“They are mine,” Tejef answered, lost in Daniel’s tangled logic.
“Because you have taken advantage of them, because you hold the truth from them—because they trust you’re going to protect them.”
“Daniel!” Arle cried, alarmed by the shouting if not the knowledge of what he had said. That was what saved him, for she thrust herself between, and her high, thin voice chilled the air.
Tejef turned away abruptly, painfully aware of the illogicalities at war in him. His pulse raced, the skin at the base of his scalp tightened, his respiration quickened. He knew that he must remove himself from the harachia of these beings before he lost his dignity entirely. Khasif’s takkhenois and the harachia of Mejakh’s corpse had upset him: the nearness of other iduve reminded him of reality, of forgotten chanokhia. He had set humans in the dhis; and now he had lost control of them. The child should not have come out. He himself had brought a strange male to them, reckoning human chanokhia different: but he had erred. He had been disadvantaged, had affronted the honor of Margaret, who was almost nas, and this child he had given to her he had allowed to be seen—to be touched—by this m’metane-toj. All his careful manipulation of humans lost its important in the face of simple decency. Harachia tore at his senses, almost as if they three, human: male, female, and child, possessed a takkhenes united against him—when m’metanei could possess no such thing. He was the one who had given them power against him. Perverted, the kalliran language expressed it: his own had not even the concept to lend shape to his fears about himself.
“Tejef.” Margaret’s light steps came up behind him; her hand caught his arm. ‘Tejef? What’s wrong? What did he say?”
“Go back!” he cried at her, realizing with a tightening of his stomch she had abandoned Arle and the open dhis to Daniel. “Go!”
“What’s wrong?” she asked insistently. ‘Tejef—”
He had wanted this female, still wanted her; and her- contaminating touch brought a swell of rage into his throat. What else she said he did not hear, and only half realized the reflexive sweep of his arm, her shriek of terror abruptly silenced. It shocked the anger out of him, that cry: he was already turning, saw her hit the wall and the wall bow before she slid down, and the child screamed like an echo of Margaret. He fell to his knees beside her, touched her face and tried to ease the limbs that were twisted and broken, strained by the way she was lying.
Daniel grasped his shoulder to jerk him back, and Tejef hit him with a violence that meant to kill: but the human was quick and only the side of his arm connected, casting him sprawling across the polished floor. He rolled and scrambled up to the attack.
“No!” Arle wailed, stopping him, wisely stopping him; and Tejef turned his attention back to Margaret.
She was conscious, and sobbed in pain as he tried to ease her legs straight; and Tejef jerked back his hands, wiping them on his thighs, desiring to turn and kill the human for witnessing this, for causing it. But Arle was between them, and when Margaret began to cry Daniel moved the child aside and knelt down disregarding Tejef, comforting Margaret in her own language with far more fluency than Tejef could use.
Tejef seized Daniel’s wrist when he ventured to touch her, but the human only stared at him as if he realized the aberrance of an iduve who could not rule his own temper.
The amaut must be called. Tejef arose and did so, and in a mercifully little time they had Margaret bundled neatly onto a stretcher and on her way to Dlechish and the surgery. Tejef watched, wanting to accompany them, ill content to wait and not to know; but he would not be further shamed before the amaut, and he would not go.
He felt Arle’s light fingers on his hand and looked down into her earnest face.
“Can I please go with her, sir?”
“No,” said Tejef; and her small features contracted into tears. He cast a look over her head, appealing to Daniel. “What is your custom?” he asked in desperation. “What is right?”