What I want…who I want…are together. Mating.
Perhaps I did the wrong thing by telling Bridget to select Vari. If she’d chosen me, I’m sure she would’ve invited him.
I would have.
And he would’ve refused because that’s not how it’s done in his tribe. I can hear his voice in my head.
I don’t give a fuck about what’s done in other tribes. Not anymore. This is our tribe, so we get to make the rules. We crossed the ocean and are exploring a new land. We have found new people.
Why can’t he see that?
Beneath my annoyance at his refusal to understand, is the bitterness that I wasn’t what he wanted. That I was good enough, but in the end, not enough.
Bridget has sailed the stars. She said there are other worlds out there, one of which is where her parents were born before they decided to travel.
I cannot imagine how hard leaving a world must have been. Harder than leaving a tribe. Yet here the humans are, and according to her, they are following the rules set out for them by the leaders of their old world. A world that takes so long to reach, Bridget would be old before she arrived.
Why do they not make new rules?
What hope do we have if they cannot, when they are much more removed from the old ways than we are?
On the other side of the fire, Yva is snoring. Hrad is silent. Maybe he is asleep, or maybe he is also watching the stars. Either way, I don’t want to talk. I need to think and plan, because I do not want to be part of a tribe that clings to the old without considering the future.
Even though the other tribes don’t realize it yet, the arrival of humans has changed our world. And us. And it will also change the humans.
It has already changed me, because I don’t want to watch Vari and Bridget every day and know I lost them by doing nothing.
I close my eyes, knowing that the person who needs the most convincing is Vari, because he is still thinking as though his tribe will welcome him home with a human mate.
I’m not sure any tribe will welcome the human women.
Not only that, why go home to a place that didn’t want him? Even if Bridget had chosen me, I would not have left my banished brothers, nor taken her from her banished sisters.
At the same time, I’m not sure that I want to go through the rut and all the changes that brings. How will Vari change? What will his meq feel like?
I wake to the waves slapping the shore. When I open my eyes, the sky is pre-dawn gray and no one is sharing my blankets.
The fire is out and I’m cold.
Another reason I don’t like waking up alone. I glance over at Hrad and Yva, wrapped in their blankets. Since I am awake, I will make the most of the quiet morning. I fold up my blanket and walk back to the main camp.
Even though everyone is asleep, the main fire is lit. I add wood to build it up and collect water to make tea. Then I sit, with the blanket around my shoulders and a bowl of tea in my hands, trying to warm up.
My gaze drifts to the shelter nestled in the trees.
That fire is out, but the shelter is lit up from the glow of Vari’s markings. When I stalked down the beach last night, I expected to wake filled with bitterness that he was with someone else, instead it’s envy.
I want to be with them.
I want to see the changes in him that the rut causes, even though I’m not sure about it for myself. I want more than being a banished warrior who is expected to live alone on the fringes of society.
But how hard will it be to convince the others that we deserve more?
As the sun rises, the others wake. Bridget is up first, wriggling out of the shelter, wearing only the borrowed shirt, and disappearing into the trees.
When she returns, she pulls on the borrowed pants and her boots and walks toward me. As we did most mornings, she sits next to me in silence as if she also needs time to wake up. I offer her some of the blanket and she silently wraps it around herself, then I hand her a bowl of tea.
With our legs touching, we can communicate well enough, as long as her thoughts are focused. At the moment they aren’t, so I don’t intrude.
