Chapter Text
57 BBY
Year Five of Yam’rii Occupation
Qymaen jai Sheelal was eight years old when his father taught him how to shoot a slugthrower.
Too young, many would argue, even for Kaleesh. Tradition dictated youth be granted their first weapon after twelve years, no earlier. For Qymaen to receive his great-elder-mother’s Czerka Outland rifle before all of his tusks had fully grown in was unprecedented.
But the Huk had been unprecedented, and tradition, necessarily, flouted.
The weather was hot and dry that morning, as it often was in their particular corner of the Ausez Steppes. The sun sat low in the cloudless sky, but its intensity was still such that it left father and son overwarm and uncomfortable as they stretched belly-down with no cover to speak of in a field outside of Irikuum. A gentle breeze offered reprieve, sending the grasses around them into rippling motion, like Kalee’s driest ocean. Qymaen’s father bit back an oath on reflex. They were downwind; normally a breeze such as that thwarted a hunt in a hurry.
But in this instance, their quarry was not juleem or pakozri. Instead, a hundred meters away, a round wooden target lay against the shell of an abandoned wagon missing half its wheels. Sun-faded pigment painted rings on the target’s surface, and neatly centered holes from old slugs boasted the talents of marksmen past.
A loud BANG cracked the stale air. Several tumu took wing in squawking protest, scolding the two Kaleesh sprawled below.
Qymaen lowered his rifle, shoulders sagging. “I missed again.”
His father peered over. “Why do you think you missed?”
“I don’t know.” Qymaen slumped deeper into the grass, willing himself to sink out of sight of his father’s assured disappointment. His father, the best shot in Irikuum. “I’m just bad at it.”
Kishar jai Immartu may have been the best rifleman in their village, but he had achieved his status through immense patience—and such patience extended to his attitude in all facets of life, including training. “You can’t know that yet,” he told Qymaen. “You’ve only just begun learning. Now,” he added, offering his son a playful bump with his elbow, “if you had been shooting for over twenty years and missed a shot like that, then I’d say you were bad at it.”
Qymaen received the elbow with an unhappy grunt.
Kishar sobered. “Let me help you see what you’re doing wrong. Try again.”
He watched as Qymaen reluctantly lifted the old rifle and aligned its scope with one squinting eye. Kishar tried to focus past how small Qymaen’s hands were—too small, too young—tiny russet fingers supporting the weapon’s weight at the forestock, tightening around the trigger, tense with nerves and with the overzealous gulp of air Qymaen sucked into his lungs and—
BANG.
Another miss.
“You’re holding your breath,” Kishar said.
Qymaen flung his rifle to the ground, all too aware of the tantrum it resembled, and too late to stop himself. “I have to! Everything gets all shaky when I breathe!”
Kishar squeezed his son’s nearest shoulder. “Your instincts are right; you shouldn’t be breathing when you shoot. But what you’re doing is taking the air into your lungs and holding it there. That creates tension, and tension is as much an enemy to a marksman as the Huk.” He spat the word as if the taste of it offended him, but quickly shook off his ill feelings and focused on setting an example for his son. “You must relax. Release the air, and shoot when it’s gone and no longer on your mind. Like this.”
He demonstrated with his own Outland rifle, exhaling before his clawed finger pressured the trigger. The slug buried itself dead center in the target.
Qymaen gaped. Never had he witnessed his father’s skills in action so clearly. Only once before, in the dark of the night, when he had crept aboveground to see the village warriors fight off the invaders during one of their awful raids. A brief, wistful prayer to the ancestors flitted through his mind, a plea for even a shred of his father’s mastery. Just enough to hit the stupid target, he clarified. Let me show him I can help fight the Huk.
“Now you,” said Kishar.
Qymaen settled in the grass, sighting the target through the scope. The reticle shivered as he drew a deep breath, distracting, nerve-ruinous. He closed his eyes, breathing out his self-sabotaging tension, his anxiety that he would fail his father, his fear that he would not be able to protect himself when the Huk came to steal him away, too—and released everything in a smooth wave. Even his finger felt like liquid as it rolled over the trigger. He opened his eyes in time to see splinters of wood erupt outward as his slug clipped the edge of the distant target and slammed into the side of the cart.
