Saved by a Bear (Legends of Black Salmon Falls Book 2)

by Lauren Lively

  “Still,” he replied, “I much prefer it here.”

  Frieda tried to keep her voice steady. “I don’t know if I can get used to this.”

  “You can go back any time you want to,” he replied. “You don’t have to stay here if you don’t feel comfortable with it.”

  “I’m sure your people would be insulted if I left after the way you helped me when I fell out of that tree,” she remarked.

  He shook his head. “No one would hold it against you. We understand how strange this world must seem to you. None of us would want to go live on land, either.”

  “What about Sasha?” she asked. “She’s chosen to make this her home.”

  Deek shrugged. “She mated with Fritz. If she hadn’t, she might have chosen to return to the land and her own kind. I wouldn’t blame her if she did, and no other Aqinas would, either. We only brought her here to save her from her injuries. By the time she recovered, she’d made a connection with Fritz and his family. That’s why she decided to stay.”

  “She must have felt comfortable here,” Frieda pointed out. “She must not have found it all that strange.”

  He cast a sidelong glance at her. “Do you feel comfortable here? Do you really find it all that strange?”

  “You know I feel comfortable here,” she returned. “That’s exactly what makes it so strange.”

  He stopped walking and regarded her with wide eyes. “I don’t understand you. What do you mean?”

  She waved her hand over the wide meadow. “All this—it’s beyond comfortable. It’s familiar. It’s home. That’s what makes it strange. That’s exactly what makes it so disconcertingly foreign.”

  He frowned. “I don’t understand you.”

  She sighed and started walking again so he had to hurry to catch up to her. “Never mind.”

  He laid his hand on her arm and turned her toward him. “Stop. I want to understand this. Explain to me what you mean. How can it be comfortable and familiar and home if it’s disconcertingly foreign?”

  She couldn’t stop herself from smiling. “Only you could fail to understand that, with your homogeneous chemical solution.” She burst out laughing.

  He frowned even harder. “What do you mean? I don’t understand you at all.”

  She smacked her lips. “All right. I’ll explain it to you. I’m on an alien planet, hundreds of thousands of light years from my home world. At least when I was with the Lycaon, and with the Avitras, I had the people to look at and understand exactly where I was and what happened to me. The sight of the people anchored me in space and reality. I never had to question where I was. All I had to do was look at the Lycaon’s hairy necks or the Avitras’ feathers to get my bearings.”

  “And you don’t have those bearings now?” he asked.

  “I do,” she replied. “Those trees over there don’t look like any trees I ever saw before.”

  “Then what’s the problem?” he asked.

  “You,” she blurted out. “You are the problem.”

  He furrowed his eyebrows, and she almost laughed at him again.

  “You look like any human man,” she explained. “The only part of you that looks alien is that hair of yours. If it wasn’t for that, I could convince myself I was somewhere back on Earth.”

  “Isn’t that what makes this place comfortable and familiar?” he asked.

  “Exactly,” she replied.

  He frowned again, but Frieda turned and started walking again. “Never mind. You won’t understand, but that doesn’t matter.”

  “It does matter,” he told her. “If something makes you uncomfortable here, you should get it out into the open. We can find a way to change it to make you more comfortable.”

  “There’s nothing you can do to make me more comfortable,” she told him. “I’m perfectly comfortable. That’s exactly the problem.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  “Let me put it this way,” she explained. “You’re alien. You’re ten times more alien to me than the Lycaon or the Avitras ever were. They live on land, and they’re separated by that unbridgeable gap, the same way my people are. I could relate to that. Now I have to learn a whole new alien way of being. I’ve been on Angondra for almost a year, and nothing prepared me for this. It’s going to take some adjustment. It’s going to be harder for me to adjust to this than living with the other factions.”

  He nodded. “That makes sense.”

  The trees blocked out the sunlight, and all at once, Frieda noticed they stood at the edge of the forest. “How did we get here?”

  He looked around. “You tell me. You must have wanted to come here.”

  “I never wanted to come here,” she shot back. “I was walking along thinking about something completely different.”

  “Then how do you explain how we got here?” he asked. “We couldn’t have got here if you didn’t bring us here.”

  “I’m telling you I never wanted to bring us here,” she snapped. “All I wanted to do was take a walk.”

  His eyebrows went up. “I’m just saying....”

  Then a glint of color caught Frieda’s eye. Her gaze fell on the house at the edge of the forest—her house. Her blood ran cold. Why had she wanted to come here—with him?

  She glanced at Deek, but he only regarded her with his calm expression. She took a step forward. “I better go.”

  He nodded again and took a step back. “It was nice to meet you.”

  She looked back over her shoulder, but he was already walking away. She never had a chance to ask if she would see him again, but she could always find him again in the meadow if she wanted to. She went into her house and sat in the chair.

  The chair sucked her down with an irresistible pull. As strange as this world was, she couldn’t bring herself to feel out of place here. The reality of the Aqinas world had become her reality.

  Maybe the water eroded her resistance until she became one with the Aqinas and their world of mirages. The water constructed out of her own thoughts and memories the most perfect environment for her she could possibly imagine.

