-3 Niala- Present Day

That faraway look settled in Kiromir's eyes. He sat, thinking.

He let an easy grin spread over his face as the motorhome roared to life. It would make another six or so thousand miles this year, like every year. The musty and cozy insides smelled of memories that I'd never forgotten and some that I would rather.

I climbed aboard the motorhome as he got out to check under the hood again; it teemed with dust and disarray. We were leaving tomorrow, and it needed a lot of TLC before we left. There were still dirty dishes in the sink from last year, and I wrinkled my nose.

"Ada! This is gross."

"If you don't like it, do something about it." He stepped up and inside as the motorhome lurched from his grip at the door. He pulled his looming frame all in and glared at me. I stumbled and hit my head on the edge of a hanging shelf. I stood too tall to be inside of it much. If I stood too tall, Kiromir had to be. He loomed far over six-foot-tall, compared to my own five foot ten. I considered myself about average height for our women, if not a little on the short side. Kiromir leaned further on the tall side, and the only one taller than him had to be Thanus. Kiromir’s body stretched thin and bore wiry, taut, corded muscles. I don't know how he managed to look the way he did with a father as broad and large as Lowak. Not being a bulky person myself made training me much more manageable. My body favored speed over strength.

I turned to him with an armload of dishes. "What does it look like I'm doing?"

He looked me up and down with a smirk. "Look at you, nesting."

His smirk changed when he saw what I had just taken in. He grimaced and wrinkled his nose. I shot him a glare. I'd be damned if they made a kept woman when I found a bondmate. I had earned my keep as a blooded warrior, not a ‘domestic.’

"I’ll have it ready before dawn.” I didn’t like his comment, but he no more wanted me to become a nesting housewife than I wanted to be one. Domestic life suited many of the women and men in our flocks, but not me. Other women fought at our sides, but many had left to join other tribes or retired to care for their children over time. Strong warriors found bondmates easily, usually.

He grinned at me, his toothy, flat smile flashing. I could see why people were afraid of him. Something predatory lurked in his appearance, severe and sharp. He disembarked, and I felt the motorhome shake as his weight lifted from the frame. My tongue unconsciously prodded to my own teeth, long, ridged, and sharp in my mouth. The wildlings had shorter and rounder ones. I had short memories of my father and mother, and I recall their teeth being shorter. I tended not to open my mouth much because of it.

I stepped out of the RV to face the common grounds. A little one ran across the flatland before our barracks where we usually played soccer, or what they called soccer, at least. Some might call it rugby, but it involved a lot more fists—it always just devolved into a dozen or so of us fighting over a ball. The child’s newly downed wings were ragged and hanging from his back in the open in broad daylight. A woman chased him close in tow, shouting for him to put them away as shedding spring down drifted behind him. He wasn’t old enough to understand fully yet. I know I didn’t understand when I had been that age. Maybe that’s the reason why they had found me that way.

Bare backs and open shirts glinted as far as I could see. Their ikris brandings marked them all in a unified sigil of being Wildling. Though I called myself Wildling, my ikris were different. Most things about me looked different.

I walked to Kiromir’s home and tossed the dishes through the grousing window.

Look who gets to be the housewife now.

I’d wash them later, but I would relish hearing Kiromir try not to yell at me.

He had one of the larger units, a home that I missed. I caught myself about to go inside and stopped. I kept having to remember that I didn’t live there with him. I had my own quarters. It’d been two years, and I still occasionally caught myself calling his house my home.

When boys and girls started shifting into adulthood at around fourteen or fifteen, they pushed us into our own barracks. The elders decided when, and I never asked for it like a lot of kids did. I liked living with Kiromir. Having him close by eased my night terrors. They said it had been designed to promote independence. They called me independent in some ways and too dependent in others.

