Page 17 of Taken to Lemora
“Oh yeffa, I think I see a little scratch there.” Reyna laughs. The others laugh, too.
“I’ve always wanted to throw something at Raingar’s head,” Tana. I shake my fist at her. At all of them.
“You all better not or else I’ll run you through!” I shout, and then I glance at Essmira in horror. “I mean…not you. You can throw whatever you like at me. I mean…not anything. Ideally, not anything sharp. But I guess, if you want…”
She smiles and the bridge between my brain and my mouth collapses. “I’m so sorry, Raingar. I shouldn’t have. I was…overcome. It won’t ever happen again.”
“I mean…oh…okay,” I mutter lamely.
Reyna, Bebette and Tana murmur parting words to Essmira and Merquin and to me, though I wave them off grumpily. They take the short stairs down and head off down the right path, toward the dome in the distance where the pad pads honk and heehaw and squawk all lunar long.
Essmira is still standing where she was looking up at me, Merquin standing just behind her. I open my mouth, wishing I had something to say.Woo her. I’m supposed to woo her. How does one go about wooing a mate when this one didn’t even want a mate in the first place? How does one go about wooing said mate when that mate happens to be the loveliest creature in the universe?
“Essmira?” Merquin says from a few paces back. She waits for Essmira to follow her to the stables, but Essmira is only looking at me with a crease between her eyes and her bottom lip stuck between her teeth. I desire to free it. Deeply.
Essmira flinches and then a sort of hesitant resolve floods her features as she takes that first step towards me and then the next. The moss and soil squish quietly beneath her bare feet and I can’t help but stare at her toes. There are five of them where I only have three thick digits. Digits that wouldn’t break if a rock fell on them, which has happened many times. If so much as a pebble landed on her little toes, it’d break all of them.And Merquin is taking her away from me.Pagh!
Hysteria makes the world hazy. Is the structure of Merquin’s keep even safe? What if she gets hurt? What if she has bad dreams? What if Egama come for her in the lunar when Merquin isn’t paying attention?
I’m about to shout at Merquin and beg her to reconsider giving Essmira to me, at least for this first lunar, so I can stay awake and stare at her all lunar long and ward away any manner of foul thing out to harm her, but Essmira kills that impulse when she takes another step towards me, and then another.
Is she trying to get back onto the ship? Does she regret coming with us so far? I flinch towards the open ramp of the kintarr ship, prepared to block her exit, but Essmira isn’t walking towards the ship. She’s coming towardsme, of all the despicable things for her to do on this fine planet.
Sweat makes my forehead tingle while a soothing balm runs from the tip of my horns down to the base the moment Essmira touches me.
She touches my chest and my entire being is hinged on the sensation.Ohr. She’s perfect. Perfecter than perfect. And I’m just a beast carved from stone with horns. This will never work. I will never be able to woo her. I’ll…I choke.
She slides her arms around my waist, making me want to shred the indigo garment she’s wrapped in so I can feel her, skin-to-skin. My fingers twitch. She buries her face in my chest, seemingly unconcerned with the Egama blood or the brittle texture, and I stand there with my arms out staring down at the top of her head like a lunatic. I don’t remember the last time someone tried to touch me, but I do remember that I hated it. But this? Being touched by Essmira? I don’t hate this. Nob, I don’t hate this at all.
My heart is straining, everything in me pulling towards her. Finally, my hands drop to her shoulders and just lie there, shivering and twitching with the desire to do more, to hold more, to touch more. Ineed…
“Thank you,” she says, pulling back before I can even decide how to proceed.
My mouth is totally dry. All I can do is grunt.
Her smile wavers and then she gets all sheepish in a way I don’t like. “I’m sorry also for throwing the um…the statue at you. Truly, I am.”
I grunt again. I should ask her if I can call on her sometime. Or show her my village. I should boast about it, tell her it’s much bigger than Merquin’s, even if that isn’t true. I should tell her about Walrey honey and that she sounds like it and smells like silk even though neither of those things can be real, they’re more of afeeling. I should tell her that she smells like a feeling. A feeling that, before this moment, was home to me. But now that’s changed, because when she steps back, it feels like she’s taking that home with her, too, and I don’t like it.Home is a place, not another creature.
“Anyway, that was all. Thank you, Raingar. For everything.” She walks away from me under Merquin’s protection and I stand there agape for another three millennia, long enough for time to unwind itself around me and become another beast altogether, this one a snake. It feels suffocating.
And as I stomp off, electing to walk home instead of taking one of those feral beasts most villagers use for transportation, I realize what the worst part of this whole thing is.
Now, when I say I hate everything, it will no longer be true.
4
Raingar
“Ouh.” I make the sound again, louder this time because no one is paying me a lick of attention. My halls are full, but the foul creatures who occupy so much of my space are all busy working. “Ouhhhhhhhhh.”
I’m lying on the stone floor in the center of the great hall, my arms and legs spread out to the sides as I stare up at the stone ceiling, wishing that a comet would fall through the overhead skylight and end my suffering. The comet would have to be very small though, because I wouldn’t want it to take out any of the ceiling and hurt anybody else. Or rebuild my keep. It’s a nice hall. A good home. And right now, it’s overflowing with too many beings of all kinds and none of them are the one I want to see.
“OUUHHHHHHHH!”
Gorman’s face appears above mine, hanging there all round like a moon. Gorman is Hypha and has bright orange skin, fins sticking out of either side of his head and large black eyes that take up most of his face. His nose is two slits and his mouth is a small thing full of short, square teeth. He doesn’t smile — he rarely lets me get away with my tantrums — but says in a flat voice, “Can I help you, Raingar?”
“Ouhhhhh…”
