Boone glared only slightly down at the not-much-shorter man. “Hey, it was the best I could do with what I had on hand.”
“Have you not been introduced to the modern marvel of food delivery services?” Zion asked. “I’m told they’re rather prevalent outside of Bear Mountain.”
“I would have had to go to the building’s downstairs door to pick up the food,” Boone shot back, visibly grinding his jaw. “What part of ‘no coverage’ are you not understanding?”
Before Zion could answer, I held up my hand. “Okay,I’mnot understanding any of this.”
I widened my eyes at Boone. “Exactly how much did you tell them?” Then I shook my head at Zion. “And what did you mean by ‘our mate’?”
Both Zion and Boone winced, and Boone said, “So you heard that before we picked up your scent?”
Picked up your scent—yet another phrase that didn’t make sense.
“Who exactly are you two?” I glanced from Zion to Ravik, who I could see standing behind Boone. “Why are you still here?”
Zion exchanged a look with Boone, for so long, I got the weird sense that they were communicating, even though neither of them spoke out loud.
Then Zion turned back to me with a somber expression. “You’ll want to grab your coat, Bell. We should relocate this explanatory conversation outside.”
As confused as I was about why we needed to have this “explanatory conversation” outside, I had to admit, the scenery was beautiful.
The sun filtered through pines interspersed between a long row of cabins on either side of a dirt road that eventually came to a bend in the distance. The rays reflected even brighter against melting snow, and the crisp mountain air smelled clean. Resinous. Like trees and damp earth.
As we walked down the cabin’s steps to the front road, I sort of understood why hiking was a thing.
But just a few sentences into Zion’s explanation, I had to stop him to get clarifications.
“Let me get this straight,” I said, rubbing my temples. “You and Ravik are the fathers of Makari and Takoda, the brothers my daughters are planning to marry in July.”
“Correct,” Zion said.
He, Boone, and the guy he called Ravik—not Vik, like Boone did—had gathered around me in a sort of arc, with Zion in the middle.
“So, you’re, like, a couple?" A small frisson of disappointment that I had no intention of investigating rose and got pushed right back down, as I clarified, "Takoda and Makari have two dads?”
Vik immediately began shaking his head while Zion corrected, “Takoda and Makari havethreefathers. One of whom died after being ejected from our family. And as for Ravik and I…”
He regarded the other man with a fond look. "We are not a couple in the romantic sense. We were both married to the same woman. Along with a third man, Boone's late brother. At the same time."
I gaped at him. Closed my mouth. Then opened it again to choke out. "You two ... shared a wife? With Boone's brother?"
"Indeed, we did," Zion answered as if having been in a polycule before polycules were even a thing was no big deal. "This is what our kind calls a maul—m-a-u-l, not the shopping establishment. In the most traditional Ayaska sense, a maul is three males bonded to one female. The Ayaska call this Four-Direction Spirit. And Bell, this wasn't information I wished to impart, but for the sake of clarity, you should know."
He paused with a look that said,Brace yourself, there's more.
"Both of your daughters have entered into similar arrangements. Each of them is engaged to three men. The Joining Ceremony in July will formalize these bonds."
"Hold up." I jutted out my chin. "Are you trying to say that both Noelle and Holly are engaged to marry not just one man, but three? Each?"
Even for someone who’d gone to art school and worked at a museum where only a handful of staff identified as both strictly straight and monogamous, this was a lot to process.
“Also, what do you mean by ‘our kind’?” I demanded. A new, scary thought occurred to me. “Have Holly and Noelle fallen into some kind of polyamorous mountain cult?”
“Oh wow.” Boone’s hand returned to the back of his neck. “That’s a read.”
Ravik cast me a sympathetic look, and Zion seemed to be speaking for all of them when he said, “I can see how it would appear that way. But please understand—the maul relationship framework predates modern relationship structures. The males of our kind have been mating in threes since before the advent of the written word.”
Our kind. There were those two words again.