I stumbled across the field over the flats of demolished buildings that left nothing behind but chipped rough concrete foundations and towards a towering stone structure built and buried into the side of a hill. My rough-hewn room had pocked stone walls that glistened with dew and had that everpresent scent of moss and old cement. The floral green fuzz grew at the edges of what they called a ‘window.’ It consisted of a series of four 3-inch-wide slats that went through the concrete to the world outside. I tethered what passed for a curtain on a wire above them to keep the prying eyes of the boys out, for all the good it did since there it lacked glass. We weren’t inherently sexual creatures, not with how we worked, but the boys had started to become ‘aware,’ and I was exotic novelty, something unrelated to them. They liked looking at my tattoos, my ‘ikris’ brand, and my wings. They enjoyed looking at more sometimes, too, but it was always in the way of ‘we’re supposed to look, right?’ and not actual interest.

There were only five flocks in the US; three stemmed from the same family. There were others scattered in Africa and Mexico. Most flocks were the size of small towns, for the most part. Ours had three-hundred and twenty-five, which is why we traveled. We were small. Though, that would change soon. We had women and men of binding age in our flocks, so we could grow or shrink this year. Our women would leave, and we’d welcome new ones.

The elders spent a lot of time planning and arranging our ‘matching’ when we started reaching ‘the age.’ We would be separated. Girls would be shuffled, and our ‘dating pools’ would be forced until our magic would choose one for us. Kiromir had never found a bondmate, and that wasn’t common, but he had plenty of time to find one. He wasn’t even a hundred years old yet. Even if he had given up, Rolyn hadn’t.

Every year the flocks would travel to trade women, for when a woman bound, she joined her husband’s flock. We would pit the girls of age with the boys to see if they would bind. Brothers and men stayed together for the most part to unify their fighting force. We fought as families. I dreaded the year we traveled, and I didn’t return. I hoped to find my bondmate in Kiromir’s flock. Any one of the unbound men was allowed to court me. I wasn’t related to any of them. But I wasn’t old enough for it yet.

I surveyed the options of boys in the flock, and only one really stood out. I hadn’t managed to ‘connect’ with many of the other boys in my age group. By the time it became a consideration, my life was already mingled too much with his.

At the end of Migration, when I turned fourteen, the elders noticed the boys noticing me a little too much, noticing Kiromir’s protective actions. That’s what triggered my separation. After that, they gave me my room in the barracks, and for the longest time, I felt abandoned.

“You’ll risk her becoming your bondmate!” Someone told Kiromir. Both he and I were repulsed enough to agree to the move, then. He was my ada, my father, despite our lack of blood.

“I think you’re the wrong type for him.” Letti had told me. She had that look in her eyes as if she were implying something dirty. I had clearly not gotten the joke.

For that reason, when I was younger, they wanted to give me to a family, a mother and a father. Kiromir was one of the few that spoke well enough in Anil to communicate with me. He argued the case to keep me as a surrogate father despite all sorts of cruel things said. They called him ‘Jehanni,’ a swan, a Wildling that sought the affection of the same sex. They raised stray children, as Jehanni were obliged to do. Those who did not breed were to help those in need. As far as I knew, their care for family came instinctively, but our only swans were Touk and Ranna. They were hardly a sample size to judge all swans on.

Nevertheless, he never minded a single moment. Since then, we’d been inseparable. He spoke smatterings of Russian and bridged that with their old tongue to patch together communication between us.

I spoke Anil, or at least something close to it back then, and not a word of English. As a child, I had spoken strange words, musical words that still sang in my mind. I also spoke things mixed with Russian words I’d picked up. They’d taught me fluent in English, Anil, and a little Russian since then. Though I didn’t look or sound like everyone else, they accepted me. My existence provided evidence that there were more of us—lost flocks.

I missed those simpler times, and that’s why I looked forward to spending time with Kiromir this year. I slept better when he stayed nearby. He bridged my bond with the language and the Wildlings.

They had me teach the kids when they were young, spreading the language a little more, keeping it from being lost. The kids just didn’t see a need to preserve it, and aside from the elders, Kiromir was the only one that spoke with me fluently. We only spoke Anil at home in private. I knew words and things that sounded similar to Anil, and because of me, they found missing words and meanings. I’d changed the language of the wanderers.

