“That is not why I ask!” he snarled savagely. “That is not why I worry!” He swiped his claws through the air. “Let my memory all be torn asunder. Let the entire universe tremble under the weight of my maddened rage. Let there be no hope left for me, no hope left alive for anyone! I do not care a whit for it, any of it, if I do not have you!”
I hadn’t fully started crying while talking about Elvi.
But I started crying now. My eyes filled and overflowed. Skallagrim’s enraged expression turned to one of dismay.
“Little star, I am sorry. I-”
“No. I’m sorry,” I choked out. What I’d just said to him was incredibly unkind, and it was only fully hitting me now. “I shouldn’t have said that. It wasn’t fair.”
He lay back down on his side, looped a strong arm around me, and hoisted me across the bed until I was curled into his front. He rested the bottom of his snout on the top of my head as I dug my forehead against the scales on his chest and sobbed.
“I am sorry,” he repeated quietly, “for the anger in my reaction.” He sounded like he was in pain. “But I cannot... I cannot think of losing you. I cannot even think around it.”
I sniffed hard, then took a weepy breath, trying to calm down.
“I get it,” I said weakly. “When Elvi first got sick, I told myself every single morning that she wouldn’t die. It became like a mantra. Because if I’d stopped to consider the other possibility, I never would have been able to get myself out of bed in the morning.”
His hand caressed the rounded line of my spine, warmth penetrating through my tunic’s fabric.
“Grief for loved ones lost is a stone around your neck in the middle of the river,” he said quietly. “It will drag you right down to the bottom.”
“Have you ever lost anyone?”
As soon as the sniffly question was out of my mouth I wanted to smack myself. Of course he’d lost people. You didn’t live as long as he had without people around you dying.
“Yes. My parents I am certain of. My mother’s name was Jolakaia – a family name you no doubt recognize. My father...” He quieted for a moment, and his hand stopped stroking my back. “I do not remember my father’s name. Or his face.”
That broke my little human heart. As much as I missed Elvi, and our mother and my father, I could at least think about them. Time had worn away some of the sharp corners, turned many of the memories dusty, more akin to dreams, but at least they were still there. Still real enough that I continued hearing my sister’s voice, even now.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. I wondered how many times we were going to apologize to each other tonight.
“Oh, Suvi, don’t be,” he murmured against my hair. “You have already brought me back to myself in a way I did not think possible. And soon-”
His words cut off, and I knew exactly why. He had been about to say something about how more of his memory might come back after we fully mated under the sway of the starburn.
I appreciated that he didn’t want to put pressure on me right now, but for the very first time, I looked ahead at what was to come without guilt or fear or resignation. I thought about what a gift I would be giving Skallagrim. If mating did restore some of his memory, in a way I’d be giving him his life back. Giving him his parents back. It might not work, of course. But if there was even a chance...
I suddenly faced the impending heat, and our joining, not with dread, but a little bit of... hope? Maybe even excitement.
At the end of the day and against all odds, I cared about Skallagrim. I cared about his mind, his memory, his pain. If I could pull him up from the bottom of that river, then I knew that I would do it. And I’d actually be glad to.
“Do you remember anyone else from your past?” I asked. “Or has Jolakaia told you about anyone?”
“No. I do not believe I ever had a brother. Although...”
He grew quiet for so long I found myself wiggling in his grip to look up at him. He shook himself as if from sleep.
“There is a male that I remember more vividly than any other. A stone sky god, like my father and me. With black wings and white hair. I feel that I was close to him, somehow...”
His words died off as my brows drew together. White hair and black wings...
It sounded like the one I’d seen before. The one who’d killed half our ship’s crew, and my good friend Torrance, on the first snowy planet we’d landed on.
Maybe he was mate mad, too...
The winged being had come to that planet in an all-consuming rage just like Skalla.
I tried not to dwell on it, tried not to think of Torrance buried under that alien’s avalanche of fury back on the frozen planet. Maybe it wasn’t the same stone sky god at all. Skallagrim couldn’t even remember who the person he’d mentioned was, or what their relationship had been like, so there would be no way to confirm. Plus, Aeshyr also had what looked like white hair, though it was shorn right down to the scalp, and bony black lines of wings. Maybe white hair with black wings was a common combination for stone sky gods, and Skallagrim was the outlier with his dark hair and green and gold body.
But even so...
It didn’t feel right not to mention it.
“I saw someone like that, once.”
Skallagrim went very still.
“The planet where you found me wasn’t the first world we visited in our ship. We were conducting research on another world when someone – a stone sky alien, I assume – came through the sky. He went on a rampage. He killed half the soldiers from our ship. And... and my friend.”
I never saw it happen. Torrance had been out in the woods on her own when we’d been shoved back onto the ship in the chaos. I saw soldiers felled by literal tidal waves of snow, wrenched up from the ground by the white-haired, black-winged alien. But I never actually saw her die.
I shivered and hoped, as I’d done many times before, that whatever had befallen Torrance had been quick and as painless as possible.
Skallagrim looked troubled, then brushed his fingers over the hollow scarring of his lost eye before returning his hand to my back.
“Perhaps that male was mate mad as well. It is impossible to say if he is the one whom I remember.”
“Yeah, I figured. I just felt weird about not mentioning it.”
He grunted and then said, “I did not know one of my kind had killed your friend.”
I didn’t say anything else because I was worried that talking about Torrance more would have me sobbing on Skallagrim’s scales all over again. I didn’t want to cry any more tonight.
He seemed to sense it, so he didn’t say anything else on the matter. We remained quiet, lost in our own thoughts while wrapped gently in each other’s limbs.
Soon, even thought drifted away from me. The inside of my head, just like my swollen eyelids, felt heavy. I nuzzled closer to Skallagrim without meaning to, and he responded with a rumbling sound and the protective drape of his wing over my body, which made me feel impossibly cozy.
I wasn’t supposed to feel cozy. Mere hours ago I’d been dreading climbing into this bed with him. But now...
Now, I couldn’t imagine us sleeping any other way in this room. It was both disconcerting and oddly comforting, to be so at ease nestled against his bulk.
His naked bulk.
But even that didn’t seem to matter right now. The awkwardness and embarrassment I’d felt had been completely stripped away, worn down to only what was raw and real. Talking about your dead sister and bawling your eyes out all over a man had a way of getting to the heart of what mattered, I supposed.