It smacked too much of Dasnarian male hubris for me to hold my tongue. “You mean unless it’s because you went down defending her.”
My sudden riposte took him off guard, and he fumbled for a reply. I realized I hadn’t paid much attention to the fierce Simyu, beyond admiring her. Why hadn’t she been part of the hot pool celebration with Zalaika and her daughters? They had been so clear on including me, as a potential addition to the female clan, why not Simyu? Perhaps I could ask Thanda.
“Of course,” Desta replied, but a beat too late and we both knew it.
I smiled at him, thin and feral, my mother’s smile that always reminded me of the jewel-bright lizard pet I’d had, until it sliced my hand open with razor-sharp teeth. “Of course,” I echoed, and started to turn away. Then, in a calculated aside, spoke over my shoulder. “Oh, and Desta? You should know there’s nothing I won’t do to protect Ochieng. His happiness is mine.”
“What does that mean?” He demanded as I walked away.
I answered in Dasnarian, because those were the words I needed. “It means don’t fuck with me and mine.”
* * * *
When Ochieng awoke, hours later, I still hadn’t slept—still too angry for it—but I had gone through the remains of my things. My side of the house had been the section that burned, though my room remained mostly intact, being on a lower level. The attackers had shot flaming arrows into the upper tiers, so the flames had spread down from there, going to the side as the breeze blew them. Some living sparks had burnt holes in my curtains and blankets, and everything lay under a coat of ash and stunk of smoke while being soaking wet from the water poured on to stop the fire.
Some part of me was grimly amused at my irritation that everything would be damp and dirty again. A small thing in the face of it all. Though I knew Thanda, at least, shared my gallows humor, because she’d remarked that thankfully the rooms that had burned were all ones that hadn’t been cleaned yet. First room and the surrounding core of the house remained intact, a small core of peace and continuity amidst the chaos and grieving.
I bagged up what could be saved. All of it fit into my travel bags again, which seemed to be a sign—if not from Danu, then of simple practicality—that I could easily remove myself from this place and move on. My sword… I didn’t draw it, but I held the sheath across my palms, testing its familiar weight and balance. In a way I missed wearing it. If I had been wearing it, would the day before have gone differently? Maybe it would have been worse. With the reach and momentum of the sword, I might’ve killed Ochieng before he could get close enough to stay my hand and talk me out of whatever fury had seized me.
A cold shudder ran through me. Nothing Desta could say to me would make me risk coming back to my senses to find Ochieng dead by my hand. He’d called me cold and I could accept that as truth. I was my mother’s daughter, after all, and a colder woman I’d never met. Regardless of what it said about me, I’d trade all the D’tiembos to keep Ochieng safe and alive. That meant from myself as well.
Resolved, I thrust the sheathed sword, belt, and all my wrapped knives into the carry bags. They commingled there with Rodolf’s manacles and cursed diamond, which seemed appropriate also. My baggage of pain.
“You shouldn’t linger in here,” Ochieng said from the doorway, startling me. He smiled when I turned, looking less exhausted, but his eyes still dark with weariness. “The supports might not be strong enough,” he added.
“I know. Thanda says she’ll find another place for me. There’s a lot of reshuffling to be done.” And nothing would happen until we laid Femi to rest.
“I think I can help with that. I’ll carry those.” He took my bags from me, shouldering them easily. I still equated size with power, so it took me aback when Ochieng’s lean body demonstrated such easy strength.
I followed him down to the terrace, wondering where he planned to store my things. He kept going, up into the unburned side of the house, and into a wing I hadn’t explored. Not that I’d gone into many of the parts of the house that belonged to the various subfamily groups. Part of the courtesy of affording privacy where there were no walls or doors to speak of meant not going where you weren’t invited.
Ochieng climbed a set of circular stairs and emerged through the floor of a wide room actually planked in wood. The curtains were tied back on three sides, the fourth wall a smooth indentation in the granite bluff itself. Small alcoves had been carved into the rock, and various curios sat in them, glittering as the late-morning light caught them. Like most rooms in the house, this one looked out over the river, but unlike any others I’d seen, this one had that wood flooring that extended beyond the four poles of the room. A couple of chairs—made of wood frames with thick cloth slung inside like a short hammock—lounged there, overlooking the river.
And the terrace. I understood then how Ochieng had so often observed me without my knowing. I also understood this was his room.
He’d set my bags down next to a hammered metal trunk and watched me. I wouldn’t have called his expression wary, but his pleasant smile covered his readiness to argue with me. Not unlike Desta that way.
“Are you keeping my things for me until Thanda can find me a new place?” I asked, offering him the out.
He sat on the trunk and stretched out his long legs, gaze traveling the area. “It’s a big room.”
“I see that.”
“Everyone will be packing in together for a while,” he pointed out, as if he were just now thinking through a problem I knew full well he’d already decided on a solution for. “Either you will have to move in with one of the other families, which means some of them will have to move in with me—or you could simply move in with me and save all that rearranging. A much simpler solution. Even elegant.” He gave me a hopeful smile.
“You want me to … sleep, in here, with you, at the same time,” I clarified, feeling foolish as I said it.