Thanus and Dimal had a decent grasp of it, as two-thirds of the flock did, but Kiromir spoke the language as if it were breathing. Gaffriel, my best friend, didn’t, and I felt guilty over it. He knew so little Anil when we met, and he learned from me so young that it had changed how he spoke. His words were choppy, and he swapped nouns back and forth from what I knew and what Anil was. His grammar switched from my tongue to theirs at random. Eventually, he stopped speaking it with me altogether. Nowadays, I spoke Anil better than my old tongue. His words were broken, though he practiced by himself. He’d kept the music in his meaning, and I liked to listen to him try.

Now, I lived in a drab 12’x12’ cell of a room in the barracks. I had made it my own with some spray paint on the walls, a rug of some obscene color pattern that I had dredged from a bin, a backless stool with a small dresser vanity combo, and my cot in the corner. It had tons of blankets nested over the stretch of canvas. I only ever used a thin blanket on top of me, even in the cold of winter. But, like Kiromir, the cold treated me well. Maybe that meant that my fires would be ice like his own when they finally came in. At sixteen, I was a late bloomer. I feared that maybe I would never get fires.

I grabbed a broom from the corner and adjusted my shirt. I got anxious when my wings were sealed in too long. I let them free with ease, like tissues pulling from a box, sliding out as the feathers rained. I started to shed the last of my winter down and could feel the feathers slipping free of the fans when I shook them. It’d been a few days since I groomed them, and they were a little rough. Summer was coming, and my down always curled when the summer heat was threatening. I hated how slim my wings were after the fluff came out. They fell more plentifully than my usual spring shed.

I kicked at my feathers on the ground as I swept them into the corner across the coarse stone floor. They were curled and rough, but a few of them were presentable enough to take for my hair weaving. I plucked them up and sat at a small stool I kept before my mirror. I unlaced two small leather bands that covered my wrists to reveal a matching reddish patch of glistening skin at the base of each hand. I rolled my wrists a bit to stimulate the glands to bring out the rich oil for my wings. My oil, ‘ault,’ always had a sharp smell of tin. Everyone’s smelled different. I adjusted my seat before the mirror. It helped as I pulled my wings over my shoulder, one by one combing and stroking the fronds together. It helped to zipper the splits back across the black span of them.

I’d never seen a wildling with black in their wings. One of the tribes in Mexico, the Cuervos, had a lot of rich dark greys. I had hazy memories of a long time ago, and I think I recall other colors, bright blue eyes, solid black wings, and more. I couldn’t recall my mother’s face, though I thought I remembered wings, along with my father’s, a long time ago.

My father, I remember his wings, great black things, solid as midnight as they wrapped around me with this bare strip of grey at his secondaries. He shared their warmth. My mother, I barely remember her wings, like a magpie’s with blocks of silver and black. I remember her voice and the haunting melody of a song. Her face came only in blurs now.

She read me poetry and stories. Her favorite book had been a small white book that my father had given her. I was supposed to revere it, and I just recall it all being stories about how much my father loved my mother. My grandfather had given my grandmother the same book. At the time, I had been grossed out by their love. Now I’d do almost anything to hear even one of those stupid stories again.

“I know who you are inside and how you once did not judge me for my scars. As you did not judge me, so shall I shall not judge you for the colors you wear now.” I barely remember that one line.

“Hello, Ni!” A young male voice said, alerting me. Broken from my reverie, I turned as a hand squeezed through my window slat. I pushed my curtain aside to reveal playful hazel eyes and red hair.

Gaffriel.

“Gaff! What if I was changing!?” I snatched the curtain back and abandoned my reverie. I had just a moment before I bolted out of my room to catch him around the front.

“Oh, relax. I wasn’t looking.” His husky voice replied in playful kind, laughter tickling over his tongue. His voice started to deepen recently; the crack abandoned his pubescent tones. I believed him. Even if he hadn’t been trying to peep, he probably wanted to watch me scruff my wings. My cheeks were bright and hot at the thought of it. I’d broken Krell’s wrist last week over less.

