Chapter Text
The air was thick enough to cling to your skin, all heat and salt and the strange perfume of beasts, smoke, and sweat, yet you could not stop trembling. The silk your brother had put you in was scarcely a gown at all, only a whisper of pale fabric wrapped around your body so sheer it left nothing to the imagination.
It clung damply to your breasts, to the soft curve of your belly and hips, to the bare space between your thighs, and though the courtyard was full of sun, you felt as though you had been stripped naked before every man there. Gooseflesh prickled over your arms. Your face burned with humiliation.
The Sera’k had looked at you for only a moment.
He had sat high upon his horse like something carved out of bronze and stone, broad in the shoulders, long-haired, severe, his dark eyes raking over you once from head to foot with the calm entitlement of a man inspecting livestock. He had not smiled. He had not spoken. He had only looked, and then wheeled his horse away as though the matter had already been decided.
Magister Fury had called that a good sign. If the Sera’k had not approved, he had said, you would have known it. His men would have made it plain.
That had not comforted you.
You stood where they had left you, arms drawn close to your sides though there was no use pretending modesty now, while your brother had already turned back to the magister, talking rapidly in the eager, breathless way he always did when he smelled power close at hand. You heard little at first, only fragments, your pulse still pounding too loudly in your ears, until one sentence cut through the haze so cleanly it seemed to split the air itself.
“I give him a queen,” your brother said, “and he gives me an army.”
For a moment the courtyard blurred before your eyes. You saw again the Sera’k’s hard face, the impersonal sweep of his gaze, the way he had taken your measure without a word. Queen. The word sounded false in your head, dressed in mockery. Not queen. Prize. Offering. Bargain struck in flesh.
You did not mean to speak. You knew better than to speak. Yet before you could stop yourself, you found your feet moving after them, your voice small and strained behind the magister’s shoulder.
“I don’t want to be his queen.”
The words had barely left your mouth before regret flooded you. Your brother stopped at once and turned. The look he gave you was not loud, but it was worse for its stillness. A tightening around the eyes, a flicker of annoyance that you had dared interrupt him at all.
Your throat constricted, but something frightened and desperate pressed the rest of it out anyway.
“I want to go home.”
His brows drew together. For one terrible instant you thought he might strike you then and there. Instead he came toward you slowly, and that was somehow worse. Fury stepped aside without a word. Your brother’s face softened into that familiar look he wore when he wished to seem gentle, as if kindness were something he could drape over himself like velvet.
“So do I,” he said, his voice low and smooth. “I want us both to go home.”
Shame prickled hot behind your eyes. You had done wrong. You knew it already. Still he kept coming until he stood close enough that you could smell the wine on his breath, close enough that anyone looking on might have mistaken the moment for tenderness.
“But they took that from us,” he went on. “Everything that was ours. Our halls. Our birthright. Our father’s throne.” His head tilted slightly, and there was something almost pitying in his expression now, as though you were simple and needed the world explained to you. “So tell me, sweet sister. How do we go home?”
You lowered your eyes at once. The answer was expected of you, and yet you could not think past the pounding of your own humiliation, the silk plastered to your skin, the memory of the Sera’k’s gaze. “I… I don’t know.”
“No,” he said softly. “You don’t.”
His words were not sharp, yet they cut all the same.
“We go home with an army,” he continued, patient as a tutor with a slow child. “That is how. We go home with Sera’k Namor’s army.”
You swallowed and nodded, because that was what was wanted of you. Because anything else would only prolong it.
His hand rose then, and every muscle in your body screamed to recoil. You did not. Years beneath his hand had taught you that much. You stood perfectly still as his knuckles brushed your cheek in a grotesque imitation of affection, so lightly anyone watching might have thought it loving. You kept your eyes lowered and prayed he would be satisfied.
“I would let his whole tribe fuck you if I had to,” he said, so softly only you could hear. “Every last one of them. Forty thousand men, and their horses too, if that was the price of getting back what is mine.”
The words settled over you like something hot and filthy. Your stomach turned. You did not trust your voice, did not trust your face, so you gave him the only thing that had ever kept the peace.
A small nod.
Understanding.
Obedience.
That seemed to please him. His fingers slipped from your cheek, and then, with a tenderness so false it made your skin crawl, he pressed a kiss to your forehead as though blessing you.
“There now,” he murmured. “You see? You are helping us.”