  Nowhere else in the galaxy would she find a place so exactly suited to her tastes and sentiments. Even the people stepped out of her dreams to surround her with care and companionship.

  She sank deeper into the chair—her own chair. A sudden wave of exhaustion washed over her and threatened to drag her down into unconsciousness. She barely managed to stretch herself out on the bed before she fell into dreamless sleep.

  Chapter 3

  Frieda studied the meadow from every angle in much greater detail than she ever had before. In the end, she faced the wall and watched the people. Whatever else she experienced here, those people were the crux of her life here. Whatever answers she wanted or needs she needed, the solution would come from them.

  If she thought about them long enough, someone would come toward her. Who would it be this time? Would Deek come to visit her again? Even as she wondered, a cluster of figures left the main group and Frieda recognized them right away as women. They wore the same long white shift Sasha wore, and their hair hung smooth and lustrous down their backs instead of bound in ropes like the men. Their white gowns drew Frieda’s attention to her own clothes. She still wore the woven shirt and pants she had on when she arrived in the Avitras village with Anna.

  Before Frieda could say a word, the women surrounded her with warm smiles of greeting. “We’ve been waiting for ages to meet you. Did you find your house? Is it comfortable enough for you? Do you have everything you need? When are you coming to the convocation? Were you injured when you fell? We have a medicine woman who handles injuries. We don’t get many, but if you are injured, she’ll fix you.”

  Two women took Frieda’s hands on either side, and the others pressed her on all sides and bombarded her with questions. “No, I wasn’t injured. Thank you very much for taking me in.”

  The woman on her left brought her face close to Frieda’s and murmured low. Her ha
ir shone with the same glossy brown as the others, but something around her eyes told Frieda she was older than the others. “It wasn’t we who took you in. You came to us through the water. We didn’t know about you until you called to us to come for you. We wouldn’t have taken you otherwise. We would have left you where you were for your own people to find you.”

  Frieda shook her head. “The Avitras aren’t my people.”

  The woman frowned. Then Frieda recognized her from her vision. She was Deek’s mother, who waved to him across the undersea meadow. She frowned the same frown as Deek. When they frowned, they looked exactly alike.

  “They aren’t?” the woman asked. “That’s strange. We thought they were.”

  “I only just came to live with them when I fell out of the tree,” Frieda explained. “I thought I might find a home there, but I hadn’t yet. I.....I don’t really know where my home is, to tell you the truth.”

  The woman pursed her lips and furrowed her eyebrows. Frieda could have laughed out loud, she looked so much like her son. Then her expression cleared. She smiled and pressed Frieda’s hand again. “Well, never mind. You’re here now. That’s all that matters.”

  “I never called you,” Frieda insisted. “I didn’t even know about you then.”

  The woman waved her hand. “None of that matters. You’re here, and you are Frieda, as we know. I am Jen, and this is Trin.” She indicated the woman holding Frieda’s other hand. “She is my daughter.”

  A light came on in Frieda’s mind. “So you must be Deek’s sister.”

  The women surrounding her exploded in a hubbub of talking and exclaiming and laughter. “Yes, yes! We’re all Deek’s family. That’s why we’ve come to welcome you.”

  Frieda blushed. “That’s very kind of you. I didn’t mean to call all of you at the same time.”

  Jen waved her hand again and beamed. “You didn’t, but we did, and here we are. We’ve been waiting so long for a chance to welcome you, but Sasha said we ought to let you understand the place a little better before we....What was the word she used? Oh yes, I remember. She said before we mobbed you.”

  Frieda chuckled. “Thank you, Sasha.”

  The group burst into fresh gales of laughter. Frieda would have been embarrassed if the whole scene hadn’t been so jolly. Every word out of her mouth delighted the women no end.

  “So,” Jen went on, “do you understand the place well enough to let us mob you now?”

  “I think so,” Frieda replied. “I must, if I called you to do it.”

  Jen tugged her hand. “Good. Then come with us. We want to show you around.”

  Frieda let them lead her forward. “Show me around? I thought this was all there was to it. What else is there to show me?”

  They didn’t answer, but led her across the meadow and around the forest to another open area Frieda hadn’t seen before. Behind the waving seaweed trees, an embankment rose out of the ground as high as the tallest tree. Tiny houses exactly like hers and Sasha’s dotted the surface. A carpet of greenery covered the hillside and the round domes, and colorful flowers decorated the landscape.

  Frieda stared at it for a moment before she recognized the cave-pocked corral bank she’d seen in her vision. So this was where the Aqinas lived.

  Jen murmured in her ear. “This is our village.”

  “But why don’t I live here with you?” Frieda asked. “Why is my house all the way over there by itself? And Sasha has her house in the forest.”

  “That must be the way you want it for now,” Jen replied. “Maybe that’s how Sasha knew you didn’t want a mob greeting right away. She saw your house standing all by itself and thought you might need space to settle in at the beginning. She’s been living there for months. She hasn’t come to live in the village yet.”

  “She said she lived there with Fritz,” Frieda recalled. “Has he left the village to live alone with her? That must have been hard for him.”

  “Well, it wasn’t exactly like that,” Jen replied. “He goes back and forth. He comes to us, and he goes with her. He lives in both places, if you think about it.”