Kishar smiled.
Qymaen, however, was determined to do better. He ran through the motions once more—aim, inhale, exhale, relax, fire—and grinned in satisfaction when the slug burrowed into the second innermost ring of the target, a finger’s-length from his father’s shot. He started to beam up at his father, then hastily squashed his childish excitement. His father hadn’t been grinning like a fool when he hit the center of the target. He settled for trying to appear unmoved, yet confident.
Kishar bit back a laugh as his son’s expression went through a journey equivalent to a pilgrimage to Shrupak. He didn’t want to diminish the moment. “Very good,” he said, placing a hand on Qymaen’s head and fondly tousling his locked hair where it was tied at the base of his skull. “See? Not so bad, after all. You might even have a talent for this.”
Qymaen batted his father’s hand away with a good-natured flail. “I want to keep practicing.”
“Mm, I think that’s enough for today, little Sheelal. You’ll tire yourself out if you do this too often.”
“But I’m just lying here,” Qymaen protested.
“Not anymore, you aren’t.” Kishar pushed himself to his feet, scooping his son into his muscular arms with ease as he stood. Kishar brandished the scrawny boy as if offering him up to the ancestors—Qymaen squirmed and shouted his righteous indignation—before tossing him harmlessly aside. “Go see what your friends are up to.”
It wasn’t the most graceful of landings, but, after a quick dusting of his tunic and breeches and a rather offended glance tossed over his shoulder, Qymaen scrambled toward the village.
Kishar watched him go, his smile fading.
They preferred to take women and children, cruel and painstaking in their selection of slaves, choosing those too weak and too young to fight. The men they would also take, given the opportunity, but many men—warriors or not—fought back, and those who fought back were butchered. And then there were the rumors, the unspeakable whispers trickling on the winds that blew from the Huk colonies on Kalee—winds thick with the stink of atrocities Kishar could not think of without revulsion crawling its way from his queasy stomach up his throat. No father should have to consider what fate he preferred befall his own son, and yet, as Kishar stooped to gather the rifles, he knew his preference had already, irrevocably guided his actions. He had decided to teach his son how to shoot. Now, Qymaen could fight back.
Now, Qymaen could die.
Better to die free, Kishar thought, swallowing the heartsick lump that formed in his throat. But no. He was alone now, with no Qymaen to worry over his vulnerable spill of tears. He let them flow, relishing the momentary privacy of his sorrow—remembering that night—remembering Shahulla.
He wondered if he would mourn her less had she been killed.
His tears dried quickly in the dry heat, gone by the time he trudged his way past the low outer wall and into Irikuum. The rare, precious sound of children laughing drifted through the village streets, comfortingly near. Nothing was ever distant in Irikuum, a clutch of clay and cloth huts huddled in their valley like eggs in a nest, the last bastion of civilization before the grasses of the Ausez Steppes languished and gave way to the hostile desert lands. Family was never far. Kishar was certain he could hear his son’s voice carrying over the indistinct clamor from the other children, demanding their attention. It was enough to make him smile.
“It’s early, Kishar. Out shooting?”
Kishar looked over, startled, to find his cousin leaning out the window of his hut, the opening scarcely big enough to house his burly frame. Not that early, he thought, noting the continued, muted commotion of whatever play the children were engaged in. He suspected Xansis knew exactly what he had been up to, standing there in his partial hunting leathers, his limbs wrapped for protection, dulhlava shielding his scalp from the sun’s ire, toting not one, but two rifles. He explained anyway. “Good morning, Xansis. Teaching Qymaen how to handle himself.”
Xansis jai Sumur sighed, crestfallen, and immediately gave voice to Kishar’s misgivings. “He’s so young.”
“Not much younger than Zaebar was when you taught him how to use a Lig sword,” said Kishar, clinging to the rationalization.
