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knight

ARROW WANTS TO follow me, but I communicate with him through the bond not to. It’s weird, this kind of communication, because it’s not thoughts or words exactly. It’s just that I let him know that we don’t spook this guy and he gets that and changes his mind and decides to hang back.

Theodorus tucks his little wooden box full of chess pieces under his arm. The table out here is a chess board, so he doesn’t need to bring a chess board. He wanders up the bank, away from the pond and I follow him.

I don’t look at Arrow as I go past him, but I can feel him.

I’ve never been in love before, so this feeling I have with him, it’s weird. I like it, but it’s weird. And I kind of don’t like the fact that I like it, if that makes any sense. It makes me feel a little bit out of my depth.

Theodorus walks between the trees and then onto a little worn footpath which winds between the shacks and trailers that are all set up haphazardly out here.

Eventually, we come to a house that has a front porch with four mismatched rocking chairs sitting on it.

The house has two stories and the siding was painted tan at one point, but it’s peeling, so I can see that someone painted it mint green before that, because that color is beneath.

The house also looks sort of lopsided, in a way I can’t quite explain, as if it’s just not quite sturdy.

But as we go in the front door, it feels sturdy. It feels like a well-built little house, which is more than I can quite say for all of the houses out here.

“Kyvie!” calls Theodorus as we step inside. “Kyvie, I want to show you something.”

Inside the house, we enter a small area with a staircase to the left and a doorway to the right. The doorway leads to a living room. There’s no one in there but I catch sight of a couch with a big shaggy dog lying on it. It lifts its face, curious.

Theodorus walks past the staircase and the dog comes out of the living room to nose its way out. It lets out a half-hearted scold of a bark at me. Who am I and what am I doing here?

“Shut it, Bowser,” says Theodorus.

Past the staircase, we emerge in a kitchen. A woman is sitting at the kitchen table while two men are standing at the sink. One’s washing dishes and the other is drying.

The woman smiles as we enter. “That was a quick chess game, Theo.”

“No chess this morning, Kyvie,” says Theodorus. He seizes me and shoves me forward. “Show her the teeth.”

The men at the sink have stopped what they’re doing to look at me.

“This one of the secular alphas?” says one of them.

“Yeah, the ones Penelope let in,” says Theodorus. “Go on, show her,” he says to me.

I lost my expanded teeth during the walk over, and I have to think about biting to get them back. I remember how it felt to sink them into Arrow, the way it lit up this bright line of connection between us, and it makes me react. I open my mouth.

“Well!” The woman, who I think must be Kyvelki, gets up from the table and comes over to me.

Her hair is long and gray, and I think about how often I’ve seen women who don’t color or style their gray hair, but she doesn’t really look old, or…

there’s something about the way she carries herself, maybe, something that’s different from the way old women carry themselves.

This woman knows she’s important. She expects everyone to defer to her.

I realize that old women usually aren’t that way.

Huh.

Anyway, she’s got her fingers in my mouth now, touching my teeth, making little exclamatory noises. “This is like the stories.”

“Exactly, folklore, about the first alphas,” says Theodorus.

“Yes, but that’s foolish,” she says. “Or I always thought…” She nods for me to sit down at the kitchen table.

I do that. I want to say something, to ask her questions, but I remember how Calix was about this place, and I decide that being quiet until spoken to might be the best way to navigate things.

“You two, back to washing,” says Kyvelki to the men, who are probably her mates? And she’s telling them what to do?

They go back to the sink, silent and obedient.

I feel that in two ways. One, I don’t like it because I don’t like anyone telling me what to do, and I’m personally affronted by any attempt to control me.

Two, I think of being made to be subservient because all men or all alphas or all…

anything are supposed to be subservient, and I don’t like it.

The urge to say something, to rebel, grows stronger.

And I feel Arrow suddenly. He’s not telling me what to do.

Arrow senses, somehow, that would make me react in the opposite way.

Instead, he’s just there, strong and quiet, and inhabiting me, and somehow, his presence makes it easier to choose my pack over my independence.

I want to protect them more than I want anything else, after all.

We need this information. I will get it.

Even if it means being demeaned and watching demeaning things happening.

