Until Dawn

by Laura Taylor

  “What happened to your face?”

  Caught unawares, Dusk pulled back sharply, having forgotten about the bruise that had probably formed by now, and the move only confirmed that something had gone down in Aidan’s absence. “Nothing,” she said firmly, turning around so he couldn’t see it.

  But he was on his feet in an instant, steering her over to the window to have a look in the light. He’d been too distracted in the chaos earlier to notice, what with a handful of his men injured and his own wound to take care of.

  “What happened?” he asked again. “That bruise wasn’t there this morning.”

  If she hadn’t reacted so stupidly, she could probably have passed it off as a simple accident, getting butted by one of the sheep, for example. But there was no way Aidan was going to believe that now. After having a few hours to think about it, Dusk hadn’t wanted to be the one to tell him about the incident with the men in the orchard, or at least, to not make a big deal of it. Of course, he’d find out one way or another, but Dusk was worried that if she went first and started demanding retribution, she and the other women would have their freedom and independence drastically curtailed. As had been demonstrated that afternoon, the men’s first reaction to realising their women were in danger had been to keep them safely tucked away in the village, where they couldn’t get into any more trouble. She was far too independent to put up with any kind of mollycoddling, and to be fair, she and Rochelle had done a pretty good job of beating up their attackers anyway.

  “A couple of the men decided to get fresh,” she said, aiming for casual indifference. “We took care of it -”

  “Who?” Aidan demanded, and for one, shocked moment, Dusk recoiled from him, a shaft of fear stabbing through her. Though she’d watched Aidan kill people and dismember their dead bodies, she’d never seen him get truly angry before, having had the impression he was an entirely even-tempered and level-headed man. The fiery rage in his eyes was startling, coming from a man she’d actually begun to trust…

  “It doesn’t matter who they were,” she insisted, still trying to play down the incident. “Torrent and Hawk came and cleared them off. It’s no big… deal,” she finished lamely, even as Aidan stormed out the door and marched off down the path.

  “TORRENT!” she heard him bellow, and cringed. If the rest of the village hadn’t heard about the fight by now, they were about to…

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Dusk caught up to Aidan just as he was storming into one of the bachelor lodges where a number of the young men bunked together. He flung the door open and marched inside, having already got the names of those who’d attacked her from Torrent. For about thirty seconds after he’d left their cabin, she’d simply stood there and rolled her eyes, thinking the amount of fuss he was about to make was ridiculous. And then a wave of fury had overtaken her, and she’d come marching down here after him, a thousand perceived slights riding her hard as she felt a very righteous indignation at his interference.

  “Mark!” Aidan bellowed, and Dusk arrived in the doorway just in time to see Mark look up, fear and surprise on his face.

  “Aidan, I -”

  He didn’t get any further, Aidan punching him square in the face in a move that dropped him to the ground without the slightest resistance.

  “I turn my back for five fucking minutes,” he seethed, standing over Mark’s fallen form, “and you think you can put your filthy hands on what’s mine?”

  Dusk stormed into the cabin after him, grabbing his wrist and forcing him to turn around. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” she yelled at him. “You think you have to posture about and prove you’re a man by punching anyone who comes near me?”

  “I will not have another man touch my wife!” Aidan yelled back at her. Dimly, she was aware of one of the other young men helping Mark to his feet. His face was going to be one giant bruise by the end of the day.

  “I am not your fucking property!” Dusk shouted. “Why the fuck is it okay for them to respect you, but not me? And I’m perfectly capable of punching my own damn pervert!” She spun around and did exactly that, sending Mark crashing back to the ground. And then she turned on the rest of them. “And if any of you ever think about laying a hand on me again, I’ll keep the promise I made the first day I got here and geld you.” The next time one of the men got in her face, Dusk promised herself, she wouldn’t be nearly so hesitant about getting her knife out, nor about putting it to good use, Aidan and his fucking honour be damned.

  Without another word, she spun on her heel and stormed back out of the cabin, almost slamming into Whisper on his way in. Fortunately, Whisper was both quick enough and smart enough to get out of her way. Once Dusk was gone, he ducked inside the cabin.

  “Fickle creatures, aren’t they,” Whisper commented drily, having heard Dusk’s loud outburst from quite a distance away. He hadn’t heard the full story of the incident in the orchard, having been too busy treating the wounded men, but he’d seen the bruise on Willow’s face, and had known he’d have to ask questions about it later. “They demand that we see to their wellbeing, then complain when we do just that.”

  “River hit Willow,” Aidan informed him flatly before stalking out the door, and he seemed to take a sardonic pleasure in delivering the news. He saw River, lurking in the shadows across the cabin. The man glanced at the door, as if considering making a run for it, then backed up against the wall as Whisper advanced on him.

  “You hit my wife?” Whisper crooned softly, cracking his knuckles as he came forward in slow steps. “Let’s have a little chat about that, shall we?”

  Inside Aidan’s lodge, Dusk sat in front of the fire, staring into the flames. While it wasn’t anything like cold enough to need to heat the cabin, they would still need to cook something for dinner, so she’d started one when she got back, after having taken a long walk by the river. Aidan hadn’t been around at the time, and so far, she’d managed to boil some water, but that was it.

