I fold my fingers together and press them to my lips. “This is very stupid,” I tell him.
Zethki slams his fist down on the table so hard that it cracks the stone. It’s not the first time he has done this.
He cackles. “Yes!” he screams. “Stupid! Is that not what I said, Minuak Hergotz? That this is the stupidest, the most… stupid thing? …that anyone has ever done? Idiots!” Zethki laughs, and he seems to momentarily enjoy himself.
And then he turns dark again. “Stupid,” he says. “But that is what really… gets me,krezatu.” He is speaking to me now, clutching his heart. Hiskrythis so yellow-gold now he might as well be mating. His blood is up, and when his blood is up, he’s incredibly dangerous. He comes up with incredibly dangerous—and stupid—ideas. I brace myself.
He leans toward me. “It’s so stupid, yes? Lead. Lead from a moon full of osmium. It’s an insult, isn’t it? It insults my intelligence. Or it says…” he sucks in his breath, baring his teeth. “It says, ‘Zethki Kirigok, I’m unafraid to send you lead.’”
Zethki stands up and turns to the large windows overlooking the mountains. “These fucking pigs, these empty-headed pieces of shit,” he seethes.
Then he turns, smiling. “Well,” he says cheerfully, which is a very, very dangerous sign in Zethki indeed. “This means that we will have to implement Clause X of our contract.”
Clause X, of course, doesn’t exist. It’s Zethki’s expression for killing people who screw him over, indiscriminately and without remorse. For instances that he takes this particular type of offense to, it probably means someone will be tortured.
I don’t especially care about that, because the Borgeen are violent and knew what they were doing. But I do care about what this means for—
“We are going to Mraka,” Zethki says gleefully. “But first, I’m going to marry my little bride, and we are going to breed her.” He pauses, as though he’s reconsidering. “I need the bonds between our families to be strong,” he adds.
He is looking at me.
My heart is sinking through my chest, to my feet.
But I nod.
There is no excuse that Zethki will accept now. Nothing that can be done to stop what has been put into motion. It’s tradition, it’s his right, and I have run out of excuses for keeping Anya Mann in training, and all to myself.
The meeting ofkapsukegoes on, but I hear nothing. When it’s over, I return to the practice arena, and destroy dummies by the dozen.
But my blood doesn’t recede, it only boils more.
CHAPTER15
Anya
I pick through my food, sniffing it. It’s a pointless exercise: this is all food from another planet, and I wouldn’t know the difference between ‘normal’ and ‘drugged,’ even supposing that whatever they are putting in my food or drink has a smell.
I’m sure I’m being drugged, but I can’t figure out what it is, or what the purpose of it is; I just wake up with memory problems sometimes. Maybe it’s all in my mind, maybe it’s because I’m deliberately forgetting something terrible, or because all the days have blended together. I can’t tell, I don’t know.
And Rysethk, this quietly dangerous Kerz who is my trainer, will not answer my question. Trasmea says I’m being ridiculous, and she offers to eat bites of my food and sip my drinks to prove her point. I let her do it, and she arrives each day pointing at her head and smiling. “All there,” she tells me.
Well, I think. No point starving. When I like something, I tell Trasmea, and then it’s delivered to me in huge piles. This moon is full of exotic fruits that defy description, and someone is a very good baker, so I’m enjoying something that seems like a croissant, only, if you can imagine, more intensely flaky and buttery than even that.
It’s a long way from the crappy algae-based stores of food produced back at my research base, which got supplemented only occasionally by food from other planets that arrived on transport ships. There’s no denying that this is a better deal, culinarily speaking.
He arrives, as always, serious and imposing, stepping through the door to my beautiful room (also, admittedly, a great step up from my dorm room back on Isotek-9, but I try to disparage it as much as I can to keep up my resolve. It’s too big, the ceilings too high, the bathroom too gaudy… I try to believe these things, but it’s difficult).
His features are stoic, unreadable, as always. I can’t explain my feelings when I see him, or the dreams that haunt me at night. My heart soars, flutters, and crashes—not the feelings of a silly adolescent crush, like at first. Not feelings like those I have had for lovers in the past—and he isn’t a lover, anyway. Stronger feelings. In my dreams, which seem almost real, we make love, and I awaken in the morning with the leftover impressions I sometimes get from a dream. It colors how I feel about him even if I know it’s just a dream.
Today, he seems different. I can’t say why. He is serious, distant, and imposing—but this is how he always is.
I’m ready, dressed in my robe, showing him in my compliance the defiance I want him to understand that I still have. He looks me up and down, and my heart leaps around in my chest. Why? It’s maddening. I’m going mad. In my dreams, he’s like a lover to me; not gentle, but forceful, and yet I’m giving myself to him willingly. When I think about him, arousal snakes through my body and I can think of nothing more that I want than to submit to him.
But submitting to Rysethk is not something I can do, because I must resist. I don’t know why I insist upon it, or what makes me fight the inevitable; if I’m deemed untrainable, if I don’t marry Zethki, it’s not as if they are going to turn me loose. But resisting seems to buy me time, more time with Rysethk, and thatfeelslike what I want.
“Good morning,” I say cheerfully. I don’t know what my game plan is with doing that. Resistance, I guess. It seems to unnerve him more and more each day. His features stay the same, but something ripples through him, something I swear I can feel.
He gestures to the corridor, same as always, and we begin our long walk to the dungeon-like training room. The implement he’s using to train me for anal sex—a central component of submission to Kerz males, I gather, and one that I find arousing, to my own surprise—has been adjusted slowly, each day, and I’m certain I can now accommodate a Kerz male. I think of this often, imagining it, and I’m ashamed that I imagine it with pleasure.
