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“Come,” she said. “I will show you the Gahn’s quarters.”
“Oh, no, that’s OK. I don’t want you to get in trouble.” Something told me that going to Errok’s room without him had to be considered a no-no.
Her sight stars pulsed, then she threw her head back and laughed.
“There will be no trouble. Errok may be Gahn, but even he knows better than that.”
I decided instantly that I liked this woman.
“I mean, it’s not like I’ll be sleeping there or anything,” I told her. “So, I don’t need to see it.”
Tilka stopped laughing, looking surprised.
“Yeah, I know,” I muttered, annoyed by how the hurt of Errok’s rejection still poked at me. “But he wouldn’t even let me sleep in his cave when he was injured, so I don’t see why that would be changing now.”
Tilka’s gaze sliced through the dim, firelit darkness.
“That does not make sense,” she said. “Errok has gone near out of his mind waiting for a mate. You cannot tell me that once he found her, foundyou, that he did not do everything in his power to keep you by his side.”
“Yeah, well, he didn’t,” I said, crossing my arms and hunching down into myself, feeling oddly defensive. As if I somehow weren’t good enough to make him want me. Which was absolutely stupid.
But my feelings didn’t care about how stupid I thought they were.
“Priya,” Tilka said with the decisive force of a soldier commanding an army, “I am taking Zuh-Tephanie into my care now.” She grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the cave just as Priya had done earlier. “You will explain this to me,” she said, as if stating a simple fact. “And together, we will figure all of this out.”
I laughed, though none of this was funny. “Well, you’re going to have to be the one doing the explaining. That Gahn is a total mystery to me.”
“I have known him since birth,” Tilka said. “He may like to think he is unknowable to a mere aunt such as myself. But he is no mystery to me.”
I squeezed her hand involuntarily. There was something so comforting about her words, and about the way she seemed to be taking charge of the situation.Maybe she can actually tell me what the fuck is going on.
I filled her in on pretty much everything that had happened between Errok and me. I told her about our fights, about the taklok and his injuries. I told her about his nightmare, though I left out the details of the kiss afterwards.
“A nightmare?” she asked sharply, her steps faltering for a moment.
I nodded, and she began walking again.
We finally stopped for good, and I realized we were in the most breathtaking place I’d ever seen.
I dropped Tilka’s hand, my head straining back as I took in the space.
We had to be in a cave atop some sort of peak or crag on the mountain. Because the entire spike of the arching, cathedral-like ceiling was clear stone. Aguir or kaktuir, I couldn’t be sure. But either way, the result was astonishing. It felt as if there was nearly no roof at all, the cave arrowing up right into the sky.
It was only Tilka’s voice that made me stop staring.
“I did not know he still had nightmares.”
I looked at her questioningly.
“He had them as a child,” she explained. “My sister, his mother, used to tell me about them. About how he’d cry out in his sleep and wake in such a state she could barely calm him down.”
I remained silent, knowing exactly what she was talking about. I’d seen it myself.
“They started up again after his parents died,” she continued. “He fell asleep in the hall, once, and I happened upon him during a dream. I tried to wake him, to comfort him and... Let us just say, it did not go well.” She sighed. “If I remember correctly, he told me he was simply hunting in his dream, and that if I wanted to extend my pity to someone, it should be to the beast he’d just slaughtered in his sleep.”
That certainly sounded like something Errok would say.
“Well, he admitted to me that he’d had a nightmare,” I said. “He told me... He watched me die in the dream. And he couldn’t help me.”
