I desperately didn’t want to acknowledge that one of them was making my sacred marks burn like I’d pressed them against hot metal.
“No,” I managed to growl. “Get them out. Carefully. They’re injured.”
My tracking party moved forward, but with hesitation now. They’d never encountered living beings in any of the debris that occasionally fell from the sky. They were afraid, and if I was honest with myself, so was I.
Vax pulled himself up to the hatch, peering inside with the wariness of someone expecting a trap. He said something in our tongue, a simple greeting, and the male said something back. The words were shaped wrong, the sounds angled differently, but there was something familiar. I caught a few words, uttered so strangely. The male said something abouthelp. I peered through the opening to see the male pointing to the sky. He held up his hands, palm out and I understood two words:no harm.
“They don’t speak our language,” one of the scouts said nervously. “How do we know they’re not hostile?”
“They’re injured and freezing,” I snapped. “That’s what we know. Get them out before they die of cold and we learn nothing.”
Vax reached in and grasped the small female under the arms, lifting her out of the pod despite her obvious attempts to resist. She said something sharp and angry, trying to squirm free, but she was too weak. He set her on her feet in the snow and she immediately tried to go back to the pod, stumbling and nearly falling.
I caught her without thinking, my hands closing around her upper arms to steady her.
The world tilted.
Heat. Connection. Something ancient and fundamental that bypassed logic and slammed straight into my soul. The marks on my chest blazed hot enough that if I were not wearing a thick parka, the glow would be unmistakable. I hid my reaction. If it frightened me, it would terrify everyone else in my party, and these newcomers, too.
The small female jerked in my grip, her eyes going impossibly wider. Her gaze locked on my face, and she said something that sounded like a question. The words were incomprehensible.
“Be still,” I muttered, knowing she couldn’t understand but needing to say it anyway.
She said something else, her voice sharp despite her obvious weakness. Then her legs gave out entirely. I caught her, supporting her weight, and felt that connection surge stronger.
Behind me, I heard Zelana make a strangled sound. “Rezor, we must get these weak beings back to the stronghold. They bleed, and the cold affects them more than us.”
“I can see that,” I said through gritted teeth, even as I adjusted my grip to keep the female from collapsing entirely. She was shivering violently now, the cold getting to her faster than it should. Her skin was too thin, I realized. No thick, protective slabs of tough hide. No way to regulate temperature the way we could. They’d freeze to death quickly up here.
Vax had extracted the other two survivors. The large male was supporting the injured female, both of them watching us with expressions that mixed confusion and concern. They knew they had no choice but to trust us, and it was obvious that they were not pleased about that.
The male said something, pointing at his companion. The word was garbled, wrong, but I caught the shape of it, turned it over in my mind, compared it to old words from the ancient texts Zelana made us all learn.
“This female is injured,” I said slowly, pointing at the older female. The syllables felt strange on my tongue, but not entirely foreign. “Broken. Arm broken.”
The male’s eyes widened. He said something quick and emphatic, gesturing between himself and the females. More sounds that were almost words, almost familiar.
Zelana moved closer, her scholar’s mind already working. “It’s like the old tongue, but corrupted. Changed.” She addressed the male directly, speaking slowly and carefully in a dialect I’d only heard her use when reading ancient texts. “You. Speak. Understand?”
The male’s skin patterns shifted, brightening slightly. Heresponded in that same careful way, his words still wrong but less so. Close enough that I caught the meaning.
Sky ship. Storm. Crash. Help needed.
“They’re speaking Old D’tran,” Zelana said, wonder in her voice. “Or something descended from it. We can communicate with them, given time and patience.”
“Later,” Vax said flatly. “They’ll be dead from exposure if we don’t move now. Whatever they are, wherever they came from, we need to get them to the valley.”
He was right, much as I hated the complications this would bring. I looked at the two color-shifting figures standing in the snow, at the wreckage of their pod smoking against the mountainside, at the storms raging beyond the peaks. I looked at the small female in my arms, who was still glaring at me with those earth-brown eyes despite her obvious fear and weakness, and felt my marks pulse with heat again.
The large male said something else, slower this time, and I caught more of it. He was pointing. Names, I thought. He was giving us names. Baleck. Mierva. And the small one…
“Cleo,” I repeated, the syllables awkward. The small female’s eyes snapped to mine, and she nodded once, quick and sharp.
“We need to bind them,” Vax said quietly. “Lord Rezor, we don’t know what they are or what they want. We can’t bring unknown threats into the valley without precautions.”
Every instinct I had rebelled against the idea of binding the female whose weight I still supported, whose presence made my marks burn with impossible heat. But Vax was right. I was responsible for more than my own inexplicablereaction to a sky creature. I was responsible for every person in my clan who trusted me to keep them safe.
“Bind them,” I ordered, hating the words. “Notthe one with the broken arm. This small one… Cleo… She’s too cold already. Carry her if she cannot keep up.”
