“Then we’ll hide,” I said plainly. “We’ll hide outside the city, and—”
But Waelden shook his head. “All they will need to do is use a heat scanner during the Winternight. It’s as easy as that.”
Lorelei’s face was full of fear, and I found her absently reaching a hand out toward me as though I myself could hold onto her and keep her safe. “There must be something we can do,” I protested. “There must be some way to protect her.”
Waelden glanced at his own wife who seemed about as interested in the proceedings as she was in the packed dirt upon which she was sitting, and he heaved a sigh that deflated his entire body. “Well, there is one thing we could do.”
“What is it?” I asked, and Lore leaned forward as we both waited with baited breath.
“You could marry her.” Lore let out one abrupt little laugh, and I just sort of blinked so that my eyes might clear.
“Pardon?” I asked, hoping I had somehow misheard him.
“She is the property of the Quarter Moon Slavers. If they were to come planetside this very moment, they would see you as a thief of that property. But if you were to marry her—”
“Then I become his property?” Lorelei demanded, indignant.
“More or less,” Waelden confirmed. “So I suppose the question you must ask yourself is, to whom do you wish to belong?”
“I belong to myself, and I will thank you to remember that,” Lorelei asserted, snatching the Panyan liquor away from Waelden to drink deeply of it herself.
“My lady,” Waelden asserted, “I did not say this was a just thing. Merely that it might be the only way to protect you from their reaches so that you might be free long enough to rescue your friends. I am not even certain that it would work, truth be told, unless we could somehow prove to them that you were married prior to their having detained you in the first place.”
“And it doesn’t have to be me,” I said quickly, in order to reassure her that I was not doing something preposterous, like trapping her into a union. “It could be any member of the Qet. Well, any unmarried member of the Qet.”
“And who better than Calder?” Waelden asked, slapping me on the shoulder. I sat there in stunned silence and relieved Lorelei of the liquor bottle, even as Waelden rose to his feet. “We will leave you two to discuss your options, for the Winternight grows cold and it is time that we turn in.” Ever the gentleman, Waelden held his hand out to Vanixa, who spurned his assistance and rose to her feet of her own volition. Waelden muttered something under his breath as she passed quickly in front of him to disappear into their tent. “We shall travel with you back to Larandi tomorrow,” he said. “Until then, I bid you good evening.”
Neither Lorelei nor I said anything as we stood and headed into the opposite tent, but I still had that liquor skin in my hands, and I drank from it. Oh, did I drink from it.
“Calder,” Lorelei began, but I held up a hand to silence her.
“There is no sense in making any decisions now,” I said. “We’ll sleep, yes? And discuss it further with clear minds in the daylight.”
She gave a sharp nod of her head in agreement before we headed into the tent.
CHAPTER SEVEN: LORELEI VAUSS
Married? To Calder? Or to anyone for that matter seemed completely absurd. What kind of backwards, antiquated bullshit had I stumbled into? I was no one’s property, not a slaver’s or a husband’s. My head swam with distress and Panyan liquor as I sat myself down on the furs that Calder laid out for us inside of what I was certain was Vanixa’s tent. There were pastel drawings all over it’s insides, and little trinkets set up around the perimeter. It was cozy and warm, and quite beautiful for a tent. But what was so wrong with marriage to a Qeteshi that necessitated that a man and wife have separate sleeping domiciles?
Between the two of us, Calder and I finished off the liquor, and we lay side by side on the bed of furs, staring at the dancing shadows on the roof of the tent.
“Maybe,” I murmured at length, certain that Calder was still just as awake as I was, “maybe it would not have to be like a real marriage. Maybe it could just be one of those paper marriages, yes?”
“Paper marriage?”
“How some people just get married for the benefits?”
“Praytell, what are the benefits of marriage?” I turned my head to glare at him and he was grinning. So I grinned back. We laughed quietly together, and I shook my head, trying to clear it. “They will want proof of consummation,” he went on. “That is a traditional part of our culture, and has been for hundreds of years.”
“What kind of proof?”
“For me, or in general?” I blinked, propping myself up on my hand to look at him.
“Why would it be different for you than for everyone else?” Calder heaved a sigh and sat upright in the tent, bending his knees so that he could drape his arms over them. The Panyan liquor made him sway ever so slightly from side to side.
“I am a prince.” He said it so plainly that I couldn’t help but laugh. His expression, however, indicated that he wasn’t joking.
“Holy fuck, you’re serious,” I said in English. He furrowed his brow with a lack of understanding. “You are actually a prince?” I said in my formal Qeteshi.
“I am the bastard son of our late leader, yes,” he confirmed. “Her formal marriage yielded no heirs, and I was the issue of her affair with one of her advisors, Orvald Fev’rosk.”
“That is why everyone wanted you to lead them after she died,” I mused quietly, and he gave a nod of his head in response. “But you’re so old,” I asserted, without meaning to. It wasn’t that he was old, just older than you would think of when you thought of a newly ascended prince.
To this, he laughed a huge, full-bodied laugh, and said, “Yes. I am old.” There was a glint in the fine blue of his eye, and he curled one corner of his mouth in a rougish grin. “But not so old that I could not do my husbandly duty.”
