“There you are,” Valeria said to Nazreen, her sight stars bouncing curiously between us. “Have you seen Fiona? Or Dalk? Oxriel said he saw them together earlier, but I can’t find them.”
Nazreen shook her head. “No. Why?”
Valeria’s mouth twisted. “I’ve just had a message from Chapman back in the Sea Sands. Dalk’s uncle, Taraken, is dying. I need to let him know and see if he wants me to take him back there with the shuttle.”
And suddenly another uncle was dying – my own – and naming me Gahn, with Warrek as his witness. I blinked the memory away.
“Shit,” Nazreen said. Her brows furrowed with worry that I wanted to press away with the pad of my thumb. “I have no idea where-”
“They returned to the mountain,” I said. “Dalk and Fiona both. I saw them head that way some time ago.”
“Oh,” Valeria said. Once again, her gaze – which had always been an observant and intelligent one – sliding between Nazreen and me. As if taking measure of the distance between us. “Alright, then. I’d better go look for them there.” Then, more quietly, as if more to herself than anyone else, she added, “Let’s hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
5
NASRIN
Valeria moved away through the valley. When I went to follow her, Gahn Thaleo murmured, “Wait.”
I tensed, wondering if he’d touch me again. My fingers twitched, feeling so much colder without his calloused hands wrapped around them. Of course, that’s why he’d grabbed me. The cold. I’d complained about the frigid water, and maybe Gahn Thaleo was as keenly aware of our poor, pathetic human constitution as the Sea Sand males were. He was probably worried I’d get frostbite or something. He wanted us human women safe and happy here so that we’d accept a Deep Sky mate from his tribe, should one be chosen for us. And that meant keeping our fingers and little human toesies warm and intact.
He didn’t try to touch me again.
“What?” I snapped when he didn’t say anything more. I was surprised by the venom in my own voice.
“He is about to be told of his dying uncle,” Gahn Thaleo replied, as if I hadn’t just heard Valeria say the same thing. “A man does not need an audience for this.”
“An audience?” I glared. “I wouldn’t intrude!”
Valeria’s words about interrupting something reverberated through my brain. It sounded like Fiona and Dalk had snuck away to be alone together for the second time today. Third time, I supposed, if you included early this morning when Fiona fell and Dalk went barrelling into the cave to help her. If they were getting closer, and Dalk was about to get ripped away, taken back to the Sea Sands to deal with this family trauma and grief, then she might need my support. She and Dalk both.
“I’m Dalk’s friend,” I continued stubbornly. “And Fiona’s.”
Gahn Thaleo’s sight stars pulsed, then drew taut onfriend. As if the word shimmered in the air before him, a strange and foreign thing that required some sort of analysis. His face was a cool, scarred mask.
And maybe it was unkind of me, but I found myself shaking my head. “You know. Afriend. Haven’t you ever had one of those?”
If my remark – which I regretted the moment it left my lips – affected him, he didn’t show it.
Does anything affect him?
“I have not,” he answered simply. No malice, no embarrassment. No hint of real feeling at all.
He’d never had a friend.
Despite the flat emotionlessness of his honest response, I gasped, feeling suddenly gutted, as if he’d roared the words at me.
The Sea Sand men did not cry tears.
I doubted Gahn Thaleo did, either.
“Alright, well,” I said, sounding shaken even to my own ears. “I don’t even know what to say to that.”
He stood, a colossus before me. Try as I might, I couldn’t picture him as a child.
“Say whatever you wish.” There was an unexpected sincerity in his response. I’d been rude to him several times this evening,and he didn’t seem bothered by it in the slightest. Whatever was going on behind the crisp mist of his sight stars, he did seem to want to know what I actually felt and thought. I wasn’t precisely sure that this was a good thing, though. Revealing too much to a calculating man like Gahn Thaleo could be dangerous.
“I wish to go be with my friends.”
