The women do not answer aloud, but the silence on their side is different now. Not empty. Not rejecting. More like something has been marked and set into place, whether all of them are ready for it or not.
Kaiven turns back to me one final time before joining the hunting line.
His hand lifts, just once, to the side of my face. Not enough to ruin the public weight of the moment by turning it tender. Just enough to make the whole camp see that the touch is allowed. Wanted. Natural between us.
Then he lets his hand fall and goes to the line.
The hunters depart soon after in a sweep of movement, leather, blades, dust, and silence broken only by the first beats of hoof and boot leaving camp.
I stand where he left me until they are gone from sight.
Only then does my body remember how to breathe properly.
The women begin moving again around me. Work resumes. Fire crackles. Children whisper. The whole camp restarts as if nothing happened.
But something did happen.
Oshara comes to stand near me. Not close enough for comfort. Not far enough for distance either.
“You held the bowl steady,” she says.
It is not much.
It is everything.
I look at her carefully. “I nearly dropped it.”
“But you did not.”
Oshara’s gaze shifts toward the direction the hunters rode. “He has never refused me before.”
There is no bitterness in the words. That almost makes them harder to hear.
My throat tightens. “I didn’t ask him to.”
“I know.”
Oshara looks back at me, and for the first time since I arrived, there is something in the older woman’s face that resembles not acceptance exactly, but recognition.
“He chose where all could see,” Oshara says. “Now all have seen.”
Then she turns and walks back toward the fire.
I stay standing alone in the center of camp for one long moment after that. I can still feel the heat of Kaiven’s skin on my fingertips and the weight of the bowl in my hands, even though it is gone.
I had thought I was his wife by law.
But this feels different.
Because today, in front of the people who actually shape his life, Kaiven did not treat me like a contract he was honoring.
He treated me like the woman he wanted beside him.
Chapter 21
Kaiven
The hunt should have been enough to clear my head.
