by Loki Renard
Why? Because I have something to prove. To myself, and to Ice, and to everyone else. They want to strip me of everything I am and make me in their image of a perfect tribal woman. But I have already proved myself. The bear chose me. I want the tattoo to prove it, so Ice will have to shut up.
“It is a long process. It will hurt.”
“Life is long. Everything hurts. I want the marks.” I look at Maverick, expecting him to be the one to make the decision.
“Ice!” he calls out.
Ice emerges onto the deck, still bristling from our fight.
“You are the keeper of the marks,” Maverick says. “Riley wants her tattoo. What say you?”
“I say no,” Ice says, his gaze stony. “I say she is a petulant little girl playing at womanhood. She will not wear a mark until she proves otherwise.”
“I killed the bear! I earned the marks!”
“You are earning a mark across your ass if you keep your whining up,” Ice says, turning away from me. He walks away, his decision made and apparently, final for the moment.
“Sorry, little rabbit,” Maverick says. “The marks must be given by one skilled in their application. Ice is the only one trained. You must earn his favor.”
“I’ve never had his favor,” I say, knowing I am sulking, but what else is there? No matter how much these savages take from me, it is never enough for that cold, cruel man.
Chapter Twelve
None of us are happy.
After Ice and I fight, it becomes apparent that I am not the only problem in their world. We were supposed to take leave of the tribe once my moon blood was done, return to the wilds and hunt again. I am not bleeding anymore, but we are still here. Have been for ten days. That seems to be ten days too long for my men and me.
I don’t understand everything that is happening, but apparently the chief has forbidden them to leave, so Maverick and Stryker and Hans are all just as unhappy as Ice and I. The five of us prowl around the house that now feels far too small, and growl and snarl at one another.
If not for Maverick maintaining order, I think there would be fights among the men. Stryker and Hans spend a lot of time wrestling. They say it’s training, but the matches break out almost at random.
Stryker is sitting on the deck and Hans tackles him off it. They fall three feet to the ground, struggling for dominance as their limbs tangle.
It’s kind of hot to watch, but there’s a reason for it. They’re bored. They’re not made to sit in a hut at the edge of a village. They’re made to test their mettle against beast and foe. With nobody else to turn on, they turn on one another.
Maverick is perhaps the worst affected by the indolence. He is a man who needs to be in control of something, and with Ice and I refusing to so much as acknowledge one another, and Hans and Stryker rolling around like puppies most of the time, his dominance has just one outlet: me.
“Come here,” he growls.
I go to him. He takes me by the chin and turns my face up to his.
“On your knees, little rabbit.”
I slide down to my knees obediently. Doing as Maverick says is a pleasure. His bright blue eyes blaze down at me and make me smile. I am rarely in trouble with Maverick. I never displease him. It’s not possible to disobey him because he makes doing the right thing easy.
“You’ve come a long way,” he says, caressing my hair. “You will go a lot further. You’re yet to reach your full potential, Riley.”
His fingers leave my hair and trace lightly over the scars on my cheek. “These are the key.”
I don’t understand what he’s saying, but I don’t know that it matters. I like listening to him. I like hearing his voice, feeling his approval. I like knowing I am his. Maverick gives me a feeling of belonging, and of protection. It is right to be on my knees in front of him.
It’s not sexual. It’s essential.
He takes a seat in front of me and draws me between his legs, caressing my hair and my scarred cheek. It will never fully heal, and I don’t want it to. It’s a reminder of that which I have survived, and reminds me that I can survive more than I think I can, even now.
Hans comes barging through the door, disturbing my sweet moment of peace.
“The West Winds come,” he declares. “We’re needed.”
Maverick stands up right away, leaving me on the floor alone.
“What? What’s going on?”
“A tribe of people,” Stryker explains. “They come to trade and cause trouble. The annual swapping of the brides is upon us. Conan’s daughters may be swapped for those of the West Winds, if he decides he likes the look of any of their young women.”
I shouldn’t be shocked. Maverick and Stryker and Ice and Hans all took me as their own without my input, but hearing that women are traded as brides in such a common way strikes me as wrong.
“We must act as guards, to ensure the proper transfer of property.”
“You mean, to ensure the girls don’t run away.”
“This is how things are done here,” Stryker tells me. “It is how you were taken, and you are happy, are you not?”
“No!” I exclaim. “I mean, I’d prefer a choice.”
Hans smirks. “Would you?” He comes toward me, puts his hands on my hips and sweeps me up off my feet, holding me aloft like a trophy. “You want choice, little rabbit? Or you want us?”
He makes me laugh, even though he is essentially saying I have no free will where they are concerned. It’s difficult to stay mad at Hans. He has an easy way about him, and though his dominance is no less complete than any of the other men, he does not carry it so heavily.
“You are happy for your sisters to be traded by Conan?”
“None of our sisters live in this clan anymore,” Hans says, putting me down. “We moved them years ago, after Stryker defiled so many.”
“This isn’t truly a clan,” Stryker says. “It’s a harem we’re contracted to for protection and food.”
