It all comes suddenly rushing back to me where we are and who we’re surrounded by. Little Tyll is standing there with wide, frightened eyes, watching his dad being assaulted by a much larger male. And, as much as I wanted Zuul to be brought down a peg or two, this isn’t the way to do it.
“Zyntarr!” I say to him, putting my hands on him - on his shoulder, on his bicep, brushing down his side, trying to calm him as best I can. “He didn’t mean any harm, he-” Zyntarr’s head whips my way, that beautiful blue eye glaring at me. “Zyntarr,” I try again, my voice lower as I glance at the male currently trying to claw his way out of Zyn’s iron grasp, “the children are watching.”
“Good, then they shall see what happens when a male disrespects-” he grits out the words but halts when his uncovered eye makes a sweep of the little boys watching him, his gaze landing on one little boy in particular - the little boy whose watching him almost strangle the life out of his father.
He drops Zuul. The male manages to stagger and not fall, though he’s rubbing at his own throat and looking at Zyntarr like he’d lost his damn mind. Maybe he has, but it doesn’t stop him from leaning in and hissing, “what makes you so sure, of all of our brothers, you will be blessed with a mate?”
Zuul’s brows knit together and with the hand not currently massaging his neck, he gestures up and down his body like thatis any kind of response - like it should just be evident by looking at him that he deserves a female of his own. My nose scrunches at the gesture. Confidence is attractive. Arrogance is not.
But when I tear my eyes away from the male to look up at Zyntarr, he seems to have deflated somehow. His big frame is still rising and falling from his steady breaths -steady, but heavy from the short burst of adrenaline and anger. And… well, he’s surveying the other male like he’s doing so for the very first time and I can’t quite tell what it is he sees.
Zyntarr maps out Zuul’s frame before glancing around again and grunting before he turns to me. “Come, you must be hungry, let me feed you,” he says, his jaw tight and his tone off.
He can’t seem to look me in the eye.
We join the small group of Carers and Elders, all standing around three different cookfires. Two with pots of some kind of vegetable stew, and one with one of those frizikki animals on a spit, slowly being turned over the flames. Zyntarr grabs a dish made from fired clay from the mudbank and starts picking at the fruits, vegetables and cured meats. Next, he grabs a small pot and fills it with some of the stew.
He doesn’t say a single word, instead opting to herd me in the direction of his hut with a single outstretched wing behind my back once he’s ready for us to return there. And, granted, Zyntarr isn’t a man of many words, but I can’t quite tell what the energy vibrating off of himmeans.
I’m quiet as I allow him to walk us back to the hut. I’m quiet when he urges me to sit on the nest. I’m quiet when he opens the pouch he keeps slung low around his hips and adds two pinches of the spices inside.
But then I can’t stand it any longer. “What was that all about?” I finally ask.
Zyntarr’s big hand pauses mid-pinch, his thick fingers still digging into the contents ofa different pot of spice from hisstores. “It is the spice you likened to your… sim-ma-mom. You like it on fruit.”
My brows furrow, and it takes me a moment to realize what he’s talking about - the sweet spice blend he made especially for me because when I tried it, I said it tastes kind of similar to cinnamon sugar. “No,” I say, shaking my head. “Not the spices, or the food. What was all that about with Zuul back there?”
Zyntarr averts the gaze of his one good eye and grunts as he continues to sprinkle the fruit with the alien style cinnamon sugar. “He disrespected you.”
He doesn’t say any more, though I think there’s more to it. That look he gave the other male spoke volumes without uttering a single word.
With that, Zyntarr sits and offers me the spread of food - made exactly how I like it. He’d even gathered some of the foods that I know he doesn’t particularly like. “Here,” he says, his hand outstretched, offering me a melon-chunk-type of morsel.
My gaze flits from the offered food, to his beautiful blue eye, and then to his lap, where I had sat while he had fed me before. Doesn’t he want me to sit there now? It was so intimate and… obviously led toeven moreintimate events this morning. I had been bold then. I’d like to be bold again.
So, instead of taking the offered fruit, I stand. Zyntarr’s arm remains outstretched toward me, but his eye is firmly on my face as I pick my heart up from the bottom of my stomach and seat myself on one of Zyn’s strong thighs. His arm holding the food falls back to his side and his Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows, his gaze having never left mine. “Is this alright?” I ask in a scratchy voice.
