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both literally and figuratively.
“But why this Clutch and why this clan, aosogi-via?” Tansan repeated softly.
I felt my nostrils flare and I stifled the urge to clench my hands into fists. “Xxamer Zu is nothing but salt pans and drought,” I murmured. “All Malacarites know of it, and none with any choice would seek a life here; that’s why we chose this Clutch. And this clan? Because you’re far from bayen eyes. Nothing more. But there’ll be other clans on this Clutch’s outskirts; I think we’ll join one of those in stead, yes?”
I held out my hand for the dowry-sword, and the man who was holding it looked alarmed. There was a brief flurry of Djimbi dialogue amongst them; the dragonmas ter interjected several times, as their tongue was his own. Tansan’s face closed like an orchid in a deluge.
“You will stay,” an elderly man said, taking the dowrysword and clasping it against his forehead. “Your womb will be ours; our seed will be yours. You are arbiyesku now.”
At once the women of the arbiyesku pressed about me, the heat of their dusky skin tangible through my bitoo. Tansan still stood directly before me, immovable, so close that her proud, outthrust breasts brushed against my chest. I don’t like people standing that close, uninvited.
I studied her from within the haven of my cowl as the arbiyesku women murmured kinship greetings and pressed their palms to my womb in ritual welcome. Tansan looked a little over my age—twenty or so. Calm, thoughtful, and confident, she studied me with eyes fringed heavily with black lashes. Her lips were full and stained black like her kin’s, but free of the canker several others suffered. Her broad shoulders were very straight but rounded softly at the ends.
Suddenly she reached up to my cowl and pulled it back. “Let’s see you, hey-o.”
Murmurs and clucks as I was revealed.
I would have snapped my cowl back over my head if not limited in movement and speed by the pain of my frac tured ribs. Instead, I contented myself by openly glaring at Tansan. She ignored my hostility and continued to study me. I felt like a yearling being examined for purchase.
My neck bore a thick scar that ran from the left side of my cheek down to my collarbone, given me by a dragon’s tongue while in Dragonmaster Re’s stables. For the sake of unobstructed vision in Arena combat, I’d chopped my black hair short, as a young boy does. My eyes were heavily bloodshot, and the black of my pupils was marbled with white from past abuse of dragon venom. There wasn’t a square inch of my skin that wasn’t covered by bruises, welts, or oozing scrapes—wounds I’d received in Arena.
The warmth of Tansan’s chest, so close to mine, invaded my breasts and surged to my throat. The dragonmaster fol lowed a group of men to one of the arbiyesku huts to ex change ritual greetings in the privacy of a men’s domicile.
“You’ve had a debu life,” Tansan pronounced. Those about her accepted the observation with calm nods.
Debu. A derogatory Djimbi word for cursed . I’d heard my mother use it, in my youth.
I wanted to slap the certainty from Tansan’s face. Who was she—indecently dressed, in clothes so worn they were all but threadbare—to pronounce my life cursed? How dared she—surrounded by kin and kith, safe from the in sanity of Arena on this far-flung, impoverished Clutch— declare my life damned?
She turned on her heel, arms balanced at her sides, not a tense line in her body, and walked away. Someone touched my wrist: an old woman carrying a baby in a sling. The whorls on the old woman’s loam-brown skin were the color of damp hay, her eyes the color of snails. Her lips and tongue were black from slii stone.
“Come, yes, we’ll give you food, water.”
The women surrounding me showed the good grace not to remark upon my shambling gait. Ahead of us, Tansan walked erect and loose-hipped toward the wooden stairs of a long bamboo-beam-and-woven-jute structure on stilts: the