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No. Not protection. Control.
We were all under Mercenia’s control.
“It would never have worked,” Maldek says. “Even if that male had not been able to control his unwanted urges, even if he had mated you, it would not have seeded a youngling. That is not how it works for raskarrans.”
I think of the talk I overheard about the female raskarran. Trying to understand her cycles, trigger ovulation. How the scientists clearly hadn’t figured it out yet.
“How does it work?”
“A raskarran can only seed a youngling with their mate, and only when their mating node is active.” He draws his trousers down, revealing a patch of differently textured skin just above his groin. “When the time is right, this will grow engorged and active. Only then can a youngling be seeded.”
“Oh,” I say, heat rising in my chest at the sight of this part of his body. “That’s not how it goes for humans. As long as we don’t take anything to stop it, we can create a baby any time we have sex, any time we mate, within a window of a few days every month.”
“Mating when the mating node is inactive is only for pleasure, for intimacy,” Maldek says. “Not that you or he would have experienced either had Mercenia’s trickery worked.”
I slide my arms round his waist. He turns to me, burying his head in my shoulder.
“I am not a hateful male, but I find I hate your tribe, linasha. For everything it did to you and my other sisters. My chieftess fears they will return, and I have thought that if they did, they would face my wrath and my spear. But that weapon they used - it killed that male so fast. I am not sure that I could fight against such might. I am starting to understand, I think, why Liv holds so much fear in her heartspace over this.”
I draw him over to the bed, encourage him to sit down. When he’s sitting and I’m standing next to him, I’m taller than he is. Not by much, but enough that he has to look up at me. I look down into his brown eyes, try to feel as much determination as I can.
“Whenever I feel overwhelmed on a mission, like I can’t possibly succeed, I always count out what I know, what I need to do.”
His tail wraps around my thigh, his hands resting on my legs, as I take his face in my hands just as he did to me moments ago.
“One, we don’t know yet that they are coming back. I’ve been frozen for fifteen years. I don’t know how long after they froze me that they left, but it’s been a while, we know that much. Two, all this stuff I know, that I remember, that scientist lady knows more, and she’s one of the people frozen in those pods downstairs. We can wake her up and ask her.”
“We do not know how to wake the females from their sleep. Your waking was an accident.”
“I know. I was trained to do it. Not fully, like if there was a medical team. But I know how to activate the wake cycle, and hopefully doing it properly will mean that the rest of those women don’t suffer memory loss like I did. So three, we wake those women. Listen to them, hear what they have to tell us. It might be that Mercenia has no intention of ever coming back.”
“Would that please you?”
There’s a vulnerability in his question, as if despite everything he’s seen about how I was treated back home and by other humans, he thinks I might want Mercenia to return, to take home.
“Hell yes, I’d be glad to never have to look one of those monsters in the eye ever again. But four, if they do decide to come back, we aren’t completely helpless. They’ve got weapons. Technology. That gives them an advantage, for sure. But you and your tribe know these trees. You know this place. You’re quiet, sneaky, and you’ve got numbers on your side. Plus, you’ve got me. I know all their tactics, all their strategies. I might be fifteen years or so out of date, but that’s the thing about war. It doesn’t change all that much.”
“You would help us to fight them?”
I put my fist over my heart in the way he’s sometimes done to me.
“I will do everything in my power to help you defend what you have here.”
He smiles, and there’s a hint of his usual humour about it.
“You have seen the trees, you have seen me, a small portion of my tribe. You do not even fully know what it is we have, and yet you offer to defend it.”
He makes a good point, and I pause to think about it. To really consider what he’s saying and my response.
“Because,” I say, shaping my words carefully, “I don’t need to see any more than I already have to know that what you have here is better than anything I ever had back home.”
The smile widens to a grin.
“My fierce warrior mate.”
Heat sparks in me at those words. Hard to believe now I was ever averse to the idea of being his, when he looks at me the way he does right now. All desire and need.
He draws me to him, flipping me so I am lying on the bed beneath him. The sudden change of positioning knocks the air out of me, but not in a bad way. I’ve always been big. Tall, broad, muscular. But underneath him, I feel small, and I like it. I like it a lot.
