I paused, unsure if I were brave enough to ask the next question.
The shy man can’t even eat cabbage.
Fuck cabbage.
“Why did you take me?”
I flinched, almost as if someone else had asked the question. Then I forced myself to look up.
Skallagrim had turned his back on me. Now, that was unusual – normally he didn’t dare take his eye off of me for more than about ten seconds. His wings rustled, muscle and tendon flexing over bone, and his fingers twitched where they hung at his sides. As I waited for a response, my eyes traced the intricate patterns of golden lights flickering along the deep green expanse of his wings, like a thousand tiny fires lighting the shadows between the boughs of some night-drenched forest.
“I took you because I had to,” he said at length. “There was darkness and I...”
He stopped, and I waited for more of an explanation, but it didn’t come. I couldn’t even make sense of the little bit he’d offered me. Oh, I was pretty sure I’d gotten the literal meaning of the words. Jolakaia had showed Skallagrim a button on the wall that turned the lights in this room on and off, and he’d stood beside it for ages, pushing it over and over again with a grin on his snout while we’d called back, “On! Off! Darkness! Light!” to each other in our respective languages.
“One day I’m going to need a better answer than that,” I said quietly when he didn’t add anything else.
“One day,” he replied, “you will get one.”
“But not today.”
“No.”
“And probably not tomorrow.”
“No.”
“So when, then?” My voice cracked.
His wings tensed upward then drooped, as if his whole body were heaving a sigh, and for the first time, I wondered if he was even more tired than me. I truly wondered what he’d been through before he’d taken me from the other humans. Why he’d been naked and deranged, crashing into the planet with the force of a cataclysmic natural disaster. I wondered why he’d lost an eye. Why he had no house.
Why he spoke of darkness.
“When I have the words,” he finally answered. “The words to name you.”
“What do you mean? You have words to name me. Suvi, for one thing. And you’re always calling me little star.”
His next sentence went over my head. He said something else about naming me, or maybe about assigning me a word and then explaining the meaning of it. My temples ached, and I gave up on trying to figure it out.
It’s odd, though, the way things can leap into your hand the moment you stop reaching for them. Because it was only after I finally ate my stew and put my head down, only on the very edge of sleep, that Skallagrim’s sentence finally clicked.
When I have the words, he’d said. The words to tell you what you mean to me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Skallagrim
Nearly forty days after our arrival at Callabarra, Suvi turned to me and said, “I want to leave.”
My own mind supplied the last word of that sentence: I want to leave you. With my heart squeezing, squeezing until every beat hurt somewhere deep inside, I hissed with furious fervour, “You can’t.”
Her soft brows crinkled inward, a sign of confusion. Or irritation.
“We have to stay in this room?”
We. She said we.
“You... you just want to leave the room,” I clarified, feeling terribly off-balance. I tightened the muscles along my back and tail, thrusting my wings outward then back in to try to centre myself.
“Yes!” she replied. “I’m strong enough to walk. I’ve been doing my drillz.”
I still wasn’t entirely sure what her human drillz were. They seemed to be a set of exercises. But whenever she tried to explain the process to me, she said it was related to a human activity called hawk-ee and I did not know what hawk-ee was. Maybe some sort of military engagement. The drillz looked like they could be basic training for some sort of warrior, I supposed.
Though imagining Suvi as anything close to a soldier was... difficult. Not because I necessarily thought she was weak – at least, I assumed she wasn’t any weaker than the other soft-fleshed people of her world – but because gentleness seemed to be bred into her very bones. She could be stubborn, and she had her moods, of course, but there was no denying the goodness in her, the shy sort of kindness at her core. I tried to picture her killing a man and it did not feel like anything near truth. I was not the only one who’d noticed – more than once, Jolakaia had quietly remarked to me that Suvi followed the way of cotton without even knowing what it was.
Besides, Suvi hadn’t wanted or used the knife I’d given her back at the abandoned house. She hadn’t even noticed that it had been taken away during her fever (Jolakaia told us that only the Mother’s Claws could carry weapons in the temple). A missing weapon would have been one of the first things a warrior noticed upon waking.
So. She was not a soldier. But still she faithfully did her drillz to regain the muscle that had atrophied in bed. At first, it had started with a few walking laps around the room. Slowly, walking had become jogging. Then jogging had turned to short sprints back and forth, touching invisible points on the ground as she pivoted. (It was very hard not to stare at the bouncing of her breasts beneath her robe when she ran, but by the skies I was a strong male and I could do hard things if I set my mind to them and if I sometimes faltered, if I occasionally failed, then no one would be the wiser anyway.) She also did squatting movements and lunging movements and sometimes looked like she was pretending to grip something like a shovel or a spear.
Suvi stared at me with eyes so shiny with expectation that the grey centres of them practically looked silver. I could think of no good reason to stay in the room if she did not want to. I did not plan to remain in this room or even in Callabarra indefinitely—only until she had recovered—and that recovery largely seemed to be complete. There were still two guards stationed at the door outside in the hallway, and no one had specifically given us permission to wander, but it wasn’t as if anyone could stop me. I made an internal vow not to break any more bones, then hastily added the stipulation, but only if no fools get in my way.
I could only be expected to endure so much.
“Fine,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Her eyebrows crawled upwards in surprise.
“Wait, really? Now?”
“Yes, now.” Her surprise at my words bothered me. It bothered me that she thought she could plainly tell me what she wanted and yet also assumed I would say no. She obviously did not understand that I would do everything in my immortal power to take care of her, to keep her happy, to do whatever it was that she wanted.
But then again, when I’d thought she’d been asking to leave me, I’d immediately refused her.
Well, acquiescing to that particular request is not within my power, I reasoned savagely with myself.
I briefly wondered, for the very first time, if there were no looming threat of darkness, would I be willing to let her go? If I did not need her as some sort of antidote, some sort of anchor, would I still want, need, to keep her like this? Would I still feel the same possessive, protective urges towards her – the desire to hold her, to hoard her?