Xansis grunted his agreement, though his yellow eyes continued to reflect the painful regret of every parent in the village. “I wish we could let our children be children for a little longer.”
Strange to find himself speaking in defense of what made him feel so wretched. Kishar met his cousin’s sad eyes and spoke firmly. “The Huk have denied us that luxury. Our children must learn how to protect themselves.”
“I know. I know this. I only…I wish…”
“So do I.”
The cousins stood together another minute or two, ears tilted to the wind, listening to their children.
A few streets away, the children engaged in the sort of disorganized play peculiar to a group of younglings absent an authority figure to guide them in a structured game, or to prevent them from making self-injurious decisions. The eldest children in the group tossed a juleem-hide ball back and forth, ignoring a younger boy as he stood in the middle of their game, whining and stretching to intercept the ball. Two others alternated between drawing in the dirt with sticks, and whacking each other with said sticks when their differences couldn’t be resolved through art. The rest of the children clambered around on the nearest huts and walls, some more successfully than others. Qymaen himself straddled the apex of the tallest structure at their disposal, the archway that framed the village’s southern entrance, the direction from which Irikuum most saw travelers and traders.
Qymaen scanned the horizon, wishing he still had his great-elder-mother’s rifle. Far became near when he looked through the scope; untouchable became touchable with a squeeze of his finger. It was like tricking time and space. It was a trick he sorely wanted to show the Huk.
“See any Huk sneaking up on us?” one of the other children called up from the base of the arch.
“No,” replied Qymaen. “But they don’t sneak. They come from the sky.”
“What if they sneak up on us from the sky?” wondered another.
One of the older children tossed the ball up and down and snorted. “That’s stupid. They can’t do that. The sky’s right there. We’d see them.”
Qymaen sighed and lifted his voice importantly. “I told you, they don’t sneak. They don’t have to. They got better weapons than us, so why would they? It’s our slugthrowers against their blasters. They just show up and attack.” He leaned over the arch, seeking his cousin. “Right, Zaebar?”
Zaebar jai Statziga looked much like his father, orange as sandstone and with a heavy brow that gave him an air of permanent pessimism. The eldest of the children present, he stood straight and a head taller than the rest as he caught the ball and glanced up at Qymaen. “He’s right. You all have to hide in the cellars when the Huk raiders show up. I’ve seen what happens aboveground.”
“I know what happens during raids,” said Qymaen, not to be outdone. “They have nets that zap you like lightning so you can’t move.”
Zaebar rolled his eyes. “They’re called electro nets.”
But all ears turned to Qymaen, more nervous and impressed by his turn of phrase than by Zaebar’s technical truths.
“Lightning?”
“They sound scary.”
“They should sound scary,” stressed Qymaen, his landing kicking up a perimeter of dust as he dropped into their midst. He spoke earnestly and with animated gestures, not trying to be cruel, but enjoying the attention. “They wrap you up and drag you away so no one will ever see you again. If you’re old enough, the Huk make you into their slaves. If you’re too little...” He paused for effect, then put his hands up to his mouth, intimating a much larger set of jaws than his own that clamped shut, his netted claws forming its sharp teeth.
While most of the children had gathered around Qymaen to listen, Zaebar stood away from the group, mouth twisted in annoyance. His eyes flicked from his cousin’s posturing to the tearful expressions on the other young faces, and finally he cut in, challenging, “You’re not supposed to be up here during raids, Qymaen. So when did you even see an electro net? When they took your mother away?”
A shocked hush fell over the group. Both Qymaen and Zaebar looked stricken: Qymaen as if he’d been slapped in the face, Zaebar wishing he’d swallowed his tongue instead of blurting what he had.
Qymaen couldn’t find his breath to respond. As unbidden memories swarmed his senses—frantic hands gripping his upper arms and shoving him into the darkness of an alcove, the cacophonous chitter from horrible mandibles, the spitting, flame-bright sizzle of electro nets, the wail rising above it all—he realized he didn’t want to respond.
“Qy, wait—” Zaebar began, clutching the ball to his chest, ears pinned back in distress.
