His voice is calming, confident, and enters my body the way a good liquor would, warming me from the center out, sending a liquid relaxation through my limbs. My eyes seem to open themselves, springing wide when I relax.
I am pleasantly surprised by the scene before me. It looks entirely… normal. Everyone, including me, is dressed, and while their clothing is strange, it isn’t otherworldly. We are lined up—the Kapsuk, then me, then the general, and an assortment of Kerz who look wealthy and high status. In front of us are other tables, a step down, and on every banquet table there are piles and piles of food. It is such a normal-looking scene that I smile in spite of myself.
The aroma of the food reaches my nostrils, and the hunger that had gnawed at me awakens from the sleep it went into during the humiliating ceremony preceding the feast. My stomach actually growls.
The general, who I have been afraid to look at—even peripherally, even at his hands—whips his head in my direction, saying something in Kerz.
“She speaks no Kerz,” the Kapsuk says dryly.
I look at him, and he looks down at me. The table is high—my arms are slightly elevated in order to rest on it, and seated as we all are, our size difference is exaggerated. I look like a child at the grownup table, and they still look too big for it.
“He asks why you’re growling.”
And then, so briefly that I am not sure it happened, the Kapsuk flashes a barely visible, closed-lip smile at me.
I move a hand to my belly and turn—slowly, like I’m about to face off with an attack dog—to the general. I force myself to look at his face.
He’s grinning, gnawing on a huge piece of meat with a bone in it, and watching me with curiosity. What I don’t like is that his playfulness is underpinned by something sinister. It lurks beneath the surface of his skin. A tingle of fear travels up and down my spine. “It’s… just… my stomach,” I manage to say, without hiding the fear in my voice.
Beneath the table, the Kapsuk’s thigh moves slowly against mine. I feel the heat of his body through my thin robe, and a steady pulse, maybe his heart rate. It is slow, solid, methodical, and calming. I relax without having to think about it.
The general lifts his eyes from my face, pausing his gnashing of the meat, and looks at—I presume—the Kapsuk.
“She is hungry?” he asks him in English. His eyes go to me. “You are hungry?”
He seems delighted by this. Buzzing with his extraordinary and dangerous energy, the same kind on display at my parents’ fated party, he drops a hand to my stomach and violently rubs it. I freeze, gripped by the fear that he’s attacking me.
But he isn’t; he laughs and yells excitedly, “But this is what our stomach does as well. We cannot have this!” Then he starts yelling things even more loudly in Kerz, not taking his eyes off my face. Servants begin moving, all around the dining room, looking confused but springing into action. He keeps hollering, and most of the Kerz seated in the dining area below us have stopped eating and are looking at our table in amusement.
The general then says something that sounds more like a question, and the Kapsuk answers in his steady, calm voice.
I turn to look at him with questioning eyes.
“What do you eat?” he asks me bluntly. “He asks what you like to eat.”
The general yells excitedly to my right, bouncing in his chair. He takes my hand and I feel something plunked into it—greasy, warm, kind of gross. I look at it. It’s one of the huge slabs of meat he’s also chewing on.
I stare at the meat. It’s from an animal that must be avian, but it’s huge. The meat is also very red in color, which alarms me, because I have no idea if these Kerz even bother cooking their food properly. They’re rumored to eat things raw sometimes, and have a far better digestive immune system by any accounts. I stare at the bird.
This causes confusion. He starts asking the Kapsuk questions, and the Kapsuk starts answering him, and I look between them helplessly with this giant drumstick in my hands while my stomach growls again.
“Do you eat meat?” the Kapsuk fires at me. The general is still shouting orders, and servants are piling things on a huge tray that appears destined for me. On it is every kind of imaginable food group, all of it looking vaguely familiar and also very strange. It’s the kind of weird, rare, expensive food my parents would have catered at a party.
“I… I… I… do,” I say tentatively. “I just… uh… not like this…” I look at my right hand. “And I, uh, need to have it… cooked, maybe… to a different temperature. I think.”
The Kapsuk blinks at me. Then he looks over my head at the general, who has finally stopped yelling.
I remember just then that the general speaks English just fine.
“Cooked,” he repeats. Then he seeks confirmation in Kerz from the Kapsuk. After they exchange a few words he looks at me. “It is cooked. This is a very rare bird from our moon. Red meat. Very strong.” He slides hand to my belly again and smiles.
I look to the Kapsuk helplessly. “I, um, need to… set this down. On a plate? And then… maybe…” I look over at the general, who has eaten the entire huge leg of meat he had in his hand and is now reaching for another one, without taking his eyes off me, “…something like a fork? And a…” I’m about to say knife, but realize I don’t really want any knives around here.
The general chews more and more slowly, looking like he’s trying to understand something really, really amazing that I’ve said.
Then he starts laughing. He slams his meat on the table just as the servants approach with a huge platter. He screams at them in Kerz and they leave the platter in front of me—it’s enormous, with about sixty pounds of food on it, spilling off the sides, all of the fruits and vegetables mixed in with the various kinds of meat. My stomach growls again, and I’m about to shrug and just start grabbing it like these barbarians, when the general yells something that makes everyone on the floor laugh and look at me in amazement.
The general pulls out a knife—a dagger, really, about eight inches long, glinting in the lights, very sharp with an elaborately decorated handle. I go rigid and do my best not to freak out and jump into the Kapsuk’s lap, as the general laughs maniacally and raises the knife high in the air, only to bring it down in a lightning-quick motion.