I knew it was innocent and teasing. Gaffriel would never intentionally hurt me. We were best friends, after all. But, things kept getting complicated in my head. I started feeling weird around him, and I didn’t like the things stirring in me. He enjoyed watching me blush and spook. I had to kick his ass every time just to save face.

I shot him a sneer as my thin legs pistoned me forward, beating the dirt as my wings instinctively cocked and slid back into my tattoo. They slowed me down at a run. Gaffriel had a decent head start. His freckled bare shoulders were enjoying the first motes of the summer sun on his back. I’d never stared at his back much before. He looked more like a man every day, and the sight wasn’t unwelcome.

I locked my eyes in on the triangle of his back, tapered shoulders slimming down to a taut and knotted slew of muscles. Ew, gross, Niala. He’s Gaffriel. I had to shake the thought of him from my head. I’d make him pay for that. He put strange ideas in me. He shouldn’t be the one that I had to teach this lesson!

“Didn’t the elders tell you to knock?” I shouted to him. I could feel sod giving way beneath my feet, flecks of grass flying as I ran.

“They tell me a lot of things that I don’t listen to.” Gaff’s was always full of playful mischief around me. His mischief endeared me most of the time, but recently it just seemed… pleading. It wasn’t jokes anymore where he pulled my braid and pinched me. Instead, there were stolen glances, longing looks, prying eyes, and our once innocent contact became tainted by something ‘adult.’

His footsteps were loud and heavy. He was not designed for speed, like most of the wildlings. They were broad-shouldered, thick-legged, dense, and powerful. I noticed all of it blossoming in him. I gained on him fairly fast. The scent of him in the wind, full of hormones and masculine teenage boy stink, came on strong. Since he had gotten his fires, it’d gotten worse, or better... Over the past year, especially in the past few months, his scent had changed. It was now something smokey and rich like the sun on baked earth and summer. I caught motes of it in passing and didn’t hate it. Actually, I kind of liked it.

Seriously Niala? SERIOUSLY?

Head in the game.

I reached out for him and swiped air only to find tasseled ends of his hair teasing my fingertips. Then, instinct took over, and I leaped. My feet left the ground, back arched, neck bowed, shoulders flexed, and where I usually flit my wings out to catch the air and soar, I let my arms clasp and deadweight fall instead, sending Gaffriel landing face-first on the ground.

Quickly I grabbed his upper arms, braced them to myself, pulled them behind his back, and locked my knee to his spine, right between the markings of his ikris.

“AH! Fuck! Mercy!” he shouted as I gave a final jerk that sent his spine in a rippling yet satisfying crack that left him groaning. I shifted my weight and drew my knee down his spine. It made him convulse in an involuntary shudder that sent his wings lashing out hard.

I tensed in shock for the briefest of moments as my own wings wanted to respond in kind. I had to restrain myself, and the ‘hiccup’ sensation I bit back was nearly painful. I dug my knees into Gaff’s wingbases, pinning him in an act of retribution.

Has he gotten stronger? My wings typically didn’t respond to anyone unless they were stronger than me. I kind of liked this now, too.

Ew!

“You keep stooping to peep in windows, you’re going to get a hunchback,” I said as I felt his vertebrae snap into place.

“Feathers and fucks alive, you stupid c-.” He wheezed and halted his words as Kiromir’s shadow loomed over us.

“Want to finish that word, Gaffriel?” Kiromir loomed over Gaff defensively. He might just be the only reason I don’t find a bondmate. But I think I’d be okay with that. Then I could stay here forever.

He grabbed Gaffriel by the arm as I shoved myself off of him and dusted my clothes. Dirt and grit smeared all over the fibers of my worn denim. Gaff withdrew his wings with a shudder before Kiromir shook him a little bit to get his attention.

I checked over my clothes. My shirt was ripped like most of my others—some intentional, some not. The one I wore had been made from an old band tee that exposed my ikris. Most of my shirts did to some degree. I had started to wear more covering at my chest, though. We didn't wear bras because anything that touched our ikris felt uncomfortable, so we made do with creative wrappings and bindings. I reached that magic age where ‘shape’ had started to become more than muscles and geometry. ‘Round’ was geometry, so maybe a little bit of geometry.

