LUALHATI
“Could you please sled me over to the saloon after dinner?” I asked Warden Hallum. We were both seated at the little table in his kitchen. He cast a meaningful glance at the plate I’d just scraped clean with my fork.
“It looks like ‘after dinner’ is now,” he observed coolly. “What do you need at the saloon so late?”
“Shiloh just sent me a message.” I held up my comms tablet, as if he required proof. “They’re throwing an impromptu little party tonight. To say goodbye to Tasha and Warden Tenn for now. There’s going to be drinks and music and dancing.”
“Party,” Warden Hallum repeated. He stood and carried my plate to the sink. “Dancing.”
He made it sound like I’d just suggested going skinny-dipping in the frozen pond for fun.
“Yes, dancing,” I told his big, hard back as he faced the sink and washed our plates. “You don’t have to dance. You don’t even have to stay, if you don’t want to. You could just drop me off. I’m sure Rivven could get me home later. Or Warden Tenn could bring me on his slicer.”
“I certainly will not drop you off and leave you there,” he scoffed. He sounded shocked, or maybe even offended, that I’d suggested it. “And I won’t have you coming home on Warden Tenn’s slicer.”
He said something to himself then. It sounded a lot like an angrily muttered “purple” followed by “dildo,” but since that made exactly zero sense, I ignored it.
“I’m just saying.” I rose from my chair, snatching up a dish towel to dry the dishes once he was finished with them.
“You are just saying what, exactly? That I am no longer invited to this party?”
“No! Of course not!” I rubbed the towel vigorously over the pristine plate he passed to me. I’d dried a lot of dishes washed by Warden Hallum by that point, and not a single one of them had ever had a smear or crumb left behind. “I’m just…I’m getting the sense that a party at the saloon is the last place you want to be.”
“It is not the last place I want to be.”
“OK. Second-last.”
“No.”
“Third?”
“No.”
“Alright. Fourth-last, then. I guess I can think of three places less appealing to you than a party.”
“Not even fourth,” he said, turning off the tap. “No place that has you in it could even be on the list.”
He took the towel from me to dry his hands. I let him have it without a fight. My fingers felt weirdly numb all of a sudden.
“If you are going,” he said, “then I will escort you. And I will remain there until it comes time to then escort you back home.”
“How chivalrous of you!”
He hung up the towel, smoothing it of all wrinkles before saying, “This word does not translate.”
“Oh! I guess it is a fairly specific Old-Earth thing. It means, like, heroic. Courteous. Gallant. Like you’d save a lady from her death and then give her a flower for the trouble.”
“Aflower?”
“It sounds stupid when you say it like that!” I laughed. I wished I had the towel back. I would have swatted him with it.
“I cannot say that I have ever felt the need to bestow a flower upon someone I have saved from danger,” he said dryly. “No. I do not believe that this word applies to me at all. But chivalrous or not, I am your warden. So I will take you to your party.”
“Yay! Thank you!” Excited, I launched myself at him without thinking, squishing my front against his, throwing my arms around his back.
The next breath he took sounded like a saw grating over metal.
Oops.
