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It put its smaller, hooked arm around his neck, nuzzled his cheek with its shorn head—most had colorless or white hair, or something like hair, but this one had none.

I scooted away.

Galva looked half-rabid wanting to shed its green blood, but she had neither means nor liberty.

“Why am I kill it? I marry it!” he said and laughed.

16Nothing You’d Want to Put Your Cock In

That was how I learned about the Wostran concept of the table wife.

“Nxitpatxbrattt, or Brat to us, was unhived,” Bazl said to me in Galtish, hoping to ease my pants-filling terror. He was roasting something on a long stick. “This is what happens to goblins who cannot or do not make swarm with the others. The sows put them out to fend for themself.”

“Sows?” I said.

“Yes. Goblin females are smarter. Make decisions. This is why they have an imperatrix, not an emperor. Females either fight as war chiefs or breed. Is decided by other sows. Males are cheap, much more numerous, only good for digging, making things, or war.”

“Huh,” I said. I translated this for Galva, and I watched the usefulness of learning what goes on in goblin hives struggle with her bones-deep instinct to destroy them on sight without asking questions. It was said that talk with goblins only led to death, and had I not seen this for myself in Molrova?

“So, these unhived. They’re no longer loyal to the horde?” I asked Bazl.

“They are not loyal, but they are not disloyal. It is for them very wrong to kill or to harm the wants of other goblins. This is why Brat crossed the Thralls, to be away from Goblin Wars with kynd.”

I thought about Grevitsa, the Molrovan town of lace and amber with its goblin quarter. Could the biters that lived there, under the eye of a human king, have all been unhived? It would make sense. But then, their ways are so strange, who could say? Perhaps that quarter in that city was a hive. All I know is that the karker who hooked my friend Malk first with words and then with its actual hook—and tangled him up in a lethal game of pull—was smart. Smarter than my poor, proud friend. Could that thing have been a sow? Hard to tell. This Brat didn’t seem one sex or the other, just a thing, like the rest of the gray or green or gray-green or mottled pink pack of ugly shyteknockers.

Maybe we looked so to them.

Brat soon tired of sitting on Szymnal’s lap and shambled off to claim the raw leg of a gazelle before someone spitted it for cooking. The biter shaved neat strips of flesh off its prize with razory teeth before swallowing these whole. It was as fearful to watch as it was unappetizing. Not so unappetizing, I must admit, that I refused the dripping, smoking, greasy gobbet of gazelle someone soon offered me on a skewer. I turned away from Brat at supper and bit into the meat gladly.

“So, a table wife.… Do Szymnal and she…?”

“No,” Bazl said, clearly amused, chewing on his own smoking piece of gazelle, which looked to be the heart. “A table wife shares money and work but not the bed. It is often so for older widows and widowers who remarry for companionship or practical reasons. But not always. Some of these remain eager to fuck—you would be surprised—and do not wish to share the fucking with others, but perhaps do not want to have their money taken. If so, they might have a bed husband or bed wife. If only we say wife or husband, they fuck and share money. A goblin could only be a table-mate to kynd. There is nothing on them you would want to put your cock in, or have them put into you.”

I shuddered.

He laughed.

I glanced over again at Brat, who was looking directly at me with her black little eyes. I felt my stones crawl up to hug my kidneys. Now the creature started scuttling over, still holding what was left of the gazelle’s leg. I shook my head, but here it came anyway. Galva got to her feet with surprising dash, chained and injured as she was, and did not respond to Bazl’s calming hand motioning her to sit.

The thing, for I still can’t think of them as sexed, now opened its sharp-toothed fish-mouth at me and fluttered its strange, shelled tongue so it made a sound like a rattle.

It rasped something in clipped Wostran.

“She says you and she should be friends, since you both have strange tongues.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

He translated.

Brat tilted its head back and issued a few short whoops or barks, which I took to be laughter, but which also struck me as an imitation of laughter. Did they have a sense of humor? Or did they just learn when and how to make kynd-like sounds that would endear them to us? I had heard those misguided wretches among us who don’t care for cats say that felines learned to imitate infants to enslave those kynd with hearts too kind or minds too weak. I couldn’t help thinking the thing was leading Szymnal, Bazl, and the others on a merry chase; that one day a group of other biters would come over this or that hill, and the creature whose name was never Brat but Nxitpatxbrattt, would deliver the kynd into the butchering claws of her true family, and feast on them just as neatly as she had the gazelle, eating her foolish table husband first. I suppose this would be the truest expression of the fine Egalitarian principles Bazl held the group to. All kynd bound for the same bone-pile, regardless of wealth, rank, or ties of affection. Affection is a two-way street, after all. When only one feels love, what is the other but a master?

Galva sat again, as nimbly as she had stood.

But she never took her eyes off that fucking thing, even when our temporary status as guests was revoked and we were returned to the cage-cart as chattel.

Brat looked at her in there.

None of the other Egalitarians saw, but I did, and got a chill.