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Bryant ignored my jibe and gripped my upper arm to haul me aside. I pursed my lips and yanked out of his hold, visually warning him not to try it. He started to reach for me again, then thought better of it and swiped a rough hand down his jaw.
“I asked you to stay at the cabin,” he said in a tightly restrained tone.
“No. Youorderedme to stay at the cabin,” I corrected. “Problem is, I don’t take orders from you or anyone. It’s a revolutionary thing in my time called ‘personal freedom’. You should try it. It’s all the rage.”
He grumbled something in Gaelic that I probably didn’t want to know its translation, then tried another tact. “It’s not safe for you to be out and about, Callista. That’s why I wanted you to stay at the cabin.”
“Why? Are the Arcan Hunters back? The slimy town sheriff hiking the woods? No? Well then, there’s no reason for me not to be here then, is there?”
Bryant opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again.
“All right then. Since you’re here now, there’s not much I can do about it,” he said.
“None.”
“At least stay with Dove-caller until I come to retrieve you. We’ll leave in the next hour.”
I was about to rebel against his infuriating male chauvinist dictate, then decided against it. There was nothing he could do about my current presence at the village, and he accepted it with bad grace, but it wasn’t nice to gloat over my small victory, as much as I wanted to.
“See you later then,” I said, turning from him and making my way around the village until I came across Dove-caller.
There really had been something of necessity that I wanted to discuss with her ever since my last visit to Silver Falls.
She was washing and beating clothes in the nearby creek. Alone, too. A streak of luck, since what I wanted to talk to her about was meant for her ears alone.
“I-tsi, dsya, ya!” I called out, one of the few Lushootseed phrases I learned.
She smiled and waved me over, twisting and beating another shirt onto the smooth stone.
“Need some help?” I offered.
Dove-caller handed me another item, and together we went about the family laundry as she filled me in on the latest village gossip.
“The mother of Yellow Leaves is not happy that Gray Wolf has rejected her offer to wed her daughter,” she said.
“Is Yellow Leaves even old enough to have a husband yet?” I asked, twisting out the excess water from the cloth I had just beat clean.
A slight, pretty girl with a penchant to giggle, she couldn’t be more than twelve or thirteen. Even if you youth was a problem, surely the major age difference between her and Bryant would be.
“She is very young,” Dove-caller agreed. “But her mother does not wish to waste the chance to wed her to Gray Wolf. He is a very good hunter and provider.”
“Hmph. Well, she dodged a massive bullet, in my opinion,” I grumbled, still fuming over the man’s latest domineering dictates to me.
Dove-caller tilted her head in confusion at the idiom, but I shook her off, not wishing to explain the phrase that would lose something in translation anyhow.
“Besides, I should know,” I added, “living with the man myself.”
“Yes. You are living with him,” Dove-caller said, biting down a smile.
I sent her a gimlet eye. “Hey now, it’s not like that between Bryant and me. We’re friends.”
“You are,” she agreed innocently.
“Nothing more.”
With the exception of that one heated afternoon in the flowering mountain meadow that came very close to crossing the border between friends and lovers. The memory still heated my cheeks and few other unmentionable areas when I thought about it in length.
“Anyhow, that reminds me of something else I wanted to talk to you about,” I said, quickly changing the subject. “It’s why I really came to the village today.”