  Behind her, she heard the door open, but she didn’t turn around. Aidan moved quietly across the room, taking a log from the stack beside the fireplace and adding it to the flames. He stayed crouched there for a long moment, just staring into the flickering light. “I know you’re a capable fighter,” he said at length, not looking at her. “And yes, you’re right, the men need to learn to respect you. But they also need to see that I’m serious about what I said. If I didn’t defend you, they’d see it as weakness or negligence, and that could threaten not just our relationship, but my role as leader of this tribe.” He turned around to face her, his words suddenly caught in his throat as he saw the tears rolling down her cheeks. He straightened, then came to sit on the bench beside her, looking utterly bewildered. “I didn’t… What…?”

  “I know what you said,” Dusk said, not even trying to hide the fact that she was crying. “You said they’d have trouble keeping their hands to themselves, and you said you’d deal with anyone who stepped out of line. And I knew something like this was going to happen sooner or later. But…”

  “But what?”

  She took a deep, shuddering breath. “But I am so damn tired of having to fight for everything. My best friend threw herself off a bridge, because she’d had enough of men using her like an object instead of a human being. Every day, for so fucking long, it’s been a battle just to stay alive, to find enough food, to find enough water, to avoid being taken prisoner. So why should I…?” She trailed off, her unspoken question hanging in the air.

  To her surprise, Aidan seemed to understand her implications perfectly, and he used his uninjured arm to pull her into a tight hug. “No,” he said into her hair, running a soothing hand up and down her back. “No giving up.”

  “Why not?” Dusk asked helplessly. “The entire world is all the same. It always has been. Why should I bother?”

  “I used to ask Whisper the same thing,” Aidan said. “How to deal with a life not worth living.”

  Dusk pulled back to look at him, wiping
the tears away with the back of her hand. “And what did he say?” she asked, not expecting any profound answers. It was the same question philosophers had been asking for millennia.

  “He said you make it worth living,” Aidan replied.

  Well, what do you know? There was an answer to the question after all. “So he’s got an idealistic streak,” Dusk said, needing to lighten the mood a little. “Who’d have thought?”

  “We both do,” Aidan told her, and she could well imagine it to be true. The life he’d given her here was far from ideal, but he seemed determined to keep improving it, piece by piece, day by day.

  She turned back to the fire, contemplating her next move. Aidan left his arm around her shoulder, rubbing soothing circles across her back. Quite deliberately, she reached over and put her hand on his knee. “Thank you for the coffee,” she said. The packet still sat on the table in the middle of the room. She’d never even gotten around to smelling it.

  “You’re welcome,” Aidan said genially, and Dusk knew he was missing the point.

  “No, I mean…” She ran delicate fingers up his chest – still bare as he’d never got around to putting his shirt back on – and leaned in to kiss his cheek, as her other hand slid higher up his thigh. “Thank you. For the coffee.” She put just a hint of husky desire in her voice. “And for dealing with Mark.”

  Aidan tensed at the unexpected move – clearly he hadn’t thought she would be taking the reins in their relationship anytime soon. But then the momentary delight on his face vanished, to be replaced with a cool frustration. He took both her hands and placed them back in her lap. Damn fucking man! Why couldn’t he ever just take the obvious route?

  “Is that the way it’s going to be, then?” he asked, disappointment thick in his voice, though hell if she could figure out why. “Whenever you think you owe me something?”

  Dusk shrugged, not sure where to go from here. “That was our deal, wasn’t it? You protect me and feed me, and I give you… satisfaction.” It was more than that, though. Just that morning, she’d been lamenting the fact that she and Aidan hadn’t been getting along as well as she’d like, and then he’d gone and brought her a gift. It was only fair that she put in a bit of effort on her side of the relationship, as well.

  But Aidan stood up, pacing away across the cabin. “I also told you I wanted a wife, a real person with opinions and desires of her own, not just a warm body in my bed.”

  Did it necessarily have to be one or the other? What had he said before about living in a world of shades of grey? In an instant, Dusk felt her patience snap, aware that her moods had been swinging about wildly lately, but too tired to try to do anything about it. “What the hell do you want from me?” she asked, leaping up and turning to face him. “I don’t sleep with you and you say I owe you for it, and then when I ask for it, you say it’s not what you want.”

  Aidan floundered for a response. “I want… shit, I… I don’t know.” He looked away from her, shaking his head. “I want a better world than this. A world where having a wife and having a woman don’t have to be completely different things!”

  But rather than sympathising with his dilemma, Dusk instead stripped off her shirt and went to stand within his line of sight. She ran her hands down slowly over her breasts. “That’s a nice little ideology you’ve got going on there. But this is the world we currently live in.” She put her hands on her hips. “So, which one do you want tonight? A wife? Or a woman?”

  If Dusk had been concerned about herself and the other women being restricted as a result of the fight, she was quickly to be proven wrong. The following morning, a hasty conference was held between about a dozen men, and when it was finished, Aidan called a meeting at the fire circle.