It was my turn to laugh, because this was all so absurd. “So, you mean to tell me,” I said when my laughter began to die down, “that my only hope of getting out of this entire mess is if I marry you, and become a Qeteshi princess?”
He gave a wry chuckle. “Basically, yes.”
I leaned my forehead against his arm and gave a little groan. “I do not know what to do,” I said in Qeteshi. Then, in English, “I’m fucked.”
“What is this word you keep using?” he asked, and then he tried out our curse on his unwieldy tongue. “Fuck.”
I laughed again, clutching my sides with the force of it. It was so bizarre, to hear this proud Qeteshi man use a human curse word. “Fuck,” he said again, because he saw that it was making me laugh. “What is ‘fuck’?”
“It is a swear word,” I explained, “a cuss word. It means...um…” I leaned my head gently to the side and looked at him in the dancing firelight. “It is a vulgar term for what two people do when they…”
“Mate?”
“Precisely.”
“Ah.” He was grinning as he looked back at me, and I studied his features: the strong line of his jaw, the braids in his cloud-white hair, the sparkling blue of his eyes. He was handsome, even by human standards. Even including the horns protruding from his forehead, and the prominent tribal markings running up and down the left side of his body. I felt a little pulse between my thighs, and tried to recall the last time I had experienced this type of raw wanting. I gave a quick shake of my head. It must be the liquor.
“You have told me so little of yourself,” he gently intoned, turning his gaze back toward the firelight at the mouth of the tent. “Tell me where you come from, my lady Lorelei.”
He was changing the subject. I wanted to talk more about fuck.
“Well,” I began, shifting to sit cross-legged at his side, “I was born aboard the Atria, and I grew up there. This is the most time I have ever spent on a planet in my entire life.” I proffered a thin-lipped smile then, and thoug
ht how royally I had messed this entire thing up. I’d just wanted to see Earth, and here I was, hundreds of thousands of light years away from my destination, on a primitive planet, with slavers on the hunt for me. I’d left a note for my parents, so they wouldn’t start to worry about me for a month, and I was on my own.
No. I wasn’t on my own. Calder was with me.
“My parents work for the Echelon, and I studied languages so that I might follow in their footsteps, but so far…” I shrugged. “I feel worlds away from what I set out to do, who I set out to be.”
“It seems quite fortuitous, given the circumstances,” he said. “What you chose to study, I mean.”
I smirked. “Yes,” I agreed. “It certainly does.”
A long silence lapsed between us, but it wasn’t strange or awkward as some of the previous silences had been. It was comfortable, companionable, and after a deep breath, Calder said, “My lady, I want you to know that I am willing to help you.”
“Thank you, Calder.”
“Even if it means that it is only a…how did you say…a paper marriage? Even if it is only make believe, just for the time while you are here and trying to get back to your people and rescue your friends, I am at your service.”
I swallowed hard as I stared at him in the firelight, and my heart was nail hammered into the hard wood of my chest.
“Why do you want to help me?” I asked, my voice small even in the electric air between us.
“I do not know,” came his gruff reply. “You are loud and pig-headed and stubborn and entitled and I had never thought that I would return to the city of my birth, nor that I would take a wife, even a temporary pretend one. And yet here I am.”
“Well, you are abrasive and ornery and demanding and inflexible,” I shot back. But he smiled at me, and I softened. “And I am terribly grateful.”
***
We laid our heads down upon the furs when they were still fuzzy with drink, and I scooted in close to Calder so our body heat might warm each other. He slung an arm around me and we slept that way, my back pressed to his chest, his hand cupping my breast. We slept like we’d always slept that way, all tangled up together, and when the dawn crept in through the canvas of the tent, I thought perhaps the daylight would break the spell. But it didn’t.
Instead, he lifted himself up onto one arm and peered down at me, drawing his hand away from my breast to brush a few errant strands of night black hair out of my eyes. I gazed up at him and saw how his eyes seemed to shine with their own source of light: they were almost incandescent in the dim glow of morning.
He was silent and self-assured as he got up on his knees in front of me and tugged the pants he’d made me over the curve of my hips, down past my knees, and off completely. And I let him.
I sat up and tugged the tunic off over my head, baring myself to him completely, and laid back down again, my knees winging out to the side so that the flower of my sex bloomed fully in front of him.
My breath quickened as I watched him reach a tentative hand out to trail down the line of my neck, and over the slope of my breast until he reached my nipple. He rolled it between his thumb and index finger before his hand continued on its journey south: across the plane of my belly, over the jetty of my hipbone, past my pubic mound, and — finally, blessedly — between my nether lips. His fingertip brushed the engorged kernel of my clitoris and sent a shudder down my spine. Then he slid a finger deep inside me, slipping inside easily given the force of my desire. He bent down as he probed me with his thick fingers and took my nipple between his lips, suckling it gently. I arched my back to meet him, groaning madly at his ministrations.
I wanted him desperately, wanted to feel him filling me up, but just as I was about to express that desire, Waelden called our names from just outside the tent.
“Calder?” he said, and Calder froze, his fingers still inside me. “Lorelei? It is time to greet the day.” Calder bore a chagrined expression as he withdrew his hand.