He cocked his head, a true hint of mirth sparkling in his eyes. “Well, I suppose we could take it in shifts. Like on the road, one of us standing watch while the other sleeps.”
“That’s not what I meant and I believe you know that.”
With a resigned sigh, he opened his arms to gesture to the room. “Yes, I want you—my intended wife—to sleep in my room and in my bed, with me, at the same time. If you prefer, I can make a separate pallet to sleep on and you can have the bed. Or we can share the bed, but roll up blankets to make a wall between us. Still, I’d like to point out two things at this fork in the road. One, I’ve already promised—and I think repeatedly demonstrated—that I will never touch you in a way you don’t fully desire, and second, if things had proceeded as planned, we’d have been sharing a room and a bed in a few days regardless.”
“In a new room, with the wedding poles and all.”
He shook his head slightly, then shrugged. “All along I’d hoped we could simply replace the poles in this room with those, to satisfy tradition, but this is a good space. Unless you don’t like it?”
“It’s lovely, but we’re not married.”
“You said that being engaged to marry and being married were tantamount to the same thing in your mind.”
“And you promised that they weren’t. What will everyone think of us sharing a room, a bed, when we’re not married? There are names for such women in Dasnaria.”
His dark eyes studied me, piercing in their perception. “Not here. Because we only conduct weddings once a year at the festival, people frequently cohabit. The formalities of marriage are only details.”
“Details?” I practically gasped the word. Of course he, a man of this casual culture would see it that way. “In Dasnaria, you would be executed for even being alone with me like this. Tortured for having kissed me.”
He made a dismissive sound. “And you would be still married to an abusive monster. Isn’t all of this why you are no longer in Dasnar
ia?”
~ 17 ~
I couldn’t think. Restless—and, yes, giving into my curiosity—I prowled over to the rock wall, examining the small works of art Ochieng had clearly collected in his many travels. Despite the esoteric variety of the collection, they all seemed distinctly him in a way I don’t know that I could have articulated. A metallic fish with inlaid scales. What looked like a golden statue of a warrior. A miniature painting of a sailing ship. A painted wooden doll caught my eye, the woman’s face somehow compelling, and I tucked my hands behind my back to resist the urge to touch it.
“Ah, I’ve been meaning to show you that,” Ochieng said, coming up next to me. He plucked it from its little shelf and handed it to me. “Go ahead and open it.”
“Open it?” I echoed, puzzled, examining it more closely. The doll looked like a Chiyajuan woman, with gleaming dark skin and braided hair woven with gold, her black eyes sparkling with laughter, all painted so realistically I expected to hear her sing. Her long fingers clasped over an obviously pregnant belly, her breasts and thighs full. She was naked and I blushed that Ochieng should have such a thing.
“Like so.” He took it from me, his long, clever fingers sliding over the woman’s body with a delicate care that sent a wave of warmth through me. Ridiculous. It must be that I was alone with him, which made no sense, as I’d been alone with him many times—so he had a point that I was being illogical about applying Dasnarian laws. Perhaps it was being alone with him in his bedchamber. No, don’t think about that. The memories rose up, harsh, bitter, tinged with pain and humiliation. Rodolf’s bedchamber, the place of nightmares. I swallowed my gorge and the horrors that wanted to rise up. Not the same. This room didn’t even have bedposts and rings for chaining me. Nothing like the other. I made myself focus on Ochieng’s hands, his calm words.
He’d twisted at the woman’s midsection, making it seem as if her belly split open, and the two halves came apart. Inside lay another woman, similar, but with a different face, younger and less obviously pregnant.
“Ivariel?”
Ochieng said my name as if he’d said it several times already. “Yes?”
“All you all right?”
I met his gaze, willing myself to look calm, and not like a crazy woman who couldn’t stand in her betrothed’s bedchamber without falling into a waking nightmare. “I’m fine. Interested in the doll.”
He clearly didn’t believe me, but he gave me a gentle smile. “Then take the one inside.”
I plucked the doll out of the bottom half-shell of the mother, aware that he’d said that to me already, also. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” he said, a bit too sharply. Not as serene as he seemed. I raised a brow at him and his smile turned rueful. “I mean, don’t be sorry for how you feel. We’re all suffering in our own ways. Everyone has to find their own way through. It’s not something you have to apologize for.”
I wasn’t so sure about that. “Does this one open, too?”
“Yes—in the same way.”
Feeling for the fine line that separated the two perfectly fitted halves, I twisted as he had. They came apart easily, revealing an even younger woman within. Ochieng had fitted the first woman together and set her back on the shelf. Now he plucked the woman from inside the pieces I held, waiting for me to fit my two halves back together and place her next to her mother. I opened the new one, finding an adolescent young woman within, and inside of her, a little girl. At last, within the little girl was an infant, a small egg of a being, wrapped in colorful blankets.
Her eyes, though, were the same as the oldest mother. The same, I realized, looking at the row of them, in all the women. Bright and sparkling, laughing in delight. Carefully I set the infant at the end, the bottom sanded flat so she could stand like the others.
“Are they all the same person?” I asked.
