So many choices.
And only one I wanted.
It was not often that I flaunted my title. I was not Gahn Errok.
But now…
Now, I found myself striding forward, telling myself that I was Gahn, and the Gahn could sit anywhere he so pleased.
And so, I sat down. Right next to Nazreen.
I did not touch her. The narrow space between us beat like a heart.
Even slightly apart from her as I was, I was cuttingly aware of her soft intake of breath, the tension that entered her small frame.
“I thought all unmated males participated in the vaklok,” she said. Her tone was very smooth and even mildly curious, not betraying any other sort of emotion. If she wished for me to sit somewhere else, she did not express it. I was not sure if this was good or not. Good, that she would tolerate me beside her…
Or bad, because she hid her true desires from me. Even if those desires were for my absence.
“Not the Gahn,” I explained to her. “It is already established that the Gahn should be the strongest, that he excels physically over the men in his tribe. It is unnecessary to compete, even if unmated, just to prove what is already known.”
Strangely, this was the first time since taking my title that I nearly wished I could compete. My tribe knew me, knew my strengths. They did not need to see it.
But Nazreen did not know me. What would she think, to see my arrows shoot true, to see my braxilk fly hard, to see me send male after male to the ground? To see me, Gahn, warrior, Thaleo, the man who conquered all?
Would she turn the obliterating loveliness of those green sight stars on me with something other than her usual guarded wariness?
Would she smile for me? Would she cheer and call me champion?
Likely not. And I was more painfully foolish than I’d realized to even contemplate such a thing. Even now, Nazreen held some sort of sign bearing the face of the Sea Sand man Zoren in her hands. All the new women had them. But only Nazreen’s bothered me. I watched her lovely, clawless fingers on the sign, fighting the throttling urge to snatch it from her and tear it into bits.
Was this jealousy? If it was, I could not name it for certain. Nor did I know what to do with it. My uncle, when he’d been Gahn, had always warned me against the disastrous selfishness of hoarding my emotions for myself. He’d dragged his own knife down my face when I was but a cub, gouging deep from hairline to cheekbone. Then, he’d stood there watching me to make sure I did not whimper or weaken or reach for the Vrika’s blood.
“You will be Gahn,” he’d told me, my blood dripping from his blade, “and when you are Gahn, you will disappear. There will be no hunger but your people’s hunger. There will be no pain but that which your people feel. You have no wants. No needs. There is nothing but the tribe.Youare nothing but your tribe.”
He’d crouched down in front of me then, his sight stars vivid in the gloom of the mountain cave. “Do you bleed, Thaleo?”
“No, Gahn,” I’d replied, so much blood coursing down my face that I could not see from my left eye.
“Do you need Vrika’s blood?”
“No, Gahn.”
And I didn’t. I healed on my own, if slowly.
And even if the scar still ached to this day.
But the ache did not matter. It was hardly even real.There is no pain but the pain of my people.
I had not felt anything for myself for so long.
And what I felt now for the strange, high-nosed, dark-haired new woman beside me…
It seemed to belong only to me. It was cut off from my people. Had nothing to do with them at all, this throb of unshakeable fixation for a woman not of my tribe.
A woman not even of my world.
But she was in my world now. In my mountains, at my vaklok, so close beside me that I could catch the soft shell of her low ear between my fangs if I only bent and tilted my head the right way.
