingar, I’m trying to help you.” Her eyes are a different color pattern than mine. More blues and purples than browns and pinks. Her lips are fuller and her white horns beam at me with mocking.

“Well, you aren’t!”

“I am. You’re not using that thick appendage you call a head. Can you not see the obvious? Maybe you can’t. Maybe I didn’t either.” She huffs out a laugh and her eyes get all twinkly and distant. I hate it!

“When I first met Librida, I knew she was my mate instantly because of these.” She taps her right horn with two fingers. “But guess what? Librida doesn’t have horns. She looked at me, saw me and saw straight through me. It was a difficult moment, but I wasn’t going to give up on her. I couldn’t. So, I had to woo her.”

Woo her. Woo her?

My jaw drops and I stare at this female, aghast. Horrified. “You can’t possibly expect me to wwwww…wwwww….” I can’t get the word out. “I CAN’T WOO THIS FEMALE! Why should I have to? I paid for her!” Merquin’s stare is incriminating. My heart beats like a gong. Pain in my horns pulses and surges. “I…I didn’t mean…”

Merquin cuts me off before I dig my grave any deeper. She snaps, “You’re right. You didn’t. What did I tell you before? You can’t buy your own mate and you definitely don’t have that to hold over her or me or anyone. You didn’t pay for her. I did. Reyna did. Tana did. Bebette did. And so did all of our clans. And we paid rotations’ worth of work for her.”

She takes a step forward, her breasts shoving up against my chest as she stares straight at me, gaze nearly eye level. “You are the only male clan chief for a reason. It’s because of how you care.”

“Pagh! I do not. Despicable. I hate everything…”

“If it had been Librida we’d discovered with Igmora and Tyto, what would you have done?”

“Librida! I’d have wrung their bloody necks! I’d have…” I quiet, cheeks smoldering with rage that the lovely Librida would have anything to do with those horrible old croons — but also at the realization that Merquin’s right. She’s always right. My shoulders hunch and slump and I sag half a foot shorter than I was before. “I’d have bought her for you.”

“I know.” She places her hand on my shoulder and squeezes. “And that is why I think your clan made the right choice. But don’t let them come to regret their choice. She may be your mate, but you can’t own her and right now, you’re thinking only about yourself. Have you given one single thought to what she’s been through? What she needs? You think you’re the kind of mate a female with this level of lifelong emotional trauma needs right now?

“Nob,” she answers before I can try. “You aren’t. So you’re going to have to wait, be patient and put in the work to get to know her. Because while you’re meeting her, remember, she’s also meeting herself for the first time, too.”

I flounder for an answer as Merquin turns from me and heads back out into the cold, moss-scented air. It’s wind blows across my bare chest, making the blood crusted across my skin feel tighter than it did. I scratch at it uncomfortably and green flakes off of my chest, like war paint. It is war paint. And in this moment, I’d fight that war again if it meant I could just skip all the parts where I’m supposed to attempt to attract her.

I’m a rock and she’s more beautiful than a star. How do you attract the sun?

“You know she’s not all that meek,” I grumble, catching up to Merquin halfway down the ramp. “She hit me with a statue of one of those ugly princes. I think I still have a piece of his foot stuck in my forehead.” At least I hope it was a foot, though it was odd since the statue had three legs.

Merquin smiles but doesn’t answer me. Instead, we’ve reached the group and she steps between Bebette and Reyna to Essmira’s side. “Are you ready, Essmira? We’ll take pad pads to my home. The stables are right over there.”

She nods but Reyna pipes up. “Wait! I didn’t get my hug earlier.” She jumps forward and swoops Essmira up in a hug that looks on the border to being painful. Not to mention the fact that she’s bare-chested. What if Essmira likes the feel of Reyna’s rocky breasts pushing against her much softer ones?

Frowning, I grunt, “Don’t suffocate her, Reyna.”

But Essmira is smiling when Reyna sets her down on her feet. “You’ll be alright here. And if you need anything — even just a break from boring old Merquin — you can come hang out with me anytime.”

“Me, too!” Bebette pipes.

“And me, of course,” Tana says, “I have the best keep, after all. We have an axe throwing competition every eighth lunar. You should come!”

“She is not throwing axes at one of your bawdy parties,” I groan.

Merquin gives me a penetrating look then that I can’t make any sense of. Her hand pinches on Essmira’s shoulder, pulling Essmira’s attention away from my face. It’s both a blessing and a torment. “I think she’d be great at it, if she’d like to try. You were the one who said she had quite the arm on her. Apparently, she threw a statue at Raingar’s head.”

