Marked In Flesh (The Others #4) - Anne Bishop Page 0,4

so old those shapes had no names—would not be concerned with answers. Even if everything else disappeared from the world to make room for the new that would be born from destruction and change, they would still exist.

The terra indigene shifters like the Wolves and Bears, the Hawks and Crows, referred to those forms as the Elders, a benevolent-sounding word for the beings who were Namid’s teeth and claws.

Meg returned from the bathroom, looking a little more awake and a lot less happy to see him. She was going to be more unhappy when she found out why he wanted to take this walk.

“Get dressed, Meg. We need to talk.”

She pointed at the bedroom door.

He was the leader of the Courtyard and she was an employee of the Courtyard, so she shouldn’t be allowed to give him orders, even nonverbal ones. But he was learning that, when dealing with humans, pack order wasn’t always maintained inside the den. Which meant Meg was dominant in her den and could disregard that he was dominant everywhere else.

He left the room and closed the door, then pressed his ear against the wood. Drawers opening, drawers closing. Movement.

“Stop hovering, Simon.”

She sounded annoyed instead of sleepy. Having sufficiently poked the porcupine, so to speak, he went back to her kitchen and checked out her cupboards and fridge to make sure she had enough people food. Half a quart of milk; a couple of bites of cheese—maybe more in terms of human bites; a small bowl of strawberries—her share of the berries she and Henry Beargard had picked yesterday; a wrapped half sandwich from A Little Bite, the Courtyard’s coffee shop.

Her cupboard had a canning jar of peaches, a jar of spaghetti sauce, and a box of spaghetti.

“If you’re poking around for leftover pizza, I ate it last night,” Meg said, entering the kitchen.

Simon closed the cupboard. Was this a typical amount of food for humans to store in the warmer months? He didn’t have more than this in his kitchen, but he usually chased down his meal and ate it fresh, so other foods were just supplements that he enjoyed for taste and were good for the human form.

“Did you want something to eat?” Meg asked.

“Later.” Leaving her kitchen, he went down the back stairs that led to the outer door, confident that she would follow him. Once outside, he took her hand, linking his fingers with hers, a form of contact and connection they’d started a week ago after she’d spoken prophecy about the River Road Community.

“The grass is wet,” Meg said. “Shouldn’t we walk on the road?”

Simon shook his head. This morning the road, which was wide enough for a vehicle and formed a circle inside the Courtyard, felt too human.

How to start? What to say?

They passed the expanded kitchen garden for the Green Complex, the only multispecies complex in the Courtyard. As a way to help the humans who were working for the Courtyard, the Others had agreed to let those humans share in the harvest if they did their share of the work. There was at least one human checking the garden every day, making sure the plants had enough water—and the females especially had eyes like a Hawk’s when it came to spotting a weed.

He spotted a scrap of fur at the edge of the garden but didn’t point it out to Meg. Something had come by to nibble on the seedlings and had ended up being someone’s dinner.

“You wanted to talk,” Meg said. “Is this about the sanctions? The Lakeside News has printed a lot of articles about the restrictions humans have to obey now.”

“A lot of howling for trouble they brought on themselves,” Simon growled.

“People are scared. They don’t know what the sanctions mean for their families.”

“Trust humans to try to build a beaver dam out of a couple of twigs. The sanctions are simple enough. Any human who belongs to the Humans First and Last movement is not allowed to travel on any right-of-way through the wild country. That means no roads, no trains.”

“Boat?”

Simon shook his head. “All the water in Thaisia belongs to the terra indigene. Ships on the lakes and rivers travel on sufferance. Always have.” And the Elementals known as the Five Sisters had already said that any ship that traveled the Great Lakes without their consent wouldn’t reach port. Well, the ship might, but the crew wouldn’t. After all, sinking the ship would soil the lake with all that fuel and debris. More