Page 145 of Mates for the Raskarrans #1-6

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Shemza

I think the image of my Lorna sitting between those two shelves, beneath her blanket, silent tear tracks running down her cheeks as she watches her friend run from her will haunt me, as it has surely haunted her.

I draw her into my arms and will us back to the healer’s hut, setting us down once again on the bed. My Lorna looks up at me, her gaze full of conviction, as if she is sure I will now understand why she is so bad.

“You have proved the opposite point than you think you have,” I tell her, trying to encourage a smile out of her.

“Shemza, I know you want to find no reason to be disgusted by me, because I’m your mate, but…”

“What I want is to kiss you.” I cut her short, get in her space in the way I know makes her heartspace quicken.

“This is our dreamspace where I am meant to be giving you pleasure with my fingers and my tongue. I should have my head between your thighs, my tongue buried in your cunt, listening to you cry out my name. Instead, I have watched another have the pleasure of kissing you, while my own lips remain untouched.”

Her cheeks flush a deep pink, and it pleases me to see it, her lips parting with a soft exhale. When she recovers her senses, she scowls at me, but I am delighted to know that I affect her so, that much as she tries to fight against this, she wants it as badly as I do.

“What you have shown me, my linasha, is a human female who believes she is aberrant simply for desiring another female for a mate - something as natural as breathing air. If this human female, this Rosa, finds you terrible for having taken a life, then I do not trust that her reasons for doing so are good ones. She believes wrong things about herself. Why would she not be wrong about you also?”

My Lorna opens her mouth to protest, then closes it again, a look of confusion passing over her face.

It is clear to me that she has never thought of things this way, that she has been told how to think so many times by the chiefs of her tribe, that she cannot accept the way of things to be any other than what they have told her.

I think of the other females and their uncertainty, their unnecessary fear.

Sally has spoken to me about the cruelty of their world, but I have never fully understood it before this moment, watching my Lorna realise that she might have been unfairly misled.

“I am starting to think you have built yourself a cage when you had no need for one.”

I press a kiss to her forehead. I want to do so much more than that, but my linasha needs time. I do not think it takes my healer’s sensibilities to know that.

“There’s nothing worse than murder,” she says, her voice soft, weak. “It’s the worst thing one person can do to another.”

I am not sure I agree with this. It is terrible to take a life yes, but worse to be cruel to the living. To make them suffer torments.

To force a youngling to mate to an elder.

I take a breath. Keep my rage in check.

“Linasha, there are many reasons why a life might be taken, and all of them are sad. But you said yourself what Ellie and Anghar had to do, what my brothers and I had to do - that was not wrong. You know there are circumstances that make taking a life necessary. Why is it so difficult for you to think that is not the case for you?”

“Because…”

She does not finish, that single word dangling in the air between us, stranded without others to keep it company.

“My linasha, will you show me this thing you have kept hidden? This thing you have feared my finding out?”

“You want to see?”

She looks so confused, fearful, hopeful, sore in her heartspace, all at the same time.

I do not want to see, but I think I need to.

“I think perhaps you will not be at peace with it truly until you have shared it.”

A small part of me is afraid, terribly afraid, of this secret she has carried hidden away inside her for so long.

But it is not because I think it will change my view of her.

It is because I suspect there are very few things that could push my Lorna to use a weapon on another.

In defence of younglings, yes. She would kill for Ahnjas and Jassal, and if she thinks that is a bad thing, then humans have very strange values.

That she would be so fierce in the protection of younglings - another’s younglings, not even her own - is one of the things that makes my heartspace beat so hard for her.

But I do not think there were younglings for my Lorna to defend against her husband. Only herself. I recall his words from before about showing her gratitude and what he obviously had in mind.

With a female so many seasons younger. That is the thing that disgusts me, not anything that my Lorna could do. I only fear that he got what he wanted from her before she ended him.

I look over to the door. It is once again changed, not the prison door, or the aviary door, or the door it is supposed to be. This time it is a wooden door - ornate, as if made by the best craftsmen. Harton could not make a thing so fine out of wood.

“Your door is here, linasha. You are ready to show me?”

She presses close to me, breathing deeply of my scent. I hold her tight, but let her go after a moment. She has to open this door. I cannot walk through it for her.

My Lorna rises, squares her shoulders, then marches toward the door.

As before, it gets bigger as we approach, and she throws it open into a strange stone building with high ceilings and paintings made of sunlight set in the walls.

There are benches on either side of a central aisle and it looks similar to the gathering hut - a place for people to meet with each other.

The elder Robert stands on a raised platform at the far end of the room, gazing over the gathered crowd with a smile of self-satisfaction.

I bite back the snarl that rises in my throat. He would not hear it, anyway.

Then I turn as the door opens behind us again, and youngling Lorna walks through in a dress even bigger and more decorative than the last one.

It is perfect white, bright as the twin moons, and her face is covered by a sheet of material that is mostly see-through.

It hides some of her fears from view, but cannot contain all of them.

The male walking with her grips her arm so tight his knuckles have whitened, as if he fears she will turn and run if he does not control her.

“My father,” Lorna says, as her younger self and the male walk past. “He didn’t want there to be any chance I might try to escape.

Everything he had depended on Robert. My parents, they…

It’s like if everyone in the village had to collect sticks, and the person with the most sticks was the most important, the most powerful.

The sticks are meaningless on their own, but you can use them to exchange for other things.

So if you wished to live in a hut, you would use your sticks to buy the materials to make it, and to pay the person with the skill to build it.

My father came from a family that had a lot of sticks, but he wasted them.

He was never content with what he had, always trying to find ways to gather more.

Too many times he used a lot of sticks to open up new ways of gathering them, only to find there were never any to gather in the first place. ”

“He had no sticks, but this Robert did?” I think I am starting to understand.

“It’s called money, and yes. My father had none left, and Robert had more than anyone else. So my father sold Robert the only valuable thing he had left. Me.”

In front of us, my Lorna’s father takes her hand and passes it to Robert. Words are spoken, but they blur past, unimportant. Perhaps my Lorna does not remember them, perhaps she does not wish to relive them.

Then there is much polite applause from the crowd, who all seem happy to watch this monstrous exchange take place.

“Why did no one stop this?” I ask, gesturing to the females dabbing at their eyes with small cloths, as if overcome with emotion, though I can tell easily that no tears are actually falling.

“That’s the thing about being the person with the most money.

Nobody wants to get in your way. It’s like if Gregar could kick you out of the tribe for no reason at all, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop him.

You would be keen to keep him happy, wouldn’t you?

To tell him that everything he does is great, well done.

All any of these people would ever do is validate Robert.

Compared to him, I’m nothing, no one. My thoughts and feelings don’t matter. ”

“They matter to me.”

Her hand seeks mine, her fingers closing around my own, linking between them. I give her hand a squeeze, but it is me that needs the comfort a moment later when Robert presses his mouth to young Lorna’s in a twisted version of a kiss.

“He will not be satisfied with a simple kiss this night, will he?” I say, my whole chest aching with the pain in my heartspace.

“No,” my Lorna replies.