He turned away before you could answer, already moving back toward Fury, already speaking of horses and ships and promises as if nothing of consequence had passed between you at all. You remained where you were, rooted to the spot in that wisp of transparent silk, the heat pressing in from all sides, your body exposed to the world and your soul to no one.
Above the distant din of men and animals, you could hear your brother’s voice carrying on, bright with ambition.
You stared at the ground and tried not to cry.
Because crying would ruin your face. Because you had been told often enough that tears changed nothing. Because if this was what it would cost to take you home, then your fear, your shame, your body, all of it had already ceased to belong to you.
By the time the celebration began, it was done. Whatever thin thread had still tied you to your brother had at last been cut, and in its place there was only this: you seated high beside Sera’k Namor of the Sakarri, no longer your brother’s burden or bargaining piece, but your husband’s possession now, renamed and redefined before a sea of strangers.
Sera’kai.
The word had been spoken over you so many times in the span of a single evening that it had already begun to rub against your skin like something foreign and permanent. It did not feel like a title. It felt like a collar.
You sat stiff-backed upon the rough-hewn platform they had built for the two of you, your hands folded too tightly in your lap, trying not to flinch each time another lord, trader, or warrior came forward with some offering meant to honor the union. Furs. Blades. Curved pieces of gold. Strings of polished bone and jewels. One man had gifted a stallion with a black mane and red-painted hooves. Another, a great chest bound in iron.
They bowed lower to Namor than they did to you, of course, but they looked at you all the same, openly, curiously, as though trying to decide what sort of woman had been brought among the Sakarri and whether you would survive it.
The celebration itself was too much. Far too much. Everything about it seemed built to overwhelm the senses until a person could scarcely breathe around it. The drums did not merely beat, they pounded with such force that you felt them in your ribs and teeth. The fires threw off brutal waves of heat, making the humid evening air feel close and sticky against your skin. The smell alone was enough to turn your stomach. Sweat. horseflesh. blood. smoke. sour drink.
Your eyes drifted helplessly to the feast spread below. Bloody horse hearts glistened dark in great bowls. Charred meat still clung to rib bones blackened from the flames, with flies circling lazily above it all. Men tore into it with greasy hands and teeth, laughing through mouths full of flesh.
Somewhere below the platform, two Sakarri had fallen into a brawl so vicious the crowd around them only shouted louder, thrilled by it. You had seen blood spilled already tonight as if it were no more remarkable than spilled wine. Here, death seemed to be folded into celebration so casually that no one thought twice of it.
And then there were the other things. The rough grabbing hands. The drunken jeering. The open, ugly sexual acts carried out in plain sight without shame and without privacy, as if the bodies of women were simply another part of the feast, another indulgence to be taken when wanted. You tried not to look, but there was no escaping the sounds of it, nor the dread that curled colder and colder in your belly each time you remembered that before this day ended, you would belong fully to the man seated beside you.
You stole a glance at him.
Namor looked magnificent and terrible in the firelight, his broad shoulders draped in leather and metal, his face severe and sharp and utterly at ease amid the chaos. If anything, he seemed pleased by it all. There was something almost entertained in the set of his mouth as he watched his people below. He did not look like a man repulsed by blood or disorder. He looked like a man sitting in the heart of his own power.
You turned your gaze away quickly and sought out your brother instead.
He was lower down, on the steps beneath the platform, exactly where he would least have wished to be. Even at a distance you could read the disgust in his face. His mouth was pinched. His eyes darted with badly concealed revulsion each time another fresh display of Sakarri revelry unfolded before him.
Yet ambition held him there. Ambition, and greed, and the army he had convinced himself would carry him back across the sea to Midgard and set him upon a throne he had done nothing to earn.
Your attention shifted again when Magister Fury approached the platform, flanked by torchlight and shadows. He bowed his head first to Namor, with the measured respect of a man who knew exactly how much deference to give and how much to withhold, and then his gaze moved to you.
“Magister Fury,” you said softly.
He acknowledged you with a slight nod. The dark patch over his eye always unsettled you a little. Perhaps because the one eye left to him missed so little. It never seemed to rest on anything idly. It assessed. Weighed. Counted.
For years he had housed you and your brother, fed you, advised you, filled your brother’s ears with stories of Midgard and the people who still longed for their rightful ruler. Whether any of that had ever been true, you had never known. But you knew this much, when the talk had turned to armies and alliances, he had offered your hand into the conversation as calmly as another man might offer coin.
