"Kazul," Ru said after having made his way to her through the crowd milling around the practice sandy practice arena.
Some few lions whose attention had remained on him after his last bout might have noted how he rubbed his head against her flank and licked her cheek tenderly as though accustomed to doing so, and how the two seemed for a moment to belong together so much that everyone else around them was excluded. If their attention lingered and they watched the pair surreptitiously, it was because they were interested in seeing how Ru would react to Kazul's pregnancy.
And he reacted with widened eyes and an unspoken question that was asked with merely a glance and a quick caress. At his tenderness Kazul shivered - almost flinched - but she made herself continue to hold his gaze. She was the daughter of the warlord and the high priestess, a Stormborn lioness. She would not be shamed.
In fact, the golden eyed lioness even forced herself to smirk and respond to his query with a light, almost pithy air. "No. You needn't worry that I'll lay this at your door. It is all my doing and none of yours, after all."
"If not mine..." Somehow he managed to convey a great deal in those three words while still keeping his tone conversational to match hers.
"You were reaving," she said shortly. And then she anticipated his next question from the hardening of his expression and the darkening of his green eyes. "I was not forced."
She watched the news hit him and hurt him. It would have been easier in so many ways to allow him to believe that she had been raped, but she could not tell that lie. Her pride would not permit it. It was better that he hate her for a choice she made freely than pity her for a cowardly lie. Harder, but better. She did not think he would forgive her, and she tried not to care.
This was made easier by the knowledge she held close to her heart like a bitter thorn, reminding her that he had hurt her first. After hearing from her thrall Grovar why it had taken his viking so long to return she had deliberately seduced the god's messenger Thorgnyr and later allowed a married lion to take her in the grass as she gathered herbs to prevent any cubs being born of her one-time fling with Thorgnyr. Obviously that hadn't worked so well.
"I was angry," she said, stepping away from Ru's side even though until she felt him next to her just now she had not really felt warm since the last time they'd been together. The cold seemed all the more unbearable after the brief warmth of his affectionate greeting.
At first Ru was too taken aback by Kazul's declaration that he was not the cause of her pregnancy to do anything more than go along with her casual manner, but now that it was sinking in and he could was aware of her pulling away from him not just physically but emotionally, too, he realized that this was not a conversation they should be having in the middle of the practice arena with countless eyes watching them.
"What did I do?" he asked, clearly confused by her words and trying to hold his temper in check. He began walking back toward his den, which was closer and more likely to be private in the hope that committing to action, even if it was not the violent action he would have preferred in this circumstance, would help him curb his temper. It was not, by the way, Kazul he wanted to hurt.
Despite his efforts, there was a bass growl rumbling beneath his words when they reached his den and he asked her, "Who did you decide would make me suffer the most?"
To his surprise Kazul spat an answer back at him almost instantaneously, and it was not the answer he had wanted to hear. He had really, really wanted to learn the name of the lion she had chosen to punish him. Then he wanted to find the lion and thrash him, possibly kill him. At least that was how he felt until Kazul spoke.
"How well did Fen'li and Karm treat you while you were wounded?" she seethed. She was sure that she would regret making the accusation while simultaneously relieved to have been able to give voice to her suspicion at last. She had bit it back when she first greeted Ru upon his return, waiting for him to say something first.
"They didn't," he said, suddenly more bewildered than belligerent. "They...I wasn't even injured. That was Vol. Did you think...?"
Kazul's stomach turned in a manner that was related in no way to her pregnancy as it dawned on her that she had been acting all this time under a serious misapprehension, and that she had been misinformed. Grovar, she thought wearily.
"Ru," she interrupted. She needed to hear him say that nothing had happened. She might not have deserved to hear the consoling words, but she craved them. Besides, they wouldn't come as that much of a consolation to her. Hearing that he did not prefer Karm and Fen'li to her would only torment her with the knowledge of how badly she'd erred. Recognizing how much this would hurt, she barely managed to whisper, "Nothing happened, did it?"
"Nothing," he told her wearily. He could imagine what she must have thought, and from there it was not difficult for him to puzzle out how she had come to be in her present condition. That didn't make it hurt any less, but it had robbed him of his anger.
Kazul nodded and took a step backward toward the mouth of Ru's den. Her posture told him that she was fantasizing about fleeing, and he wouldn't blame her, but once more she startled him. She stood her ground and continued to meet his eyes.
"It was a very long viking," he said, speaking formally and awkwardly. His words were tangling up in his mind as they used to do when he was a cub.
"It was," she agreed. And then, speaking so softly he couldn't actually make out her words, she added, "I have missed you so very much."
"What?"
"I'm so glad you're home safely, Ru. Be welcome. I hope I will have the opportunity to learn what really happened someday."
And then, at last, Kazul did depart, but her departure was not flight. She had a thrall to punish. Upon her departure Ru slumped onto his sleeping furs. This was not the homecoming he had expected.
wc: 1,118