“My apologies, my lady,” he whispered to me, even as he sucked my juices off of his fingers. “Perhaps I should not have so rudely handled you.”
“No, please,” I said, tugging the pants up again. “Handle me rudely.”
Calder chuckled quietly under his breath, and waited until I had my tunic on before he helped me to standing. We emerged from the tent to find Waelden and Vanixa ready with their packs.
“No time to break our fast if we intended to make it to Larandi by nightfall,” Waelden said, and headed off with Vanixa close on his heels. We gathered our things and quickened our pace to catch up.
And it was a bloody godawful trek, if you want to know the truth of it. At least when it was just Calder and myself, we could walk in companionable silence without everything feeling strange and slightly strained. But there was something about Vanixa that put me off, and I wasn’t sure what it was.
Perhaps it was the way she cast sidelong glances my way when she thought I wasn’t looking. Or how she rolled her pretty brown eyes whenever her husband dared to open his mouth. Maybe it was the haughty, holier-than-thou air with which she purported herself, or the fact that she was just plain rude to me whenever I tried to draw her out of herself. But whatever it was, she put me in a sour mood. And Waelden as well, though I imagined most of his life was spent in the sour mood that his wife evoked.
“So, Vanixa,” I tried again, one final time, “did you grow up on Europa, or—”
“I don’t wish to speak with you,” she snapped, “in a human tongue, a Europax tongue, and certainly not in the vile Qeteshi that you seem to speak so easily.”
I pursed my lips, startled by how blatantly she displayed her distaste. “You know, it’s funny,” I remarked as we trudged along a few paces behind the men. “I couldn’t help but notice that there were two tents when Calder and I arrived. Why don’t you and your husband sleep together? Or can’t he get it up for such an uptight bitch?” I offered my sweetest saccharine smile before I trotted to catch up with the men. Maybe, if we were all very lucky indeed, Vanixa would fall into a ravine.
We fell into a rhythm, steady and challenging but not too terribly difficult, and I was able to finally take in the scenery of the lush and exquisite world around me. We continued alongside a crystal clear and rapidly flowing river, silver fish glistening every so often at its surface. The grass easily came to my hips for most of the walk, but there were places where trails emerged and the walking was easier. There were other places still where the height of the grass towered over me. Places where it was obvious few people had ever traipsed.
Puffy white clouds like cotton balls hung low in the azure blue sky. Hot, but a breeze came down from the mountains that looked like torn purple construction paper in the far distance. I decided that I liked being on a planet. I liked the dirt between my toes, and the air that moved through my hair. I liked the real feeling of sunlight on my skin, and the smell of the plant life all around me. Living aboard the Atria, they had done their best to replicate many of these sensations. There was a greenhouse you could walk through to smell living plant life. There were sun beds where you could go to take in some artificial UV light. There were pictures as large as the picture windows that could be projected onto the glass to give the impression of looking out at a natural landscape, but I only just now realized none of them got it quite right.
Even the cold was different. Living aboard a spaceship meant you spent a lot of time a little bit cold. But I realized now that it might have been more of an existential thing than an actual, bone-chilling cold. Gazing out a window at the vast blackness of space could send a shiver through me, but it didn’t feel the same as seeing my breath hang in the air in front of me, as it had during the Winternights on Qetesh.
I was relatively happy to be left to my thoughts as we marched, thoughts that inevitably turned to the women whose lives depended on my action. And here I was, getting cozy with some alien. I shook my head, frowning, and repeated their nam
es to myself: Teldara Kinesse.Tierney Mafaren. Ciara Zehr. Sara Yve. They could not wait for me to decide how I felt about Calder Fev’rosk; they needed me now. And in order to save them, I had to send out a distress call to whomever was closest to us in the galaxy. That would risk bringing the slave ship to us first, and the only protection I would have against the Qeteshi of Larandi from turning me over to my enemies would be if I were married. And so, I would marry.
What was marriage, anyway? It was never really something I spent too much time thinking about. My parents had modeled a good, long-lasting and solid relationship to me, and I figured that, when the time was right, I would find someone like my father and settle down with him somewhere. And then we’d have one baby, and then I would go back to work, and that would be that. I was never one of those children who planned their big, fancy weddings, and I was never particularly enamored of princes doing all the rescuing, so what did it matter if I were to become a wife for more pragmatic reasons?
Thus, I settled the matter in my mind: we would reach Larandi, and we would be wed. God. What would my mother say? What would my father do? I would have a hell of a lot of explaining to do when I finally saw them again. If I were very lucky indeed, they might forgive me some time this millennium for being such a royal screw up.
Royal. That’s kind of funny. Once I married Calder, once he ascended to take the leadership role his people wanted from him, I’d be a princess. Or a Queen. Regardless, I’d be a royal. Me. A plain human girl who had gotten in way over her head.
CHAPTER EIGHT: CALDER FEV’ROSK
My heart leapt up into my throat when I saw the Spire glinting in the distance. “There she is,” Waelden said, with a hint more nostalgia than I thought was strictly necessary, given the comparably short time he’d been away.
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