Arrow himself has described my masculinity as toxic, but…

It’s not like I think that the natural way of things is for men to rule over women or something, so I’m horrified by this inversion here for that reason.

I mean… I don’t think that’s why.

I think I’d be horrified the other way, too. I’m pretty sure I would.

This place… whatever it is about this place… I don’t know if it’s a good place.

Kyvelki eyes me. “You wouldn’t know the stories about the origins of alphas and omegas would you?”

“Uh…” I furrow my brow, because it’s not as if the Polloi folklore is entirely unknown by us. “Something about wolves, right? Like, weren’t we raised by wolves?”

“‘We,’” she echoes.

“I mean, not us, but don’t you believe that’s where the alphas came from?

” I say, cringing, thinking about being stoned to death.

How much literal stoning to death do the Polloi do these days, anyway?

I seem to remember some civil liberties case where they said that the Polloi were not allowed to do their ritual stoning-to-death thing when an alpha decided he didn’t want to die with his omega.

However, I understand it’s pretty common for alphas in an omega’s pack to shoot themselves right after she dies. They just do it.

It’s not like they can stay, anyway.

Supposedly, it’s illegal for them to be forced to commit suicide, but the Polloi basically say, ‘Kill yourself or get out.’ And most of these guys are in their eighties by this time. Where are they going to go?

Kyvelki is talking. “Yes, there’s a component of wolves in the story.

What happens is that a king… he has different names in different stories, but he marries a young and beautiful woman who already has twin boys, brothers, who also have various names in various versions of the tale.

The king does not wish his new wife to have children except his own, so he contrives to take the children away from her.

He intends to kill them, but at the last moment, he can’t do this unspeakable act, so he simply leaves them in the wilderness to die.

But the Goddess sees, and she takes pity on the boys, and she causes a she-wolf to come and to allow the boys to nurse along with her litter of pups.

When the boys grow up, she gives them teeth, teeth by which they can claim.

And the boys come back to the kingdom, where the king had cast them out, and the king has new wives in addition to their mother.

The twin boys use their teeth to bite the king’s other wives and they become the first omegas, transformed by the bites. Is that the story you heard?”

“Something like that,” I say. “But I also thought that the first omega was like… Snow White or something? Like she gets thrown out of her kingdom by a wicked stepmother—”

“Step-parents tend to be evil in these tales,” says Kyvelki.

“It’s odd, really, I’ve always thought, especially since in our culture, there is often no real clear way to know paternity of children.

It’s like a relic of some older culture that has seeped into our folklore, these stories about step-parents.

” She laughs. “Of course, not all of our stories are that way, but the origin stories, they seem to build on the culture outside of alpha and omega interaction.”

I just nod. I don’t know what to say, and I don’t want to say the wrong thing.

She looks me over. “You scent as if you’re afraid of me.”

“No,” I say, too quickly, as much because I never admit to being afraid of anything as because I think she’s going to think that’s rude.

“Someone warned you off me?” she says.

I shake my head. “No. Just… omegas in general, I guess. I got laughed at today by a beta for daring to introduce myself.”

Kyvelki smiles very widely. “Ah, I see. I’ve often wondered about secular alphas, what they’d be like. If they’d be fun to break.”

I do my best not to react to that. I remember thinking about flirting with this woman for information, doing more than flirting… Calix could have been right that I should have left this to him. I wonder if this was a bad idea. Am I out of my depth here?

Kyvelki laughs. “Oh, your scent, little secular alpha!”

Guess I’m doing a terrible job at not reacting. I clear my throat. “Sorry about that. Look, we… no one else has teeth like this?”

“No,” she says. “No one does.”

“So, how do you do bites, then?” I say. “Just with regular human teeth?”

She shrugs, pulling down the collar of her shirt so that I can see the bite marks there.

I realize they don’t look like our bite marks.

They look like a full set of teeth coming down.

They’re lumpy and half-moon shaped, with indentations for each of the teeth.

Ours are two twin teardrop shapes, fang marks.

“What?” she says. “Your expression?”

“Only that our bite marks look different,” I say.

“But you haven’t bitten anyone,” she says. “I can scent you’re unclaimed.”