I still don’t truly understand what keeps them serving Conan. They are protecting families they are not allowed any real contact with. Conan controls all, and yet my men offer their bodies and lives in defense of the innocents who live here. They seem to receive very little in the way of compensation.
There’s no time to think about it or ask any more questions. A sonorous horn sounds as the warriors of the West Winds arrive. I follow my men out as they go to escort them into the village. They order me to stand back, and I do, but I watch with the same wide eyes as the other maidens of the village.
The men of the West Winds are painted with red markings across their faces, and they wear the skins of large cats, tiger stripes across their great bodies. They are fearsome to the extreme, and I am glad that I have my savages to protect me.
Chief Conan comes out of the roundhouse, dressed in a fur cloak and impressive leathers that have been stitched finely. He is the best dressed of all the men, including mine. His red hair is long and flowing, his eyes fixed not on the men of the West Winds, but the women who follow behind them. There are six young ladies, around my age, and the chief has eyes for them all.
“Welcome!” He extends his arms to the head of the West Winds contingent. “We already have one of yours in our village.”
“One of ours?”
“A stray. I’ve let my men have her, but you’re welcome to take her back if necessary.”
I take several steps back. I can’t see the expressions on my men’s faces, but I see their bodies stiffen at his words. It would seem that the chief does not consider me his, but he does not consider me theirs either, not really.
The painted West Winds warrior growls and shakes his head. “What stray?”
“The one known as Lulu Ursa.”
“Luwhat whonow?”
“That girl.”
Chief Conan points to me. All eyes turn to me. The warrior narrows his gaze and shakes his head.
“Never seen her. Never heard her name.”
Conan l
ooks at me, calls me forward. I hesitate, but what can I do? If I run now, I will be caught, and in moving forward I get closer to the protection of my men. Maverick catches my eye as I walk past and gives me a little nod.
“Where are you from then, Lulu?” The chief asks me the question, and I do not hold the truth back.
“The city.”
Chief Conan bristles visibly. He draws in a deep breath and speaks in a dangerously soft growl as his eyes narrow to two emerald chips.
“The city. So you have all lied to me. Five of you all came spinning a story of deceit.”
Chief Conan has a flair for the dramatic.
“What is your city name?”
“Riley Jones.”
His eyes widen. He holds his breath and there is a moment where the entire world seems to do the same.
“Riley Jones,” he says wonderingly. “No. It can hardly be a coincidence.”
“Coincidence?”
“My name was once Mark Jones.”
“That was my fath…” A tingle runs down my spine. I look into his eyes and I suddenly know why I felt a kinship with him from the beginning. He and I share the same blood, if not the same family.
I have imagined this moment a thousand times over. Finding my father in the wild, being greeted by him warmly. But this moment is nothing like that one. He is not pleased to see me. He is horrified.
“What are you doing here? You should have stayed in the city!”
“You left me!” I am filled with rage. I take a flask of wine that is supposed to be an offering for the men of the West Winds from the arms of one of the obedient village girls, and I dash it as his feet. “How dare you!”
Nobody knows what to do. The chief is so respected that most here would never meet his gaze, let alone scream in his face, but to me he is no chief. He is the father who abandoned me to the city and who came to these wilds. Here he has a new family. Endless wives and children. These people who stare at me, many of them must be my half siblings. I am among family, and yet I am a total stranger to them all.
My fury is only matched by my destruction as I fly into a rage and tear at everything I can. There are gasps of horror as my anger takes free rein until Maverick’s arms wrap around me. He hauls me off my feet, flailing and screaming with a rage that does not just belong to the woman I am now, but to the child my father once abandoned.
I am inconsolable and uncontrollable. I scream every curse word I know, and some I don’t as Maverick takes me from the chief’s home and carries me out of the village. I wrap my arms around his neck and cry on his shoulder as we take to the fields, his pacing soothing me until finally I am calm enough to stand on my own.
It takes a long time. The late afternoon sun gives way to twilight, and then to night proper. I am so angry I can barely speak, so furious at all I have given up, all I have believed in.
Maverick lets me fume and rage all that time. He lets me cry. He gives me space as I am suddenly thrown into a deep mourning, not just for my father, but for everything I thought he was.
“What am I going to do?” I ask the question, my eyes full of tears. “What are we going to do?”
“First, you are going to hurt,” he says simply. “It is no wonder you drew the spirit of the bear. Your rage is the same.”
“My rage is justified,” I say. “I came here… into the wilds to look for him because I had a memory of him. I thought, if I found him, he would love me. But he… he wanted to give me away!”
“I know,” Maverick says. “I am sorry, he is not a good man.”
He is not. And all my life I blamed my mother, secretly and sometimes out loud for the fact he left. I thought she drove him away by being too clingy, too concerned, too annoying. But now I see that she was a woman with a broken heart and an unfaithful husband who did not love her and who did not love me.
My tears flow again as I wish to my core that I could speak to her, see her, tell her how sorry I am for hurting her. I’m not sorry I left for the wilds. I’m not sorry for having found my men—even Ice. But I am sorry for how it happened and for how little I understood her all my life.
