kick, you should have told me and spared yourself the trouble of talking.”
I laugh, the tension breaking.
At least on my end. Not on Bash’s, and the moment my eyes find his, the weight in the air is back, making my lungs seize. “Isla,” he asks, his face serious. His horns look huge as ever and his spines are sitting straight up along his back.
“Hmm?”
“You are beyond certain you want to be paired to me?” he stresses.
My eyes bounce between both of his. “I’m sure.”
He doesn’t break our stare. He doesn’t blink. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t make a sound. He takes a very deep inhale, then his arm reaches around me and—
“Ah!” my front collides with his body as he hauls me to his side.
“We must make haste,” Bash commands, and starts walking.
I have to double-time it to keep up. He makes sure I have no choice. “Are we going to a bed?” I sort-of-but-not-really tease. I tilt my head to try to get a read on his features: ears back, serious face on, shoulders wide and set with purpose. There’s a pinch to his brows that gives the impression he’s deep in plans. I’m relieved to note that when he glances down to see me watching him, I do see heat in his eyes.
But… it’s not like wild I-have-to-have-you-now heat.
So… why the rush? “Not a bed?”
Bash gives his horns an absent shake in the negative. He follows this with a wordy, “Not yet.”
But there will be a bed in the future? I face forward and quicken my pace even more so that he doesn’t have to stifle his long-legged stride quite as much as he has to when I’m not power walking to keep up with him. “So where?”
Bash points. “That wagon.”
***
It’s a longer wagon ride than we’ve ever taken before. Past all sorts of interesting sights; fields and mountains and people. Alien people. Rakhii people. All of them male. All of them hefting tools or baskets or loads borne between pairs of broad shoulders on staves. We pass more and more of them the further we travel away from the quarry. I wave a lot, enjoying all the horn-tips and friendly (or shocked) smiles I get in return. Bash stops for no one and is weirdly quiet, even when I try to tantalize him with tidbits from Earth that should drive him up a wall to learn.
Since the Narwari seem to move at a similar speed as a horse, I imagine we probably only cover a couple of miles total. But there are a whole lot of colorful shops in those couple of miles. Glassblowing studios, food markets, gemstone and fine jeweler shops. For every business with doors open on the ground, there seems to be a mirror of the shop built in the sky.
For ground-dwelling and flying customers both, I realize.
The road isn’t paved or dirt; it’s rock. It’s the same sort of stone the quarry rock is, and it’s cut flat here, wide enough for three wagons to ride abreast of each other and a whole lot of Rakhii foot-traffic to walk. On either side of the road is a belt of low, leafy vegetation, just the small stuff that is determined to grow where nothing else can. In some places beyond them, I can see trees, what looks like a swath of forest. There’s a line of Rakhii leaving the woods like busy ants, many of them bearing caber-like timbers.
When our wagon crests hills in the road, I can see a mountain range in the distance, a huge one. I’ve given up trying to chatter about anything because I’m too busy staring like a wide-eyed tourist to concentrate and Bash hasn’t ordered me to keep talking.
Bash drives us to a carefully tended lane with a beautifully arranged garden. All other traffic disappears, and if I was the nervous type I’d be wondering where Bash was taking me. A thousand glances over at him and he looks like a man on a mission. Count me intrigued, because we don’t seem to be headed for a horizontal surface but we also don’t seem to be headed for food, which was what he originally mentioned, and now I’m getting hungry.
And as he clucks to the Narwari pulling our wagon, it seems his mission was to take us to a stone cottage straight out of a fairy tale. At first, I think it has a moss roof until I realize the structure is built out of the side of