offer her another feather through the gap in my fingers, feeling pleasure lick my insides when she accepts it. And I ask what I’ve been pondering since she appeared. “How did you know to seek me out? Have you felt connected to me all this time?”
“Since what time?”
“Since I began watching you when we were hatchlings.”
“You watched me?” She peers at me from between my fingers before her gaze moves blindly over her clanswomen as if she’s seeking some understanding.
My tail whips back and forth, forcing her people to step back even farther from us, giving us the illusion of more privacy. I frown. “If you did not know I followed you then, why did you seek me out now?”
“You watched me? You know me?” She tries to sit up, so I raise my upper hand off of her. She stares up at me in disbelief. “I went looking for you because I wanted help saving my brother, and I want these raids to stop.”
My mate came to me for help. My drhema came to me, trusting me to protect her. There is no higher honor, no greater show of confidence among dragons. I begin walking quickly, moving on three legs and carrying her on one hand.
“When did you watch me? And where are you going?”
“I came upon you the first time when you were in a tunic skin that matched the color of your eyes. You wore a shieldmaiden corset so new that the straps squeaked when you kneeled down to pick berries. I was nine solars, you might have been near that. And we are going to your lodging.”
I follow her scent trail where it is thickest until we come to a longhouse that bears the heavy scents of several other females too. Former to my arrival (mere degrees of a sunspan, considering I just arrived), these women lived here with my mate. That’s over now. I push my nose past the doorway’s leather flap, and find wooden benches placed along the walls, with firepits set in the middle of the structure at various points, with cooking pots suspended over banked coals. Rushes from herbs and sweet-smelling grasses line the floor, and on each bench is a bedroll, with antler bone combs and other human-needs things spread over the surfaces, and I am pleased that this lodge will serve well as our love nest.
Reaching my neck in further, I snuff when I confirm which station belongs to my mate. Carefully setting her on her feet, I reach my hand inside the longbuilding and begin scratching with all efficiency, scraping everybody’s belongings out but hers.
Protests ring out behind us.
I draw my head out of the lodge and twist my neck, my scales glittering as they flex under the sunlight. I aim a glare that promises a painful fiery punishment to anyone who desires to submit further complaint.
When I’m met with wide eyes and no one speaks, I snort and turn back to emptying our dwelling.
When a particular item goes flying past her, my mate hollers, “Hey! That’s my rug!”
Carefully, with two claws, I pick up the item she indicated and flick it back into the lodge.
“Thanks,” she mutters.
“You are welcome.”
Once our human den is cleaned of possessions we won’t want and have no need of, I take up my mate once more, pleased because, for the first krevk’d time, she didn’t try to run from me. I tuck her close to my heart and I move to enter our longhouse. I hunch my shoulders and my back sinks low and I try to collect my body in a tight enough crouch to fit under the doorway—but my wings, even closed, are too wide to fit through. I grunt with defeat.
I change to a human. It’s getting easier every time I call on the shift; a welcome thing because I intend to be in human form as often as I need my mate, and I’m feeling very, very needful of her.
But then my stomach lets out a growl to rival any throat-originated sound that I’ve ever made—in this human form or my dragon state.
“Dragon, are you hungry?” my mate asks. She eyes me. “Didn’t you just scarf down half a flock of geese?”
Holding her in my arms, staring into her eyes, I ask, “What’s your name?”
She blinks. “Nalle. My name is Nalle.”
Purring, I repeat her name to myself, enjoying the way my heart reacts to learning it. “I’m Halki. And I do need to hunt.”
Several emotions chase across her face