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I look at him. He has braided his dark hair like the other hunters do, and he has abandoned his chest plate. I like that second change quite a bit. Being able to ogle him unimpeded is nice. But I cannot fit in the way he is. I’ll never have scales. And now I am terrified of something even deeper — that I’ll never have a baby either.
I cry that night, quietly. I do it outside so as not to disturb Tethys as she sleeps, and not to alert Sithren to my distress. I don’t think he cares if he has another baby. I care more than I can express, and the pain of having to bleed is another indignity on top of what already feels like a curse and a failure combined.
My period ends, and with it, my patience for this lizard world.
I’ve sacrificed myself over and over, first for the Authority, and then for Tethys and Sithren, and for what? So I can be regarded as a barren freak by a bunch of backward aliens who don’t know what the hell a human even is?
“You are in a mood,” Sithren notes one morning.
I haven’t even done anything yet, but he is absolutely correct. I am in a mood. I am pissed off with fate. I am upset at myself for trying to choose family and failing even at this last ditch effort. Yes, Tethys is happy. But what about me? That’s probably too selfish a thought. I should just be floating about the place with a general goofy gladness of spirit, I suppose. That’s how the other women seem to be. They are settled. They know their place - and not in a sad sort of downtrodden way. I mean they literally know their place. They were born among these trees and hills and stars. They know this land. They know that the bones of their ancestors lie beneath the very soils upon which the beasts roam, and they know that their children come from the stars above too.
These are the most peaceful people I have ever encountered. There is no war because there are no outsiders. There is only the tribe. There is only family. And that makes everything so much worse. Because I am not one of them. I am as other as other can be. Sithren and Tethys are blood of the same blood. I share no blood here. And with every passing day I feel the urge to shed blood instead.
“You are not going to reply to me?” Sithren nudges me, a look of dangerous curiosity on his face.
“What do you want me to say?”
“Hm,” he says, his eyes flickering over my face with an interested glare. “It has been too long since you were spanked.”
“What?!” I feel myself flush hotly.
“You heard me,” he said. “I can see the rebellion rising in you, even though you have nothing to rebel against, having chosen this path in life for yourself.”
“Oh fuck off,” I curse. I have about as much true choice in this as a rock has the choice to fall to the ground or not. It was all inevitable and decided by forces far outside my control.
“I see you want your lashing now,” he says, his tone even.
I turn on him, my eyes flashing with the rebellion he has correctly accused of coursing through my veins. Sithren knows me better than I know myself in some ways, and I do loathe that at times like this. His anticipation of my moods and needs is sweet sometimes, but now, now it just feels like an intrusion into my mental cavities.
“I don’t want anything,” I curse.
“Oh but you do,” he says, reaching for me. I move away. I am not in the mood to be handled.
He lifts a scaled brow at me. I lift my brow back at him. What is he going to do to me now we are here in a little dirt hut in the wilds playing happy housemates with a bunch of feral aliens? He has a limited ability to deal with me now, and we both know it.
“Don’t push me,” he growls softly. “You won’t like what I do to you.”
“I never like what you do to me.”
“That is a lie,” he laughs. “You melt for me when you are in the right temper. I can put you in the right temper. I can take this spoiled agitation away.”
But he can’t, though, because the day is beginning and the villagers are stirring and Tethys has just woken up and here we are, on the verge of a kind of domestic boredom that might be the end of me.
The day happens in the way all days here happen. The women gather and prepare food, the men wander about and ‘hunt’. They bring down a beast every week or so, which means most of the time it is the women who provide the food with vegetables and small lizards.