But Qymaen was already running, his head ducked to hide his tears.
He didn’t stop until he reached his family’s hut, hide and cloth panels decorated with clan-specific designs to distinguish it from the others, Jai Clan sigil painted with red-bold prominence above the front door frame. He burst through that door, ready to barge his way through the main circular chamber to the hanging cloth that separated the living space from their sleeping quarters, the Jai Clan sigil also stitched into its surface. His pace stuttered at the sight of his father, seated at the workbench with his back to the door, wiping down his rifle with a square of cloth. Too late to downplay his dramatic entrance. His father started and twisted on his stool to face the door, eyes darting up and down as he inspected his son for harm. They lingered on Qymaen’s face. Qymaen gave his cheeks a self-conscious swipe of his wrist, hoping the wetness wasn’t too noticeable.
Kishar nodded toward Qymaen’s rifle, propped against the side of the workbench. “Do you want to help me clean these?”
Maybe a distraction would be better than hiding under his covers, trying to smother the lingering impressions of chittering Huk and buzzing electro nets. “Yeah.”
He crossed the room, stepping carefully around the central hearth and the cushions that served as seating for family during meals and for entertaining guests. It was too early in the day to light the fire, and the curtains were drawn to preserve the relative morning cool of their home, but small lamps situated around the room provided plenty of light to go about their chores. Even without the lamps, Qymaen knew he could still see well enough to navigate the hut as well as a musnaka hunting in a burrow, but his father had explained that even Kaleesh eyes could grow tired and weak with too little light. Indeed, Kishar turned up the nearest lamp when Qymaen dragged the second stool beside him and picked up his rifle.
Kishar studied his son, who began to disassemble his weapon as he’d been taught, but his attention trained on his still-damp cheekbones. “What upset you?” he asked after a moment. “One of the children?”
“It’s nothing,” said Qymaen quietly, and despite the obvious lie, Kishar didn’t push him for more.
They worked together in silence for another minute. Soon, Kishar moved the cleaning jar closer to the edge of the table, and, soaking a fresh rag in the clear liquid, Qymaen tended to every metal surface of his weapon with a delicacy he rarely otherwise possessed. Everything about the old slugthrower encouraged him to settle the fire in his soul by necessity—don’t breathe, don’t shake, don’t grip too hard, be precise, be vigilant, think before you shoot—and it bled into his careful ministrations.
“You’re doing very well,” Kishar said at length, unable to contain his pride. “Your great-elder-mother’s rifle will last for many more years to come, under your care.”
Qymaen spoke without looking up. “If we go to the Huk colonies and fight them there, do you think we can rescue Mother?”
Kishar dropped his disassembled scope. It bounced off his thigh and clattered to the ground, forgotten, as he stared blankly down at his son. “What?”
“She’s not dead. They have her. We can save her if we attack them, like—like the freedom fighters in Urukishnugal.”
“It’s not that simple, little Sheelal,” said Kishar, grasping for rational words and a calm demeanor. “We have to protect Irikuum.”
Qymaen’s hands twisted around the barrel of his rifle. “You mean we have to keep hiding. Like children in the cellar.”
Kishar didn’t miss his son’s frustration. His own tone sharpened as he set his rifle down on the workbench with a clunk. “No, Qymaen, we are surviving. Listen to me. Do you know the village of Ganaugaa?”
“No…”
“Because it was gutted by the Huk. Everyone who once lived there has been killed or enslaved.” Kishar’s breath grew quick as his pulse rose and blood ran hot. He could already see the dread in his son’s eyes, but he pressed on, fueled by his desperation to impart this vital lesson. “It is an empty shell, silent of souls, shunned by the gods, and it is because its people didn’t prepare themselves. We are prepared, we will stand our ground, and we will not abandon Irikuum to the same fate by running off on wild, useless missions that risk what few warriors we have left. Do you understand me?”
Qymaen’s expression crumpled as he tried and failed to contain his tears for the second time that morning. “I...I just miss her.”
