Blade Kin Read Free

sense of necessity?
    Fava went and lay beside Tull in the boat, setting her head in his lap, and her Neanderthal mind registered more than the heat of his body.
    To her, it seemed that love flowed out of him, touching her, caressing her. Yet when she looked up into his face, he seemed distant, preoccupied.
    Though his yellow eyes were set deep under his brows like those of a Pwi, Tull was half human. Father says that Tull needs to free himself, Fava thought, but from what?
    Fava could not imagine what ideas circled within his head, so she asked, “What are you thinking about?”
    Tull opened his mouth as if to speak, then seemed to change the subject. “I’ve been thinking about building another room to my hogan, digging back into the hill the way that your father did, but now I’m not so sure. I think I would like to build a bigger house, perhaps north of town.”
    For a moment Fava was at a loss for words. Among her Pwi ancestors, it had always been the woman who built the hogan, and it was therefore the woman’s job to decide whether it should be enlarged, what it should contain.
    But the Pwi of Smilodon Bay had lived near humans for over a century, and among the humans, the home was considered the property of both husband and wife. “Your hogan will be big enough for us,” she assured him.
    “It will be fine for two, but I never meant it for three. With Wayan there, we will always be stepping on each other’s toes. We’ll hardly have room to turn around, and my land doesn’t offer much space to enlarge.”
    Fava supposed he would see the hogan as small. Tull was a big man. “We can wait until summer to build,” Fava said. “If we have to squeeze tight until then, we will just have to suffer.”
    She hugged him, leaning into him with her weight, and he turned his attention from the rudder, kissed her passionately.
    Tull laughed. “I think we’ll have children soon. You’ll need a big house, and you should have the best. You should have a house bigger than the mayor’s, more elegant than the Altairs’ old mansion.”
    “We don’t need a big house,” Fava said. “I just want to be cozy.”
    Tull touched her lips with his finger. He pulled her hand to his mouth, kissed her knuckles. Fava slid a leg over him, pushed Tull back down into the boat. He held the rudder loosely and laughed.
    After a long slow kiss she crouched over him on her palms so that her breasts filled her tunic as they dangled above his chest.
    “Tonight, you will sleep between my legs,” Fava whispered. “Ah, Tell-zhoka-faan! Ah, zhoka-pwichazai! ” Tull, give me love that will give me peace! Give me the love that makes people wild!
    Tull trembled slightly. She could feel him, warm between her legs, quivering. She whispered in Pwi, “Ah, poor little mouse, to shake so badly.” She grabbed his sable-red hair, a handful on each side of his temples, and pulled him up to kiss him.
    He hugged her, body and soul, so that she was sure that for the moment he could think of nothing but her.
    Fava silently cursed the woman who had spoken the words “replacement wife,” causing the worms of fear to burrow into her head.

    A cool wind swept from the north that afternoon as they reached the atoll. The honeymoon cabin, among fir trees on a hill, was not built for chill weather, for most Pwi couples married in midsummer, after the crops were planted and before the harvest.
    So Fava set a fire while Tull made trips down to the boat to get food, clothing and warm furs. Fava put a bearskin out before the roaring fire, and on Tull’s last trip, she stripped and wrapped herself in a new blanket.
    The kwea—the sum of the emotions—of the time was strong, as if the goddess Zhofwa herself were in the room, yet Fava still felt unsure. She whispered a prayer softly, “Zhofwa, bringer of love, blow your kisses on Tull. Make him love me. Make him love me.”
    Outside in the bushes, she could hear little sparrows twitting and jumping, and overhead the