Zyntarr clears his throat. “It is more than ‘alright’,” he answers, the hoarseness of his voice matching mine.
His arm raises again to offer me the food, but I catch him by the wrist and push it away. “What’s wrong?” I ask.
For a time - a moment that seems to stretch on longer than it should - Zyntarr’s sky-blue eye just stares into mine, flitting from one to the other, until his chest expands with a large inhale of breath. “Zuul was right,” he says. “He is a capable male with keen skills as a Protector, and the sight of both eyes.” His head drops a little, now looking lower, at my mouth as he says, “he is deserving of a female like you.”
“I’m not interested in Zuul.”
Zyn blinks at me, his tongue rolling out to wet his lips before he says, “he, or a male like him could protect you…properly.”
My heart splits for him as I lean closer. “I feel the safest, and most protected when I’m with you, Zyntarr.”
He says nothing like he needs time to mull that over in his head. And, while we’re being so intimate right now, I take the moment to voice the question that I’ve always wanted to; “how did it happen?” I ask, softly tracing the shape of the worn leather eye patch with a gentle fingertip.
Zyntarr catches my hand in his, drawing it closer to his mouth and pressing abarely-therekiss to the backs of my fingers. “It was when I was a naive green-male. My brothers and I thought it would be fun to hunt a firemouth - a brutal, lizard-creature whose venom will make you feel like your blood is turned to flames. It was a stupid idea. Firemouths are not good eating, and their hides are too tough to make use of,” he pauses to shake his head at himself, moving the thigh I’m perched on to shift me closer as his hand curls around my hip. “But I wanted to prove myself to my brothers. The risk didn’t seem real to me then. My pride, my standing in the tribe, how everyone had told me my whole life that I would be a fierce and mighty Protector because I had always been the biggest, the strongest -thosethings were real to me. Anyway, we tracked the beast, and it was decided that I would be the one to lead the attack.” Zyntarr takes a long inhale, before he brings my hand back up to hispatch, urging me to caress the thing again. I do so, almost in a trance while Zyn tilts his head to the side ever so slightly, like a cat leaning into touch. “We did kill the thing. But it put up a good fight for the right to live. Claws, teeth, and its thick, ugly tail all thrashed around during our very inexperienced attack.These-” he gestures to the long slashes gauged into his skin from forehead, over his bad eye and down to his chin, “are proof of how hard that firemouth fought that day. If its claws had been in closer range, they would have been enough to do damage to my eye, but-” Zyntarr continues with his insanely intense gaze with his beautiful, blue eye, and he reaches up and slowly removes his worn leather patch. I suck in a small breath. What he reveals is another eye looking back, but the blue is barely there. It’s like it has a milky film over the top of his pretty iris, making the whole thing look like a white marble resting in the socket. He blinks those thick lashes at me and I come back to myself. “Firemouths spit venom when they are threatened,” he explains, tapping his own cheek beneath his ghostly eye. “It felt like someone had replaced my eye with a burning sun.”
“That’s awful. I’m so sorry that happened to you.”
Zyntarr snorts and shakes his head. “It is no less than I deserved. We did not need to hunt that firemouth. The Goddesses saw fit to take something from me as I had needlessly taken a life from their forest. I learned to live with the shame that I lost the use of this eye while being a green-male idiot, and the other scars started mounting up because of my blind spot. It was a message from the Goddesses, and now I have heard it.”
He continues staring as I slide from his lap, standing between his strong, splayed thighs. With Zyn sitting on the nest, and me standing, it is one of the few times I’m taller than he is, though the arches of his inky wings still loom at an even greater height above me, so I suppose it’s still not true. The difference isn’t much, maybe even only an inch or two, but theway Zyntarr tilts his head back to look up at me makes me feel taller somehow. With the air thick, and nothing but the sounds of the jungle bugs outside, I slowly raise my hand to trace across his facial scars. Following the brow that frames his unseeing eye with the pads of my fingertips, I map a path around the newly uncovered feature. Some might call it ugly, unsightly, scary. But all I see is Zyntarr. He made a mistake, like we all do. I certainly know the weight of my past choices.