  “By now, you’ll all have heard about the fight in the orchard yesterday,” he addressed the crowd, and the reminder was met with a chorus of boos. “I expect more from this tribe than that level of stupidity and selfishness,” he told them sternly, “although we’re all very grateful to everyone who helped break things up. For the next month, River, Archer and Mark will all have their rations cut off. They’re free to help themselves to the usual staples – fruits and vegetables, nuts and millet, but they will be excluded from their share of eggs, milk, meat and beer. They’ll also be required to empty and clean the toilets” – the tribe had built a series of composting toilets that let their waste rot until it was indistinguishable from dirt, and was then used as fertiliser for the orchard – “and scrub the washhouse once a week for the next month. If there’s any further misbehaviour, the punishment next time around will not be nearly as lenient. Is that perfectly clear?” he asked sharply, glaring at the three men. All three of them now wore dark purple bruises on their faces, and no doubt they had a few more on other parts of their bodies.

  He waited until he’d had a meek ‘yes’ from all three men, then climbed down from the platform. As the gathered men began to meander away, he headed over to Dusk, pulling her aside for a quiet chat. “What you said about Mei-Lien and Willow not fighting back… it’s a problem,” he said, his voice soft but serious. “I’ve asked Whisper to start training them – training all of you, in fact – but I was hoping you might be willing to run some of the training yourself. You know how to fight better than a lot of our men, and we could all learn something from your techniques.”

  Dusk stomped down hard on the shaft of pride she felt at Aidan’s acknowledgement of her skills. She’d originally learned to fight for her own pleasure, and later, honed her skills in order to survive. She didn’t need pretty words from any man to make her feel worthwhile. “I’d be happy to help,” she said, grateful that he’d taken her comments seriously. “And if any of the men want extra lessons, I can teach them, too.”

  She cast her eye over Mark, River and Archer, who were gathered together, talking quietly amongst themselves. Were they admitting their guilt and agreeing not to do it again? Or plotting some nefarious revenge for their punishment? “Is that really the best we can do?” she asked, knowing this was likely to be a sticky topic. “Cutting out the nicer bits of the food? Given the chance, I honestly believe they’d have gone all the way and raped us.” Aidan grimaced, a look that Dusk was quickly coming to recognise. “I’m not trying to start an argument,” she added hastily. “But can you honestly tell me the punishment fits the crime?”

  “It’s a tough one,” Aidan admitted. “We want to be strict enough to make an impression, but we can’t afford to do anything that would materially weaken the tribe. We can’t reduce their food too much without making them a liability in a fight. We can’t cast them out of the tribe, because then they can just go straight to the nearest tribe of slavers and come back with a small army to wreak their revenge. If they do anything like this again, we’d be looking at something like a public flogging to make the point clearer, but even then, that leaves three of our warriors injured and unable to fight for a while. We’ve all learned by now that the good of the tribe supersedes the good of the individual. But if you can figure out a way to walk that line that’s better than what we’re doing now, I’m all ears.” The last part seemed to be a genuine offer to listen to advice, rather than a sarcastic dismissal.

  However, Aidan’s assurance that there would be a more severe punishment next time around was enough for the moment. Dusk simply wanted to know that they realised how serious the issue was, despite the complications of deciding a punishment in a world that didn’t have any real laws or justice system anymore. “It’ll do for now,” she told him. “And thank you. It’s more than most people would have done for us.”

  As the day progressed, Mark, Archer and River all went out of their way to avoid the women, and the four of them took it as an attempt to avoid further conflict, rather than any kind of expression of resentment. But it seemed that that wasn’t the only social dynamic to have changed. Without any obvious discussion or direction from the tribe’s leadership, the rest of the men seemed to have reached an unspoken agreement to
ostracise the three trouble-makers. River sat down to eat lunch at a table where three other men were sitting, and each of them suddenly found a reason why they urgently needed to be somewhere else. Archer started chopping wood midway through the afternoon, and Dave, who had already started the task, picked up an armful to take to one of the cabins, and simply never came back. At dinner, the men didn’t even bother making excuses anymore. Mark and Archer sat down at a table, and everyone else there simply stood up, picked up their plates, and moved somewhere else.

  “It’ll only go on for a month,” Nicholas told Dusk quietly, as he took a seat beside her, a plate of roast vegetables in his hand. “Everyone values the cohesion of the tribe, and this could create a few ripples that we don’t particularly need. Once their punishment’s over, it’ll all go back to normal, but people here have long memories. I try to encourage them not to hold grudges, but there’s a difference between forgiving and forgetting.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  It was three days later before the tribe finally knew the result of Mei-Lien’s experiments and could decide whether the trip to Eden had been worth it. Making the ether itself was an exercise fraught with tension and potential disaster. Ether was highly flammable, which meant all the heating required for the reactions had to be done without direct exposure to fire. The temperature had to be raised to about 140 degrees Celsius, meaning they had to use an oil bath to keep the liquid at the right temperature, as water would never get that hot. They also had to complete the whole process outdoors, to prevent the possibility of fumes building up, which could spontaneously ignite if the humidity was low enough. And once the whole thing was done, they then had to figure out how to administer it to Steve and hope that an accidental overdose didn’t kill him.