Page 51 of Taken to Nobu
She blinks up at me and I know this time her expression is one of shock. “I’m not training anymore?”
“You are. You will do this in the latter half of the solar. All warriors have multiple positions. We cannot simply play with swords while the rest of the tribe does all of the work. I have been too lenient with you thus far.”
She gapes. “Are you calling melazy?” She lands a punch playfully on my chest.
“Perhaps I am. How will you retaliate?”
She sits up quickly and throws a leg over my chest only to wince and clutch her thigh. Dramatically — near comically — she lilts to the side, collapsing onto a pile of pillows. “Cramp!” She shouts.
I cannot contain laughing sounds as I come to cover her. “If you think I will not rut you simply because of a cramp, then you are wrong. You have much more work to do, my Xhea.”
I impale her with my length without warning and she moans deeply from the back of her throat. Her eyes roll and she struggles to meet my gaze as I pound into her. “More work,” she moans, “You’re going to be the death of me…”
“Nox.” I capture her lips with my own and between pants and kisses, grunt, “But I will kill for you.”
Forty-eight solars later…
17
Kiki
Tre’Hurr laughs uproariously and I can only assume it’s because of my expression. “What is this?” Bile pitches in my stomach and climbs threateningly up my throat as I maneuver my paintbrush up and down the stretch of hide in front of me.
Other females stand in even intervals to my left and right in the huge screa chamber. One of the biggest in-built caves I’ve seen in the village so far, it’s second only to the Okkari’s training pitch, though this one is broken down into many antechambers — so many, I haven’t even explored them all.
In this cavern are a little more than thirty of us working, but some filter in and out. All are busy with different hides, carrying them from one antechamber to another for skinning, tanning, stretching and airing.
For the past however many solars, I’ve been helping carry newly skinned pelts from one place to another — all of them white Edena hides — and stretch them across wooden frames of varying sizes. Thinking back to all the manual labor I did on the colony, I thought this would be a breeze, completely underestimating how hard the work would be. Still, I find myself smiling as I notice a few faces shining in my and Tre’Hurr’s direction. They’re smiling too.
“Don’t act so surprised. This is dolloram, what we’ve been using to cure the hides.”
“But it’s never smelled so bad before — I mean, it’s smelled bad, but this is a whole other level. Like a bowl of rotten fruit was beaten to death with a fish.”
“Colorful, I’ll grant you that, but you should know better than anyone what this is.”
I stand back from it for a moment, head cocked to the side. Dread fills my belly. “Is this the hevarr?”
“It is.”
“It reeks.”
She laughs. “That it does. It’s an incredibly dense piece of material. We thought for your first time, it would be easier to start you with Edena.”
“And now what — I’m one of the team?” I smirk.
She looks at me, pausing mid-stroke and smiles up at me guilelessly, “Hexa.” She resumes working without saying anything else. As if that single word didn’t mean something special to me. As if it were totally obvious. “You have improved considerably over the past solars. You are almost as adept at this as nearly matured kits.”
“Wow,” I say, elongating the word, “You are throwing major shade right now.”
“Throwing shade?” She tuts under her breath in a way that’s become familiar over these past solars working alongside her in this muggy cave. “That is not possible. Another one of your human expressions, I must assume.”
“Indeed.” I laugh lightly under my breath and pick back up my brush, moving it over the horrifying-smelling hide in even strokes, just as Hurr and Tre’Hurr taught me. “We did something similar on the human colony, but we didn’t have dolloram, or any particularly effective tanning solutions for that matter.”
“What did you use then?”
I shrug. “We mostly just mixed sand with acolic acid and did the process once instead of soaking the hides after and applying salt. We didn’t have enough salt to spare. Or acolic acid. In fact, the only thing we can spare is sand. If y’all ever need any, you know where to go.”
She smiles at me slightly, her laughter ceasing as she turns back to the skin with her brush. She dips the frazzled hairy brush tip into the thick, grey goop and applies a layer onto the pale grey underside of the pelt. “Your colony will not have these worries again. I am sure.”
