"Is that so?" he mused. "Well, if we have to use the term we feel in our hearts, then I must call you deshaida," he said.
She was quiet a moment, then he heard her sniffle a bit. "Tarrin, I am honored," she said in a quiet, emotional voice. "But if you would be my brother, then you must accept the rites of my people," she warned in the human tongue, so there would be no mistake of translation.
He urged her to get off of him, and they sat down by the water's edge, their feet dangling in the hot water. Tarrin looked at her, and his eyes never really failed to go her shoulders. On each shoulder, she carried a single brand. On her uppermost left arm, it was a circle with a line through it and a crescent just inside the circle and over the line. She said that the circle and crescent were the symbol of her clan, and the line through it was the mark that denoted her status as the blood of a clan-chief. On her uppermost right, she carried a sword-on-spear symbol that she said was the holy symbol of her Goddess.
"Would you be willing to truly become my brother, a brother in all but blood?" she asked.
He didn't even have to think about it. "Of course I would," he told her. "You're very important to me, Allia. You and Dar are the only things that keep me from going crazy here."
"There is more to it than that," she warned. "You would be bound under the Oaths. For you, that would mean very little, for you have no true clan chief. But it would put you somewhat under the dominion of my Holy Mother Goddess, for you would have to swear an oath to obey her will."
"What would she want of me?" he asked curiously.
"I would have to ask her," she said.
Tarrin gaped at her a bit. "You've never told me you talk to your Goddess," he said.
"Don't you?" she asked, lapsing back into Selani.
"Not really," he said. "Karas is the God of the Sulasians, but he's never spoken to me."
"The Holy Mother has a more intimate relationship with her people that most Gods, deshida," she told him. "If I pray, she will answer. I must pray and ask her guidance on this. She may not accept someone not of the Blood."
What startled him was that she clasped her hands together at her breast and closed her eyes. Obviously, she meant to do it that moment.
Tarrin wondered at her request while she was silent. Even though it hadn't even been a month, Tarrin already felt that he was that close to her. She was the older sister he didn't have; to his surprise, he found out that she was thirty-seven years old. Selani aged at a slower rate than humans. Among her people, thirty-seven was barely of marrying age. As long as it didn't mean consigning his soul to an unknown God, he was more than willing to make her happy by accepting the oaths of her people. Tarrin wasn't a overly religious person, since neither of his parents were very serious about it themselves, but he started getting edgy when his soul was in the balance of things.
After a while, she opened her eyes. "The Holy Mother will accept you," she said with a smile. "She likes you, actually," she said with a gentle smile. "She is very thankful to you for being so good to me. She also said that since I am violating my oaths in teaching you what you should not know, that you had best be made a brother of the Blood. She was quite put out with me over that," she said with a depressed look in her eyes.
"What would she demand of me?"
"Tarrin, the Holy Mother demands nothing of us," she said gently. "What we do with our lives is our own choice. That you acknowledge her is enough. The Holy Mother Goddess has no dominion outside the boundaries of our deserts, so there would be no demands set upon you. But also that means that she cannot help you."
"I've never had a God help me before," he shrugged.
From seemingly nowhere, Tarrin almost thought he heard the impetuous stamp of a foot.
"What was that?" Allia asked curiously.
"Maybe it was thunder," Tarrin said. "The storm's still going on outside."
"Ah. It is your decision, Tarrin."
"Allia, I've already made up my mind," he said. "You're already like a sister to me, and I love you as much as my own family. I would be honored to formalize the relationship."
She smiled broadly at him. "Maybe it was the Holy Mother's hand that guided me here," she said. "I am now glad beyond reason that I forced to come into the human lands, else I would never have met you."
Tarrin reached up and put the palm of his paw against her cheek, swallowing up the delicate side of her face in his huge paw.
And so Tarrin stumbled into his room late that night, with his shoulders throbbing, but feeling very good about the whole thing. Allia never told him that it would be her Holy Mother Goddess herself that would put the brands on him. She had reached out from wherever it was she was at and touched him with her power, and that had burned the symbols into his shoulders just the same way they appeared on Allia. The pain was part of the rite, an acceptance of the pains and trials that came with adulthood, and he'd been warned that to scream was unseemly, and that he had to remain still and now squirm, for the branding was not instantaneous. If one moved or flinched, it was an evasion of the duties of adulthood, and that person took a bad brand, and was ridiculed and scorned. Tarrin had a bit of an advantage there, for his Were-cat nature allowed him to endure quite a bit more pain than a standard human. He still nearly blacked out though, which, he'd discovered, was an honorable thing. Blacking out was not in his control, and it proved that the person being branded was strong enough to hold still even under such intense pain. People who blacked out, curiously, did not take a bad brand, even though they did move. Tarrin suspected that the Holy Mother Goddess had a great deal to do with that.
Tarrin just worried that his regeneration would heal over the charred burn marks.
"You're in late," Dar noted as he turned to look at Tarrin from the writing desk.
Tarrin hunched over a bit, his tail drooping. Even putting himself in the water of the bathing pool hadn't eased the residual pain after the branding.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
"Allia branded me," he said shortly.
"What?"
"She asked me to become her brother, and I said yes. The brands were so that could happen. I couldn't be her brother until I was seen as an adult in the eyes of her people, and that meant I had to be branded. It meant alot to her, and to me."
"You take friendship seriously," Dar said, getting up. "I'll go steal some ice from the cold room," he offered. "That should take most of the bite out of it."
"I appreciate it," he said gratefully.
He returned a bit later with a small bowl of ice, which was wrapped into a kerchief and applied to one shoulder at a time. The ice blissfully numbed his throbbing skin, and he leaned back on his bed, back against the wall, sighing in almost ecstatic relief.
"That must have really hurt," Dar said.
"It was worth it," Tarrin said. "I can't even begin to explain the relationship I have with Allia, Dar. It goes way beyond simple friendship. I've never had so deep a connection with anyone. We love each other about as much as two people can who aren't married."