“I have a gift for the new Sera’kai,” he announced.
The title struck you again. Sera’kai. Not your name. Not even your family’s. Just what you were now.
You looked for some parcel in his hands, some box or wrapped token befitting the word gift, but found nothing. Confused, you lifted your eyes to him, and Fury stepped slightly aside, extending one hand behind him.
There was a man standing there so close behind the magister that for a moment you had not separated him from the dark itself.
He was immense.
Broad through the shoulders, heavy with muscle, nearly as imposing in size as your husband, though he held himself in a curiously contained way, head bowed just enough that dark hair fell forward and shadowed much of his face. There was something subdued in that posture, and yet nothing small about him. He looked dangerous in the way a chained beast did, quiet not because it lacked strength but because it had been taught to keep it leashed until called upon.
Fury’s voice carried plainly. “This is the Winter Soldier. He is yours now. He will guard you, keep you safe, and die for you if need be.”
A strange chill passed through you despite the heat.
The man did not move. Did not look up. Did not speak.
Fury went on, almost casually, “He is Midgardian, as you and your brother are.”
At that, your gaze fixed more intently upon him. Midgardian. Something in you, starved as it was for familiarity, stirred faintly at the word. Yet when you studied him, there was nothing familiar in him at all. Not really. He did not look like home. He looked like something carved down and remade for other purposes.
“What is his name?” you asked.
Fury’s answer came too easily. “He has no name. He is only a soldier. Now he is yours.”
Only a soldier.
The words sat badly with you. Perhaps because he was standing right there to hear himself spoken of as though he were a horse, or a hound, or some fine weapon being passed from one hand into another. Perhaps because, even bowed and silent as he was, there was something about him that made the lie of it obvious.
You did not know what answer courtesy demanded of you. Thank you sounded obscene. Refusal was impossible. So you sat there for a heartbeat too long, trying to gather some proper response, some graceful phrase that would not betray how strange and unsettled you felt.
Before you could speak, Namor rose.
The effect was immediate. Like a wind had passed through the camp and stilled it in one sweep. The noise fell away in ripples. The drums quieted. Voices hushed. All attention turned.
Dread hit you so swiftly and so completely that it hollowed the breath from your lungs.
No.
Even before your mind formed the word, your body had understood what was coming. This was another part of the rite. Another thing expected of you. Another humiliation to be walked into before witnesses.
Namor stepped down from the platform and began to move forward, and the gathered Sakarri watched with the bright, hungry expectancy of people about to enjoy something that belonged to them by custom.
You stood only because you knew you must. Your legs felt weak beneath you. For a moment the world around you seemed distant and muffled, as though heard through water. The torchlight blurred. The drums began again somewhere far off, slower now, like the beating of some vast merciless heart.
You had taken no more than a step when fingers closed around your wrist.
You turned at once.
Your brother.
For the barest, most pathetic second, hope leapt in you. Hope so foolish it was almost shameful. That he might stop this. That he might look at your face and see you were frightened. That he might, for once in his life, remember that before you were a bride or a bargain or a future queen, you were his sister.
But of course he did not.
His grip tightened slightly, and his eyes moved over your face with irritation rather than concern, as if your fear were merely another inconvenience he had to manage.
“Make sure he is pleased,” he murmured.
That was all.
No comfort. No apology. No promise. Only instruction, given with the same cold certainty with which he had ordered your choices, your silence, your obedience. Then he nudged you forward again, back into the path laid out for you, back toward the man who was now your husband and the people who would call you Sera’kai until you forgot the sound of your own name.
You stumbled one half-step before catching yourself.
And when you looked up again, the Soldier had lifted his head at last.
You could not yet see all of his face through the shifting light, but you felt his eyes on you. Not the crowd’s eagerness. Not your brother’s impatience. Not your husband’s expectation.
Something else.
It did not save you. It changed nothing.
And yet, as you walked forward with your heart pounding sickly in your chest, it was the only thing in that whole savage camp that did not make you feel completely alone.
A few weeks into the journey, your body no longer felt like something that belonged to you. It felt borrowed. Used too hard, too often, and returned to you in worse condition each time.