His father’s heart was still thudding as Qymaen was pulled into a hug tight with regret. Powerful pheromones flooded their nostrils, washing one another in the scent of their shared heartache. Under other circumstances, their kuu-lir should have brought comfort. Now, it only served to remind them that a third scent was missing from their home, never to be restored.
“So do I,” Kishar managed to say before grief choked him.
—
The raiders came again, two months after that day.
Evening deepened to black night, but the streets of Irikuum were awash with red blaster fire and the blue-white crackle of electro nets and shock grenades. In the flashes of light, blades clashed, the metal of Kaleesh Lig swords crossing the organic chitin of serrated Huk forearms.
Below the fight, where dirt-packed walls muffled the sound from the surface, a group of Kaleesh women and children huddled around a single dim lamp. The women held the children close, veils masking their fearful expressions. They listened to the skirmish above and shuddered.
“Are they going to find us?” asked a child in a hushed voice.
“Ancestors willing, no,” said one of the women.
“Our warriors will drive them off,” chimed in another, her anxious gaze fixed on the ceiling of the cellar, waiting for any indication that the invaders had entered their hut and unearthed the cellar trapdoor under the patterned rug. “They always do.”
A faint bellow of agony sent several of the children whimpering, and their aunts and mothers shushed them, gathering their small bodies into their laps, nuzzling foreheads to settle their fears with comforting kuu-lir.
One of the younger children squirmed and began to cry more intensely, despite her mother’s attempts to console her.
“Shh, Dari, shh. Please. It’s all right, but we must be quiet.”
“Keep it down…”
“Dari, what’s wrong?”
“W-where’s Qymaen?” the little girl wept, stretching her hands out toward the space where her playmate should have been.
The women all turned in different directions and scanned the cellar. Qymaen was nowhere to be seen. They knew he was old enough that he needn’t be fetched and carried bodily down to the cellar with the younger children; he should have come on his own. They also knew his father was currently teaching him how to use a slugthrower, though Kishar had insisted, repeatedly and at length, that Qymaen was not yet ready to fight with the older warriors.
Dari’s mother’s eyes grew wide.
“Oh, no.”
Aboveground, flames erupted as the Huk set fire to the nearest plot of farmland to the village. Farming was difficult enough in the dry valley without their enemies undoing all of their hard work, and a collective cry of outrage and dismay went up from the warriors and villagers who could see the fire as it began to consume the entire crop. Atop the granary, flat on his back with his rifle clutched to his chest, Qymaen could practically feel the heat of the blaze.
It’s safe up here, he told himself, squeezing his eyes shut, as if the flames would disappear along with his vision. Father told me what happened before. No more grass between the crop and the village wall. The fire won’t spread. It’s safe.
But the fire was hardly the only danger, and his hands tightened with instinctive terror around his weapon when a rhythmic chittering thrummed through the night air, painfully loud. It was impossible to say how many Huk there were or how close they were to the granary; that was part of their typical strategy, it seemed, to create so much noise that their enemies had trouble counting their numbers or gauging their proximity. Qymaen forced his eyes open, if only to confirm that none had discovered his hiding place on the roof of the granary, and were not now looming over him with death in their bulbous, multifaceted eyes. Thanking the ancestors that he was as yet undiscovered, and offering them an apology for his unmasked face in the thick of battle, he rolled onto his stomach, fought to control his panicked breaths, and lined the scope of his rifle with his eye.
They were there in the streets below, hulking silhouettes given intermittent form and clarity during the pulses of blaster fire and the discharge of shock grenades. The Huk were tall, taller than the Kaleesh, insectoid monstrosities with leering mouths set in wedge-like heads and forelimbs that ended in barbed, serrated blades capable of slicing a warrior’s head from his shoulders. Not all of the Huk had these terrible cutting limbs; perhaps a third of them had arms that terminated in grasping fingers, granting them the dexterity to fire their blasters and pilot their starships.
They were called the Yam’rii, it was said, by those who had lived to learn such a thing and pass the knowledge along. But here in the Ausez Steppes, they were the Huk—soulless bugs—a vile, offworld pestilence that had overrun Kalee and left devastation and broken homes in their wake.
