“Do you ever run into any problems with that, though?” she asked, her hand stilling on the brolka’s side. “Like, what happens if someone falls in love, then the Vrika chooses someone else?”
Falls in love. I’d never heard the term before. I pictured someone – a man, and one who rather looked like me – falling from a cliff.
“It has never happened in my lifetime,” I said.
“That you know of,” Nazreen countered. “Sometimes feelings are secret.”
There was no one on this mountain who knew such a thing better than me.
“There has never come a time,” I clarified, feeling an odd tension build between my shoulder blades, “that a man in my tribe has refused the Vrika’s call in order to choose someone else. It simply is not done.”
“But what would you do if itdidhappen?”
I suspected she would not like my answers. There was a warily suspicious look in the tightness around her eyes. Like she wanted to find fault with me, and knew she would if she only pressed this far enough.
“Why do you ask about scenarios that have not come to pass, and likely will not?” I asked her.
“I guess I’m just…Trying to get the measure of you.”
“Surely,” I said dryly, “you new women have better tools of measurement than this.”
Her pretty mouth dropped open.
“Was…Was that ajoke?”
I twitched my tail.
And, great peaks of the Deep Sky, she laughed then, and maybe she was laughing at me, but I found I did not care. Did not care for anything besides the bright, melodic sound she made, and the resounding answer I felt to my deepest core. My body surged like a braxilk leaping to answer the call of its rider. My chest felt full of light. An impossible thing – to have something like the sun inside your body.
But her laugh made me feel that way.
I’d never experienced such a thing before. Or, if I had, I could not remember when.
“See, this is what I mean!” she said, still laughing, but more quietly now. “I never would have thought you capable of makinga joke.” She tilted her head as she observed me. Her hood was down, and this bared the side of her throat, bared the thrum of her pulse, a place I could perfectly imagine stroking with my knuckles. Or my tongues.
And just like that, I wanted to give her anything, even an honest answer to what she’d asked. Even if it made her laughter vanish and that guarded look come back into her eyes.
“To answer your question,” I said, once I found the power of my voice restored to me, because for a moment I had been struck entirely dumb by her, “I would not be able to allow anyone to ignore the Vrika’s call.”
She sighed, as if I’d confirmed what she already knew, and in the process had greatly disappointed her.
“You sound like Gahn Errok.”
I did not consider myself a prideful man. My ego had been largely cut down the day my uncle had cut my face. But I could not deny that this remark affected me, made my spine stiffen. A comparison to Gahn Errok was an insult of the highest order.
“Explain,” I said between clenched fangs.
“He’s the same way. He sent his own brother into exile for ignoring the Vrika’s summons.”
I did not like admitting that Gahn Errok was ever reasonable, but in this, I agreed with him.
“I recall that. A judicious choice,” I replied tightly. “I cannot say that I would do any differently.”
“Yeah. I had a feeling.”
“Clearly, you do not approve.” I had no idea why I said it. It did not matter if she approved or not. The Vrika’s mate bond was sacred and had to be protected at all costs. It kept us alive.
“I just…What about freedom? What about choice?” she asked. And I did not think she meant to infuriate me, or that she enjoyed arguing, but that that these questions were simply boiling inside her, and had to be let out.