Every movement seemed to wake some fresh ache. Your thighs burned from the constant stretch of the saddle, your back was stiff from long days spent upright beneath the hammering sun, and there was a deep, miserable throbbing lodged between your legs that never quite left you, only dulled enough at times for you to almost pretend it wasn’t there. The endless sway of the horse made that pain worse.
You were beginning to understand that the Sakarri did not live as other people did. They were not made for stillness, nor for walls, nor for the patient work of building anything meant to last. They moved like a storm across the land, never settling in one place for long, their whole existence bound to the rhythm of their horses and the strength of their own hands.
Wherever they stopped, ruin followed. They did not farm, did not trade honestly, did not raise cities from the earth with stone and labour. They took. Food, slaves, women, beasts, whatever could be carried off or consumed.
And if there was resistance, they crushed it beneath hoof and blade and laughter. You had begun to learn that death was often the kinder thing when the Sakarri descended upon a place.
They had been riding for days now, perhaps longer. Time seemed to blur out here beneath the open sky, where every morning began with heat already rising off the ground and every night ended in darkness broken only by campfire and dread. You were still sore from the night before, still trying not to think about the way Namor used you when the mood took him, as if your body were simply another piece of his spoils to reach for when he pleased.
Every other night, sometimes less, sometimes more. Enough that you had stopped hoping for longer stretches of peace between them. Enough that exhaustion had sunk into your bones so deeply you could almost feel yourself turning numb around it.
You thought, in your darkest moments, that you were beginning to rot from the inside out. The thought had barely passed through you when a hand appeared in your periphery, holding out a strip of dried horse meat.
You turned your head slowly. The Soldier rode close at your side, as he always did now, his horse keeping easy pace with yours, his expression as unreadable as ever. He had not said a word before offering it. He rarely did anything with warning. He simply saw, assessed, acted. His eyes flicked once over your face, taking in the weariness there, the strain, the way your shoulders had begun to sag by the middle of each day no matter how hard you tried to sit straight.
He did not want you passing out and falling from the saddle. That, at least, you understood.
You took the meat from him with stiff fingers and said nothing at first. You still did not know what to make of him. Since the wedding night he had scarcely left your side, save for when Namor summoned you to his tent or to his bed-furs or wherever else he decided to have you.
The rest of the time, the soldier was simply there, always near enough to reach if you turned your head, always watching with that rigid, unsettling stillness of his. When you spoke to him, he answered rarely and with as few words as possible. At times it almost felt as though you were talking to a wall that had learned, grudgingly, to breathe.
And yet his presence had become its own kind of grim comfort.
You bit into the horse meat and nearly winced. It was dry as bark, salted within an inch of its life, and tough enough that your jaw ached trying to chew it. Still, hunger and duty forced you to keep going, though after a second bite you could not stop yourself from murmuring, “Is there not anything else?”
The soldier said nothing. He barely so much as turned his head, but before the silence could settle too long, Magister Fury’s voice reached you from just behind.
“The Sakarri have only two things in abundance, Princess,” he said. “Grass and horses. And you cannot live on grass.”
There was a trace of dry amusement in it, though whether it was meant kindly or not, you could never tell with him. You glanced back over your shoulder.
Fury looked irritatingly at ease atop his horse, dressed in dark travelling leathers despite the heat, one hand loose on the reins as though this endless procession across grass and misery were no more taxing than a stroll through a market. He had travelled with warlords and kings too long, you thought. Or perhaps men like him simply learned to belong anywhere power gathered.
You swallowed another miserable mouthful and sighed faintly. “When will we stop?”
“Whenever the Sera’k wishes it,” Fury replied.
Of course.
Your gaze drifted forward through the rolling blur of horses and riders until it found Namor in the distance ahead, unmistakable even among so many mounted men.
He rode with the easy assurance of someone born to command, his posture straight, his dark hair moving in the dry wind, everything about him radiating confidence and possession. He never looked tired. Never looked uncertain. Never looked back to see if you struggled to keep up.
The ache between your thighs sharpened as memory caught up with you, and you had to fight the urge to shift in the saddle, knowing it would only make it worse. Your fingers tightened around the strip of meat. For a brief, shameful moment you hated him so fiercely you could scarcely breathe around it.
Fury, as though sensing the direction of your thoughts without needing to hear them, nudged his horse a little closer. “It will get easier,” he said.
You nearly laughed at that, though there was nothing funny in you. Easier. The word felt thin and useless.
