“Can reaching ship we and we and new we.”
“Then we go now.” She moved toward the ship, her anger barely contained. The Imshee raced in front of her. “Adversary-strangers in large ships are many. One Rownt is not enough.”
“If you believe that, you have never seen an angry Rownt,” she countered. She tried to walk around the Imshee, but the animal darted in front of her again. “We and not we have seen angry Rownt. Much damage. Much fear. But offspring died. Rownt died. Imshee not we or we died. Adversary-strangers in large ships is too many and too much. They overwhelm one Rownt.”
If she were still tuk-ranked or ka-ranked, she would not have been able to control herself. She would’ve grabbed the Imshee and ripped one of its legs off before beating it to death for getting in her way, but she forced her logical mind to the forefront. The Imshee had seen Rownt try to defend egglings and fail. These adversaries were too strong for one Rownt, because any Rownt who was taken with an eggling would destroy mountains one handful at a time to bring the youngling home. But there were no egglings who had come home with stories of walking between stars. The Imshee spoke the truth, and that made her angrier. Strangers were hurting egglings.
“Bring information on the adversary-strangers in large ships. Bring all the information to the temple. Bring anything you have. Rownt will retrieve our egglings.”
“Adversary-strangers in large ships will try to stop.”
She took several leaping steps forward until she was inches from the Imshee and when it tried to retreat, she grabbed that enormous front leg and held it. “I don't care how many ships they have or how large they are. I will rip them apart with my hands. Bring me information on how to reach them so I can kill them or I will kill you and take your ship and figure out how to make this beast fly by myself.”
She turned her back before she lost her temper entirely and did as she threatened. And then she ran. With all the fury in her heart, she ran as fast as she could, leaping over boulders and bounding up the hillside using her hands to claw the dirt as she tried to make it back to the temple as fast as possible.
The other Grandmothers needed to know. The hunters needed to know. If there was one Rownt eggling that walked between the stars, then it was time for the Grandmothers to walk between the stars, and if there was a new boundary to patrol, there would be Grandmothers to patrol it.
Walking a Larger Border Part Three
Liam waited to seeif the eldest Grandmother would add anything to the story, but she remained silent. “Did the Rownt rescue any of the egglings?” he finally asked. He assumed that the Imshee had told the truth about the kidnapped children because lying to a Rownt about children was equivalent to committing suicide with a spoon. It would be so slow and painful that one would have time to regret one’s life choices before dying. Rownt were so protective of their young that Liam had never even seen a glimpse of an eggling on theCalti. He wondered if he should have been offended that the parents didn’t trust a human to even look at their offspring.
“Only two,” she said, and again there was a long pause. She paled, even the memory disturbing her enough that she couldn't control her emotions. “There were too many deaths.”
“Were you on those ships?” Liam asked. Considering that Rownt Grandmothers could live a millennia, it seemed possible.
“I was not born when this happened. I grew up hearing stories of it, warnings that one had to approach aliens carefully, because what was logical to Rownt was not always logical to others. For example, the Cy believed that it was logical to dispose of Rownt.” She grew even paler.
“‘Dispose’?” Liam did not like how that sounded. He might not have the same instinctive drive as the Rownt, but he had a very human distaste for anyone who would harm children, and it sounded like these Cy had.
“The first ship we attacked, the Imshee brought their ship to the hull of the Cy, and Rownt entered. We were determined to search every place a youngling might be secreted, and we did much damage to the ship before deciding that there were no younglings.”
Liam waited, sensing that the story was not done. The Grandmothers rarely spoke about the Cy, and if they did, they said that they were antisocial, that they were an ancient species that had retreated to the corners of the universe that few others went. Rownt had gotten folded space technology from a Cy trade, but after this story, Liam was surprised Rownt didn’t hunt down every Cy in existence and kill them. The Rownt inability to declare war had saved those assholes from extinction.
However, for the most part Rownt were happy to ignore the existence of Cy. But now that humans, or one faction of humanity, had claimed a Cy ship, the Grandmothers had become more vocal. Liam wondered if they wanted him and Ondry to trade information back to the human authorities.
“When we approached the next Cy ship,” the Grandmother continued, “they decided that the logical course of action was to ensure that there were no younglings on the ship. They believed that would stop us from searching.” She took a breath. “The Cy spaced adults and younglings together, and we were unable to retrieve them before the vacuum of space had killed them.” The Grandmother had grown so pale that even Liam's skin was darker. This was the look of a Grandmother who was homicidally angry.