Ochieng studied them with me. “Some say yes. Some say they are grandmothers, mothers, and daughters. What do you think?”
“You told me about this sort of doll before, when you described this house to me, with first room at the center and the layers built around that.”
He smiled, and touched my cheek, fleetingly, withdrawing his hand as if uncertain if the gesture had been welcome. “You always listen. That is a thing I love about you, I should tell you. Not many people truly listen when I talk.”
“That’s because you talk so very much,” I teased.
He mock frowned at me. “I see my mother has influenced you. But truly—you are unusual. Most people are thinking about what they want to say next, instead of truly listening.”
“I don’t always listen,” I felt I had to say. “Sometimes I… fade out.”
Sobering, he nodded, watching me closely. “I know. That’s why I call you back. I don’t mind because when you go inside, it’s for different reasons. Will you tell me what you were thinking of, when you faded out just now?”
No. Never that. I’d told him some things, but not … all of that. “I think the dolls are the same person,” I decided, looking at them so I didn’t have to face him, though I felt his discerning gaze on the side of my face like a candle flame. “Our different phases of life.”
“And which is you?” he asked, allowing me that room to change the subject. Though I thought we both knew it was all one conversation.
I reached for the adolescent girl, her smile so hopeful—then realized I hadn’t been her for a long time. Instead I pointed to the next oldest, the young woman, her face more mature, her eyes somehow knowing. “Probably her.”
“Though, by your definition—you are all of them—just at different times.”
I cast a sideways glance at him. He returned the look blandly, but I knew him too well. Deliberately I plucked up the adolescent and handed her to him. “If this doll were me, this one would be a monster.” The crazed serpent inside me stirred, her scales hissing as they slid against each other.
He cupped her in his palms, cradling her with tenderness. “Or perhaps simply scarred.”
“Red demon eyes,” I countered. “Venomous fangs. Curved talons dripping the blood of innocents.”
Lifting his gaze, he narrowed his eyes at me. “Defending innocents, and herself, from the enemy.”
Slowly, I shook my head. “She’s not that mindful. Her blade cuts down everyone in her path.”
“You didn’t attack me. Or Capa.”
“Only because you stopped me.”
“No,” he said, surprised. “You stopped yourself. I should have told you. Once the attackers were all dead, you simply… froze. You didn’t seem to know what to do next, so I called you back.”
“You held my knife hand by the wrist,” I reminded him.
He smiled, that rueful twist. “I promised I wouldn’t let you hurt me. I was being careful.”
“Wise,” I told him.
A silence fell between us. And then he lifted the doll to his mouth, kissing her reverently, eyes on me all the while, and setting her on the shelf, somewhat forward of the others. A position of honor she didn’t deserve.
“I’ll put them back together,” I said, reaching for the youngest two, but he stayed my hand, lacing his fingers with mine.
“Let’s leave them unpacked for a while,” he said, “I like seeing all of them. They are each beautiful in their own way. As are you. All of you.” He lifted my hand to his mouth, kissing it as he had the doll. A shiver of heat ran through me and he murmured something that sounded like agreement. Turning my hand over, he smoothed open my fingers, placing kisses on the tip of each as he did, then pressing another kiss in the palm of my hand. My breath shortened, my body responding, wanting more. Wanting his mouth on me in other places, that same stirring tenderness. My skin seemed to throb with the need, starved for it. Craving the sweetness he brought.
I wished it could be like this. That I could be with him, be a wif
e to him and have it be only this sweet tenderness and none of the rest of it. Zalaika had been proven dramatically correct in at least that life is short, and things could change in a moment. If I’d lost Ochieng on the beach the day before, I wouldn’t have had even this moment.
“It can be only this,” he replied, confusing me, because I hadn’t thought I’d spoken that aloud. “I promise that.”
“What of your… needs?” I asked, breathless with my own needing, as I’d never truly experienced it before.
He looked up at me, mouth quirked in amusement. “I am a grown man. I’ve been able to handle my ‘needs’ for many years without a wife to see to them.”
“With other women?” I asked, tugging my hand from his grasp, unreasonably jealous, as no Dasnarian woman should be. Men needed to indulge in many women, that was the way of things. Even married men seldom confined themselves to one wife. Still, the thought of Ochieng going to other women annoyed me far more than it ought. Perhaps that was me being a princess. Precious pearl. Thinking myself so special. “Never mind—I didn’t mean to ask that.”
“Why not? It’s a perfectly reasonable question. Although it irritates me that you think I would want anyone else when I’m in love with you. I didn’t ask you to marry me so I could dally with other women.”
Hmm. Though I still wasn’t at all sure why he did want to marry me. “Young boys then?” I asked. I’d heard plenty of tales of that sort, that young boys served in place of a female, when there were none to be had.
Ochieng looked truly horrified—and angry. “You think I would do that to a child?”
I lifted my shoulder and let it fall, starting to turn away.
But he took me by the shoulders and turned me back to face him. “No, don’t do that. Some men prefer the company of other men, it’s true, though I am not one of those. But to harm a child is anathema. What was done to you is anathema too. I am not that person.”
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