“Oh yeffa, I think I see a little scratch there.” Reyna laughs. The others laugh, too.

“I’ve always wanted to throw something at Raingar’s head,” Tana. I shake my fist at her. At all of them.

“You all better not or else I’ll run you through!” I shout, and then I glance at Essmira in horror. “I mean…not you. You can throw whatever you like at me. I mean…not anything. Ideally, not anything sharp. But I guess, if you want…”

She smiles and the bridge between my brain and my mouth collapses. “I’m so sorry, Raingar. I shouldn’t have. I was…overcome. It won’t ever happen again.”

“I mean…oh…okay,” I mutter lamely.

Reyna, Bebette and Tana murmur parting words to Essmira and Merquin and to me, though I wave them off grumpily. They take the short stairs down and head off down the right path, toward the dome in the distance where the pad pads honk and heehaw and squawk all lunar long.

Essmira is still standing where she was looking up at me, Merquin standing just behind her. I open my mouth, wishing I had something to say. Woo her. I’m supposed to woo her. How does one go about wooing a mate when this one didn’t even want a mate in the first place? How does one go about wooing said mate when that mate happens to be the loveliest creature in the universe?

“Essmira?” Merquin says from a few paces back. She waits for Essmira to follow her to the stables, but Essmira is only looking at me with a crease between her eyes and her bottom lip stuck between her teeth. I desire to free it. Deeply.

Essmira flinches and then a sort of hesitant resolve floods her features as she takes that first step towards me and then the next. The moss and soil squish quietly beneath her bare feet and I can’t help but stare at her toes. There are five of them where I only have three thick digits. Digits that wouldn’t break if a rock fell on them, which has happened many times. If so much as a pebble landed on her little toes, it’d break all of them. And Merquin is taking her away from me. Pagh!

Hysteria makes the world hazy. Is the structure of Merquin’s keep even safe? What if she gets hurt? What if she has bad dreams? What if Egama come for her in the lunar when Merquin isn’t paying attention?

I’m about to shout at Merquin and beg her to reconsider giving Essmira to me, at least for this first lunar, so I can stay awake and stare at her all lunar long and ward away any manner of foul thing out to harm her, but Essmira kills that impulse when she takes another step towards me, and then another.

Is she trying to get back onto the ship? Does she regret coming with us so far? I flinch towards the open ramp of the kintarr ship, prepared to block her exit, but Essmira isn’t walking towards the ship. She’s coming towards me, of all the despicable things for her to do on this fine planet.

Sweat makes my forehead tingle while a soothing balm runs from the tip of my horns down to the base the moment Essmira touches me.

She touches my chest and my entire being is hinged on the sensation. Ohr. She’s perfect. Perfecter than perfect. And I’m just a beast carved from stone with horns. This will never work. I will never be able to woo her. I’ll… I choke.

She slides her arms around my waist, making me want to shred the indigo garment she’s wrapped in so I can feel her, skin-to-skin. My fingers twitch. She buries her face in my chest, seemingly unconcerned with the Egama blood or the brittle texture, and I stand there with my arms out staring down at the top of her head like a lunatic. I don’t remember the last time someone tried to touch me, but I do remember that I hated it. But this? Being touched by Essmira? I don’t hate this. Nob, I don’t hate this at all.

My heart is straining, everything in me pulling towards her. Finally, my hands drop to her shoulders and just lie there, shivering and twitching with the desire to do more, to hold more, to touch more. I need…

“Thank you,” she says, pulling back before I can even decide how to proceed.

My mouth is totally dry. All I can do is grunt.

Her smile wavers and then she gets all sheepish in a way I don’t like. “I’m sorry also for throwing the um…the statue at you. Truly, I am.”

I grunt again. I should ask her if I can call on her sometime. Or show her my village. I should boast about it, tell her it’s much bigger than Merquin’s, even if that isn’t true. I should tell her about Walrey honey and that she sounds like it and smells like silk even though neither of those things can be real, they’re more of a feeling. I should tell her that she smells like a feeling. A feeling that, before this moment, was home to me. But now that’s changed, because when she steps back, it feels like she’s taking that home with her, too, and I don’t like it. Home is a place, not another creature.

“Anyway, that was all. Thank you, Raingar. For everything.” She walks away from me under Merquin’s protection and I stand there agape for another three millennia, long enough for time to unwind itself around me and become another beast altogether, this one a snake. It feels suffocating.

And as I stomp off, electing to walk home instead of taking one of those feral beasts most villagers use for transportation, I realize what the worst part of this whole thing is.

Now, when I say I hate everything, it will no longer be true.