Qymaen saw them, saw that they had the upper hand. A Huk fought with Chieftain Xansis, his father’s cousin, a mountain of a man even alongside his towering opponent, both his swinging Lig sword and painted kakmusme gleaming in Qymaen’s scope. Another Huk hauled a villager who clutched a boneknife through the window of his hut, threw him to the ground and shot him through the head with a blaster before his victim or Qymaen could do more than flinch. Two others worked together to drag an electro net behind them, weighed down with unconscious captives—boys he recognized as not much older than himself, old enough to fight, but apparently young enough for the Huk to feel confident in capturing. This was why the Huk did not simply bombard villages with plasma from their starships, why they carried out their small, controlled, selective raids. They didn’t wish to simply kill and destroy all in their path. They wanted Kaleesh, and they took care to weed out those they deemed easy for the taking.
He mumbled under his breath as he sought his targets, hardly aware he was doing so. “They can’t see me. They can’t see me. I can see them. All of them. One, two, three...six...seven…”
A Huk cornered a villager, disarming him. The villager pressed his back to a wall.
For how petrified he was, Qymaen should have been shaking. And yet, the terror never surfaced, never made it past the wall he had unconsciously erected in his mind. On one side of the dam churned his fears, sickening and steeped in hysteria; on the other lay a sea of serenity, where a single ripple could secure his full focus.
The Huk lifted its blaster. A ripple on still waters.
“Don’t breathe,” Qymaen whispered through a slow, steady exhalation, and, when the breath was gone, he squeezed the trigger.
The Huk’s eyes fell vacant as a high-velocity slug ripped through its head in a spray of green blood. It dropped its blaster and collapsed on the spot. The Kaleesh villager looked swiftly around for his savior, and, spotting no one, simply picked up the Huk’s weapon and took off down the street to find another raider.
One of the Huk lugging an electro net cried out and clapped a three-fingered hand over its wounded shoulder before almost immediately taking a slug to the head. Its companion stumbled, whipping out a blaster and seeking an enemy, before it, too, dropped from a headshot.
Meanwhile, Kishar swore to himself, wishing he had taken the time to find a vantage point and fight the Huk on his own terms. Instead, he found himself oscillating between giving chase and being chased, darting around on the streets and inevitably rounding corners to find himself face-to-face with yet another Huk, inasmuch as a Huk’s repulsive physiognomy could be called a face. With a bayonet affixed to his rifle, he held his own in close-quarters combat, though a few scythe-arms glanced off the protective surface of his mumuu kakmusme and rattled his skull.
Fresh from a point-blank shot straight to the thorax of a Huk, Kishar rounded yet another corner feeling exultant. His satisfaction shattered in a gut-roiling instant when he spotted Xansis before him, in that moment staggering backward with a deep gash splitting leather and flesh across his chest.
Kishar raised his rifle, aiming at the face of the Huk who had struck down his cousin, and flinched when the glittering red eye centered in his scope erupted before he could pull the trigger. Startled, he cast a quick glance around, following the trajectory of the shot. A glint from the roof of the granary caught his notice, and he spared the unknown rifleman a nod before rushing to his fallen cousin’s side.
He knew a death blow when he saw it. Xansis’ tunic and leather armor were drenched in blood, and, as Kishar knelt and gathered him into his arms, he realized no new blood was pumping forth from the wound. Kishar bowed his head.
A series of sharp, rapid clicks supplanted the chittering noise that had underscored most of the battle unabated. The Kaleesh soon deciphered its meaning—the Huk were turning, retreating, fleeing. Electro nets and would-be slaves were left abandoned in the streets as they scurried on spindly legs to where their starship awaited them outside of Irikuum, on the opposite end of the burning farmland. As they sprinted past the outer wall and into the tall grasses, one of the Huk appeared to trip to the sound of an echoing clap of another rifle shot.
A hooting cry of triumph resounded through the village as the Huk’s ship swooped across the valley and up into the star-scattered sky.