Over the bindings, we wore altered shirts. We got most of them from second-hand stores, and the magic happened at home with scissors and razor blades. A wildling didn’t feel free if they couldn’t let their wings out on a whim. I felt the same way. I loved cutting and weaving the shirts to make them work to let our ikris show. I kept mine out all the time.

They secretly hoped me leaving my tattoos visible would invite questions and eventually find someone who recognized them. Kiromir said they found the Nyota wildlings that way when Lowak was a kid. I delighted at the prospect of there being more of my kind. Around our own kind, at the gatherings, though, we all let ours be exposed. It made me self-conscious when I saw all of the wildling ikris.

Gaffriel shook his head and stumbled on his feet as Kiromir carried him off towards the elders’ barracks. They knew how to deal with Gaff better than his parents. His father, Yarrick, drank a lot, and his mother had passed away from the wasting disease some time ago. As a child, I had felt such sorrow for people who died of it, and we knew who they were with their dark eyes and slack skin. People shunned them. Then, when I was old enough, they told me. The wasting disease came from those that were unfaithful to bondmates.

After his mom died, Gaff clung to me out of desperation. As we got older, that childish infatuation turned into intent. I knew he wanted to try to have me as a bondmate. He couldn’t stand the thought of me not being there someday. I wanted to distance myself from him just in case. It would make the break easier if I had to leave our flock. Our people mated for life. We coalesced until our souls chose one another and marked us. If we ever strayed, ever gave our bodies to another, we wasted away. It was hard to imagine that two chosen souls that were made for one another would want to stray, even facing death. Sure, some bondmates separated after a long while. Kiromir’s parents did. To be fair, I’d have left Rolyn, too, after a point. She acted rudely and mean to me

You get one love—that’s it. We needed to choose wisely.

Gaffriel had gotten his fires last year before the Migration, and they had surprised us both when his arms went up in thick red flames. He had burned me. He had been hoping to have yellow ones like lightning, just like I hoped for ice. Not many wished to have colors of green or white. Letti had green fires, and they were fickle like a storm, healing or harming at a whim. I still waited for my fires, and Gaff waited for them too.

We promised we’d test our fires with one another first. It was a promise that Gaffriel didn’t keep. The adults didn’t let him wait for me. I wasn’t mad. A few weeks before he got his fires, his mood had changed. He blushed and stammered around me all the time. I caught him staring at me a lot. Now, I started to understand how he felt.

I grew sick of waiting for my fires to come. This must be how human girls felt about periods. We don’t have those, not in any way recognizable, at least. When a woman of our kind bleeds, it’s only after the loss or birth of a child. If anything else, it’s healer territory, pronto.

Kiromir told me when he found his fire. He had been fourteen and at his father’s side on their summer journey. He drank himself stupid and wrestled with some of the boys when his breath ran cold, and the ground around him froze solid. His father, Lowak, wasn’t thrilled with his fire, but Kiromir had made it his own in time. Sometimes, though, and we never spoke of it, Kiromir’s had a glint of a fire in his gold eyes that wasn’t blue. It meant he had the potential for two fires. Our eyes usually glow with our fire’s colors.

We’d lost Kiromir’s father a year or so after they brought me to the flock. Lowak was one of the few that could talk to me, and he treated me well. Unfortunately, Kiromir’s mother didn’t feel the same way. Rolyn despised me with a passion.

Lowak’s fire was like Gaffriel’s, which is why Kiromir had a soft spot for him in all things besides me. Lowak fell bravely in battle when their mission had them at the site of a nuclear reactor. He saved millions of human lives, and nobody would ever know his name. I had barely gotten the grasp of English, and I remember Kiromir immersing me in English but breaking down and using the old tongue to tell me that his ‘ada’ had died. I think that was the first time I ever called Kiromir ‘ada.’

I felt like I had lost my father too, and that cemented our relationship.