Obsidian and Stars (Ivory and Bone #2)(81)

His breath is warm on my throat. His lips trace the line of my jaw, flutter over my chin, stopping to cover mine. We fall back against the dunes and he draws me into his arms. His kiss is light and playful, but I pull him closer, deepening the kiss until I feel my heart pounding against my chest as if it’s trying to break into his. I tip my head back. My eyes sweep over Kol’s face, but he keeps his gaze fixed on my mouth.

“Mya . . .” Kol swallows, and I feel the vibration run into me, he holds me so close and so still. “I need to tell you . . . I didn’t want this just to . . . our clans . . . it’s not . . .” His eyes move to mine, and something inside him opens wide and pulls me in. For a moment I’m scared, but then I let everything that is Kol surround me and enclose me. “Mya, I love you.”

“And I love you. With all my heart.” My words are half spoken, half gasped, but I know Kol understands.

I tilt my head forward, touching his brow with mine. Our bodies relax. The tension between us slowly unwinds as we settle into the sand.

“Now,” I say, partly to myself, partly to Kol, and partly to the clan that right now is sharing a meal, not knowing the plans that are being made. “Now we just need to give our new clan a name.”





THIRTY-TWO


Lying here on the sand wrapped in Kol’s arms, I try to memorize every detail of this moment—the sound of the waves, the wind in the dunes, Kol’s breath coming quick, his chest rising and falling against mine. When I stand on this beach from now on, these are the memories that will stir in me. This place will no longer remind me of death.

“I wonder,” I say, thinking out loud, “if the Manu-Olen would be the best name.”

“I like that,” Kol says, “but maybe for a clan that’s so new, we should choose new names. Names of the leaders we want to remember every time we say the clan’s name.” Kol slides away from me and sits up. He looks down at his hands, bruised and cut in the battle with the Tama. “What would you think of the Chev-Arem clan?”

Hearing the name of my brother, so soon after standing at his grave, brushes my nerves, and for a moment I’m unsure. But bound together with the name of Kol’s father, it feels solid and strong, like rock beneath my feet. Like something to build on.

“It’s not like we’ll forget Manu or Olen or Bosha,” Kol says. He watches my face closely. He must see that I am happy with the name, because a smile lights in his eyes. “Their stories will be told forever, their songs sung and their dances danced at all the celebrations of the Chev-Arem clan.”

“Yes,” I say. “Beginning with a wedding.”

Four days. At first I say it’s too long, but after the first two days are behind me, I say that we will never have enough time.

“You want the good luck,” Ela says. “You want to be blessed by all that the Divine promises to those joined under a full moon. We could wait for the next one, I guess—”

“No,” I say, my voice so quick and sharp, Ela laughs.

“I didn’t think so.” Her fingers dance across pieces of a tunic—my betrothal tunic—as together we work to increase the intricacy of the pattern into something worthy of a bride.

“It should still look like a meadow,” I say, “but now it needs to have no boundaries. We can add to it a piece of the sea and the beach . . . and maybe a cave on a cliff.”

“All that on this one tunic?” Ela asks. Her eyes reflect the light of the seal oil lamp. It’s far too dark in this hut to do this work, but still we persist. In two more days the wedding will be upon us and we will be out of time. “You may be right,” I say. “What if we simply add a few sections to suggest a bee? Stripes of light and dark and two wings?”

“A bee?” Ela asks. “Why a bee?”

“Because bees make honey,” I say. “Don’t worry. Kol will understand.”

While Ela and I work on my tunic, others work on bringing in the guests. Everyone wants to attend—the Olen, the Bosha, who will soon rejoin the Olen, and the Manu, too—so boats make the trip up and down the coast over and over. With every new arrival from the north the decision to merge is reaffirmed.

Before we told anyone else about the merger, I went with Kol straight from the beach to talk with his mother. We found her in the kitchen after the meal, and I hung back near the door as Kol approached her. My memory echoed with the words she said when she didn’t know I could hear: This is about every Manu who’s ever lived. Every one who’s yet to live.

The words she’d used to tell Kol she opposed a merger.

But when Kol takes her hands in his and tells her we would like to create a new clan, he doesn’t wait for her response. “It will be called the Chev-Arem clan,” he says, “because we know it’s what Chev and Father would want if they were here.”

My fingers curled around the bearskin hanging in the doorway at my back. My teeth bit into my lip. Kol had nearly extinguished my smoldering fear of the future, but now it began to flicker to life again.

But then Mala threw her arms around Kol. “I was so burdened with grief before, I thought that keeping the Manu separate was something we owed to your father’s memory. But I was wrong. What we owe his memory is a strong clan. He would be so happy to hear this. He would be so proud.”