Soon, the villagers of Irikuum were all finding each other in the night, reuniting with those who survived, mourning those who were lost. Many worked together to ferry buckets from the well to the perimeter of the smoldering, destroyed farm to ensure the flames didn’t creep any closer to the village proper. While a warrior used a blade to cut captives free of a discarded electro net, Kishar sought out his son, growing increasingly frantic when he didn’t emerge with the women and children from their hiding spots.
Just as he steeled himself for the worst possible scenario—to check beneath the masks of bodies the Huk left behind—he spotted a small, skinny figure climbing down the ladder at the granary, rifle lashed safely to his back to give him full control of his descent. Even from this distance, he saw that Qymaen needed every hand he could spare as he wobbled and pitched on each rung.
Qymaen, on the ground again and no less dizzy for it, leaned against a hut wall to collect himself and try to calm his breathing. The tranquility he’d summoned during the shootout had evaporated the moment it was all over, leaving him with every residual fear he’d managed to bury. He closed his eyes and tried to remember a prayer the Malga had taught him, a prayer for the peace of one’s soul, but it was futile to think at the moment. It felt like he was going to shake apart from the inside out.
Hands grabbed his shoulders and his eyes flew open with a gasp. Peering down at him was a familiar sight—his father’s kakmusme, a bonemask shaped from a mumuu’s skull and painted red with the Jai Clan’s sigil. Qymaen exhaled a breathy laugh, weak with relief.
Kishar squeezed his son’s shoulders. “You were supposed to stay below,” he said, stern but equally relieved.
“I’m sorry.” Qymaen barely got the words out. “I...I wanted to help.”
His father pulled him into a tight hug, then, which finally began to persuade the both of them to relax. The spool of tension in Kishar’s chest unwound as he breathed his son’s scent, and Qymaen, completely enveloped in warm arms and pressed up against the musk of old leather, began taking slower, deeper lungfuls of air. “How many did you fell?” Kishar asked at length.
“Seven,” came the muffled reply.
Kishar drew back. “Seven!”
Qymaen gauged his father’s reaction and, seeing as he didn’t appear too upset about him venturing aboveground to fight, decided it was all right to boast a bit. “All in the head.”
“Well, I am most impressed, little Sheelal,” Kishar couldn’t help but chuckle with pride, scrambling his son’s locked hair.
Qymaen almost smiled, squirming a little at the gesture, but his face fell as a memory came back to him. “I tried to help Chieftain Xansis. Was I too late?”
His father sobered in an instant. “My cousin has gone to join the ancestors,” he said, keeping his speech formal lest he dwell too deeply upon the loss. “He died well, in battle.”
Qymaen bowed his head. “What will Zaebar and his mother do? Should they stay with us? We have room.”
Kishar felt another slight swell of pride. His son, forever thinking of others, aggressively helpful. “They will probably live with Malga Shapra for now. She is his sister, after all.”
“I thought no one else could live in the Malga’s home?”
“He may take no wives. Family is fine.” Kishar returned his hand to Qymaen’s head, stroking gently. “Don’t worry. Zaebar will still be well cared for. I will also be sure to look after him.”
“But what about the chieftain? Every village needs a chieftain. Who—who’s going to be…?” A jaw-cracking yawn interrupted his train of thought and he almost slumped on the spot.
Kishar recognized the fatigue that often followed a battle rush; it was no wonder it struck Qymaen so severely, if his still-trembling hands and knees were any indication. “That’s a burden for tomorrow,” he told his son, slipping an arm around him for support. “For now, let’s get you home so you can rest.”
“I’m not tired,” Qymaen mumbled.
A fist of dismay clenched Kishar’s throat. Seven Huk dead by Qymaen’s hand, and yet here his son drooped under his arm, a boy who protested his bedtime like any other sleepy child who stayed up too late.
Just a child.
But it was too late to go back, to take back his slugthrower lessons, to roll back time to a life before the Huk arrived. Time marched on, bloody and inevitable.
“Even warriors need their sleep,” Kishar said, forcing the sadness from his voice, “and you’ve had a long night, little Sheelal.”