Would the riding get easier? Perhaps. Would the heat? The stink of blood and horse and sweat? The sight of men gutted in the dirt for sport? The cries that carried through camp at night? The way your husband’s hand would settle on you with that same calm entitlement, as if there had never been a world in which your body belonged to yourself?
You doubted it.
Still, what would be the use in saying so? Fury had made his bargain. Your brother had made his. The Sera’k had taken his bride. None of them had asked whether the cost was bearable. Only whether it could be paid.
You nudged your horse forward again, forcing it into step with the rest of the tribe. Around you the Sakarri rode on, tireless as vultures following a carcass. Beside you, the Soldier remained where he always was, his presence as constant as your own shadow.
You chewed another piece of dried horseflesh, swallowed it down like punishment, and kept going because there was nothing else left to do.
Respite finally came near sundown, after so many punishing hours in the saddle that the light itself had begun to blur before your eyes. Far ahead, the front of the Sakarri column had already started to break apart, riders peeling off toward a stretch of open land where tents were being raised and fires coaxed to life.
By the time your horse slowed near the forming camp, your whole body had gone stiff with pain. Your thighs trembled with it, your lower back burning, every inch of you sore from the day’s riding and the nights that had come before it. When you tried to shift forward to dismount, a sharp ache tore through you so suddenly that your breath caught in your throat.
You froze at once, fingers tightening uselessly around the reins, humiliated by how quickly your own body had betrayed you.
The soldier noticed, of course. He always noticed.
He brought his horse alongside yours in that same silent way he did everything, and before you could murmur some false assurance that you were fine, he was already reaching for you. There was no question in it, no pause to ask permission, only the certainty of a man doing what needed doing.
You had no choice but to let go of the reins and put your hands on his broad shoulders as he lifted you down, his hands firm beneath your arms, handling your weight with such ease that it made you feel absurdly small. He carried you off the horse as though you weighed no more than a child.
The moment your feet touched the ground, your knees nearly buckled.
A gasp escaped you before you could stop it, and instinct sent your hands fisting in the front of his leathers as you pitched toward him instead of collapsing outright into the dirt. His hands slid at once to your waist, hard and steady, holding you upright with an unthinking surety that made the heat rush to your face despite everything.
“Careful,” he muttered.
It was one of the few words you had ever heard from him, and for a moment you could only cling to him and breathe, your head light, your body throbbing, your eyes lifting to his almost without meaning to. He was looking down at you now, properly down, his face shadowed by the lowering light and the fall of dark hair across his brow. There was nothing soft in his expression. Nothing easy either.
Only that same severe attentiveness he always wore when it came to you, as though your unsteadiness had become a problem he meant to solve by force if he had to.
“Sera’kai!”
The cry came from behind you and the moment shattered.
Three pairs of hands were on you a second later, gentle where his had been firm, hurried where his had been still. Gamora reached you first, her grip careful but sure as she took your arm. Sif was at your other side immediately, one strong hand braced at your back, her face pinched with disapproval at the sight of you swaying on your feet.
Wanda came last, but her touch was the one that made something tight inside you loosen, familiar and tender and deeply out of place in this brutal, endless world. She had been yours before any of this—bought for you by your brother, yes, but somehow kinder than either of you had deserved—and in these last miserable weeks her presence had become one of the few things that still felt like the faintest echo of your old life.
“Slowly,” Wanda murmured. “Do not force yourself.”
Together they guided you toward the nearest tent, careful not to jostle you more than they had to, their hands moving over you with the quiet competence of women too accustomed to tending pain. You let them lead, too tired to pretend otherwise, but just before the tent flap swallowed you from view, you glanced back.
The soldier was still there.
He had not returned to his horse or drifted off into the settling camp. He was already following a few paces behind you and your handmaidens, his gaze fixed, his broad shape cutting through the torchlit dusk like something tethered to your steps.
And though you did not understand him, though he still unsettled you in ways you could not name, the sight of him there eased something in you all the same.
The tent was dimmer than the world outside, the late light turned soft and amber through layers of hide and woven cloth. It smelled of warmed milk, crushed herbs, clean water, and the faint sour trace of sweat that no amount of scrubbing ever quite removed from a travelling life.
For once, there was no dust in your mouth, no drumbeat hammering at your skull, no horse beneath you grinding pain into your bones. Only the low murmur of women’s voices and the careful, practical touch of hands tending what the road and the Sera’k had left sore.