Maverick watches over me as I pace in circles, trying to digest what I now know. I didn’t like Conan from the beginning, but now that I know who he is, and how we are linked, I loathe him.
“I won’t live here,” I say. “Not with that man. He rejected me once when I was a child, and again when the West Winds came. I wish he was dead.”
“We will leave,” he says. “We will have to. I cannot see a way this ends well for any of us.”
“Will he take revenge for what I said and did?”
“Revenge is not what I am worried about him taking,” Maverick says. “Come, we need to get the others and we need to leave tonight while the moon is still covered by the clouds.”
Maverick’s suspicions are correct. By the time we return to the village the hut is surrounded by no fewer than fifteen men. The men of the West Winds have come for me. My father has promised them a bride, and they want what they were promised.
Ice is at point. Hans and Stryker have his flanks. There is no doubt that the threat of violence is in the air. I have no idea why. Was my anger so great that we are all going to be outcasts now? I hope so. I want to leave this place and never return. Just looking at my father standing there makes me want to scream with rage.
“What is happening?” Maverick asks the question coldly.
“We are going to trade.”
“Trade what?”
“Riley for one of the West Winds maidens.”
Silence meets his statement. Maverick does not so much as dignify the idea with an answer. He stares my father dead in the eyes with an expression that conveys so much pure derision and disgust that words would only dilute the message.
“She is my daughter,” Conan says, blithely unaware of how terrible he is being, or uncaring if he is aware. He is so used to having things his own way that he does not seem to understand that he might be done. “Therefore she is not yours to have, but mine to trade.”
“She’s our mate. We will go to war to defend her.”
Conan smirks. “You are four men against the finest warriors of the West Winds.”
“You’re right,” Stryker says. “There’s not nearly enough of them to take Riley from us.”
“I hate you!” I snarl the words at the man who fathered me, the one who abandoned me, but trades his daughters for women from other tribes. I was fortunate to be left behind. He has no love for anybody. It is my men who sacrifice for this tribe. My men who feed the hungry. My men who provide protection.
“Take him and leave,” Maverick says to the warriors who stand around Conan. “Take him as prisoner, take him as slave. Do with him as you please, but you will never take another woman from our tribe.”
“What?” Conan laughs. “You cannot trade me, insolent boy.”
“You have nobody to protect you but these slavers of women. I am sure they will make good use of you too. We revoke our protection. We revoke our fealty. You are a man alone.”
“Kill them,” Conan orders. “Take the girl and slaughter these fools!”
He orders their deaths without hesitation. The years of service to the tribe are as nothing to him. He does not care what anyone has done for him. He only cares how useful they are in the moment.
The warriors of the West Winds make ready their attack. As agile as my men are in battle, they are far outnumbered and I do not see how they can possibly win. They will be slain. I will be taken. It will be a horror unlike any I have ever known, but I can see it playing out before me as time slows with fear.
As the first blade flashes, I scream.
That scream turns into a roar that does not come from my throat, but from the hills above the village. It is an unsettling, horror-filled sound that makes every inch of my skin tingle.
Suddenly, we are not alone. She is here. I don’t know how, but I feel her presence.
The roar makes the warr
iors hold their blades. There are large dark shadows moving above the village. They are angry. They are loud. They are…
“Bears!”
The West Winds warriors give the shout and make them real.
A horde of bears come rushing down from the mountains. Not just one bear, but five. They come past the boundary of the village, sweep around the hut and race past Maverick and me, sending the attackers scrambling for their lives.
I do not move an inch as fur and fury flows past me, through me. My rage is their rage, my blood is their blood. I may not have a father, but I have the family in the wild and I wear their mark.
What happens in the dark will never fully be revealed to any of us. Some say that the bears came from the mountains and ran toward the river. Others say they ran into the shadows and became one with them. Still others will say that there were never any bears at all, that some dark magic was at play, an illusion that struck terror into the hearts of those who tried to take me.
Whatever the physical truth of the matter is does not matter. Maverick, Ice, Stryker, and Hans do not miss their opportunity. They are as fierce as the bears, moving among those who would have slaughtered them with blade and spear flashing dangerous arcs.
In the end, there are the fled, the dead, and the wounded. An equal number of each, but not a soul to oppose my men. Chief Conan cowers on the ground, his hands over his head, groveling for mercy he does not deserve.
He is bloodied and wounded, but not so badly he will die. Flesh wounds for my flesh and blood. I don’t feel sorry for him. He abandoned me and wanted to trade me for some poor soul he could fuck.
Maverick stands over him. He has never looked so hot or so commanding before. He is a man who knows how to wear his wounds and will fight to the end. He would never do what this so-called chief is doing, cowering for his life.
“Go,” Maverick growls. “Go and never come back. You are outcast now and forever.”
“I need…”
“You will have nothing. Take nothing. The wilds will decide your fate. Now go, before I reconsider my mercy and take your head as trophy.”
They are harsh, savage words, but no less than the man deserves. He rises to his feet and begins to stumble into the darkness. We watch him go with merciless eyes. He planned to take me from my men, and instead it is they who have taken his tribe.