  “That must be even harder,” Frieda remarked, “having a foot in two places.”

  Jen shook her head. “Not really. He’s happy there with Sasha, and when they want to be with family, they come here. It isn’t all or nothing.”

  Frieda nodded down at the ground. “I’m sure it will become clear to me after I’ve been here for a while.”

  Jen cocked her head to one side. “Then have you definitely decided to stay here? You don’t have to, you know. You could go back to the land. No one would blame you if you did.”

  Frieda blushed. She couldn’t look any of these women in the eye, especially not Jen, who regarded her with the same frank expression Frieda noticed in her son. “I only meant it would become clearer to me the longer I stayed here. There’s still so much to learn.”

  Jen burst into a radiant smile and took her hand again. “Come to our house. Let us welcome you.”

  Frieda could hardly protest. The group swept her up the hill into the village, where narrow footpaths wound between the rounded dome houses. An eerie silence shrouded the place. No other people hung around the houses. No other women laid their laundry on the bushes to dry. No one looked out their windows to see what was going on. Frieda didn’t see another living soul anywhere. “Where is everybody?”

  Jen’s head whipped around and her eyes widened. Then she laughed. “They aren’t here. It’s just us.”

  Frieda turned bright red again. She’d forgotten. All the people were out there by the wall—or wherever the ocean hid them when they weren’t in her immediate field of interaction. That in itself was going to take some getting used to. She wouldn’t see anybody if she wasn’t directly engaged with them at any given time. No wonder Deek said he didn’t know all the Aqinas. No one could.

  The women ushered her up the hill and through the door of one of the houses. From the outside, it looked as small and unassuming as the others—perfectly round, tiny, and half-buried in the ground. Already Frieda’s vision of the caves in the coral bank faded so she saw only the house and village in front of her with its soft fuzz of green grass and nodding wildflowers.

  On the inside, though, the house stretched back into the hillside with several sets of tables and chairs scattered around and multiple beds of all sizes lining the walls. Frieda stopped in the doorway. “How many people live here?”

  “This our family home,” Jen told her. “Several families share this house. My sister and brother and their mates and children all live here, and their children’s children and some more distant cousins. We come here to spend our time together and raise our family together.”

  Frieda studied some smaller beds, too small for adults. “I didn’t think about the children. I haven’t seen any since I came.”

  “You won’t see them until they become part of your life,” Jen replied. “Sasha has been here almost a year, and she still hasn’t seen any.”

  “How is that possible?” Frieda asked. “Didn’t you say she comes here all the time to spend time with your family?”

  Jen shrugged. “I can only imagine it’s because she was single and childless when she came here, just like you are. It doesn’t happen to our people, since they grow up around their younger relatives. They are never not around children. But a person who hadn’t been here before, who had no children of her own—I suppose it must be different.”

  “Then how could I ever see them?” She swallowed hard.

  “I’m sure you’ll see them when you have children of your own. Children will be part of your life then.” Jen laughed. “You won’t be able to get away from them.”

  The group erupted into conversation and laughter. They settled into a loose circle in the chairs, with several different conversations going at once. On one side, two women fell to discussing their own children, what they said that morning when they woke up and what they played when they got together with th
eir friends. On the other side, another three women started negotiating plans for a large family gathering at another house. They decided who they would invite, and who would handle what aspect of the planning and arranging.

  Frieda listened to all this intimate community discourse with a sinking heart. As warmly as these women welcomed her, she still sat on the outskirts of their close-knit world, an outsider. Would any Aqinas ever talk to her that way? Would she ever enjoy the closeness of those bonds? Her heart twisted into a knot. She couldn’t stand to live in a place like this without them. The image of Sasha in her isolated house in the woods rose before her eyes. Was that her future here—to live in a lonely bubble apart for others, a tragic accident brought about by a clumsy fall from a treetop balcony?

  She almost got up and walked out of the house when a gentle touch on her hand made her look around, and she found Trin gazing into her eyes with bright interest. At close range, Trin didn’t look like Jen or Deek. “You must miss your own people. I can see the women you left behind on land. You must be anxious to get back to them.”

  Frieda blinked hard. “It isn’t just my people. I have two sisters out there somewhere. My sister Anna is still with the Avitras. She probably thinks I’m dead. I should find a way to get in touch with her and let her know I’m all right. My cousin Aimee is with the Lycaon, and my other sister Emily was on the Romarie ship with us, but I don’t know what happened to her when the ship crashed. She could be alive somewhere and worried about the rest of us, or she could be dead. It’s very nice here, but I couldn’t settle here or anywhere else if I was worried about them.”

  Trin nodded. Her gaze never wavered from Frieda’s face. “You could go find them. Then you could come back if you wanted to. We aren’t going away.”

  “Does that happen?” Frieda asked. “Do people go back and forth?”

  “Well, not really,” Trin replied. “Very rarely, a group of Aqinas will travel up onto land to intervene when the other factions get too violent with each other, but they don’t stay long before they come back. Sometimes the other factions call on the Aqinas to negotiate a peace agreement when no one else can. That’s the advantage of staying neutral.”