You sat upon a pile of cushions with your skirts gathered up, your feet submerged in a wooden bucket of steaming milk while Sif crouched before you, her strong hands working the heat around your swollen ankles with surprising gentleness.
Wanda sat at one side with a shallow bowl of water gone cloudy from soap and herbs, dipping a cloth and pressing it over the raw spots on your palms where the reins had rubbed your skin near through. Gamora was at your other side grinding something bitter-smelling into a paste before smoothing it over the worst of the blisters with blunt, efficient fingers.
Over the weeks, you had found yourself no less confused by Sakarri women than when you had first been given these two.
Gamora and Sif were not soft creatures. They were fierce in a way that still caught you off guard, sharp-eyed and quick-handed and wholly unafraid to bark at men twice their size if they stepped where they were not wanted. There was heat in them, and pride, and a kind of certainty in their own right to take up space. It unsettled everything you thought you understood.
Because was this not the sort of life that should have beaten such qualities out of a woman? Was that not how it worked? Men like your brother, men like the Sakarri, men who took and ordered and struck and raped—surely they were meant to make women smaller. Quieter. Meeker. Submission had always felt to you like the natural answer to cruelty. Compliance was how one endured it. Obedience was how one survived.
And yet these women lived among the same violence and did not bend at all.
Strange creatures, Sakarri women.
Still, you could not deny that you felt safer with them near.
Sif poured a little more warmed milk from a bronze jug into the bucket, and the heat lapped at your aching skin. You let out a small breath you had not meant to make. At once Wanda looked up, her brow creased with concern, while Gamora barely spared you a glance before saying, “If hurts, it means feet not dead yet. That is fortunate.”
You almost smiled at that, though it came out more tired than amused.
After a quiet moment, with nothing in the tent but the soft splash of milk and the rustle of cloth, you asked the question that had been pressing at you for days. “When will the Sakarri cross the sea and take my brother’s throne?”
Sif did not look up from your feet. “After Sakaar.”
You frowned. “Sakaar?”
She nodded as though that explained everything. “We go there first.”
“What?” The question escaped you more sharply than you intended. “Why would we go there at all?”
Gamora clicked her tongue under her breath, not impatient exactly, but with the air of someone forever baffled by the fact that you did not already know what everyone else seemed to take for granted. “To present you,” she said. “To the dosh Sera’khan.”
Sif gave a curt nod. “It is known.”
“It is known,” Gamora repeated.
You exchanged a glance with Wanda, who looked no less lost than you felt. That, more than anything, made you laugh. The Sakarri could turn the most alarming thing you had ever heard into a line spoken as blandly as a weather report.
Your eyes drifted, unbidden, toward the entrance of the tent.
The soldier stood there at his post, broad as the tent-pole itself, his back half-turned, one shoulder visible through the hanging flap. He had not moved since you had been brought inside, save to shift his weight once or twice. It was impossible to tell from looking whether he listened to any of this, whether such talk mattered to him at all. But you had begun to suspect that very little slipped past him, no matter how still he seemed.
You turned back to the women. “What is the dosh Sera’khan?”
This time Gamora did sigh, though not cruelly. More the sigh of a woman forced to explain to a child why the sun rose in the east. “The widows of great riders,” she said. “When Sera’k dies, his Sera’kai is taken to Sakaar. They live with dosh Sera’khan.”
“Sacred wives,” Sif added, kneading your arch with a firm thumb. “They belong to no another man after.”
Your stomach tightened. “And Sakaar?”
“Only true land of Sakarri,” said Gamora. “Place for trade, for judgment, for laws. Even fiercest riders answer to customs.” She looked up then, fixing you with those dark, cutting eyes of hers. “New Sera’kai must be seen. Named. Dosh Sera’khan will judge what kind of wife you are.”
Named there.
As if the title they already called you by had not been enough. As if becoming Sera’kai once was not sufficient and now there must be older women in an ancient city to look you over and decide what exactly had been made of you.
You stared down at your hands while Wanda gently pressed the cloth over your knuckles. “I didn’t know that.”
“No,” Gamora said, rubbing in another smear of green-brown salve, “you did not.”
There was no mockery in it, only fact, which somehow made it sting more.
Wanda had just reached for the ties of your robe when Gamora straightened abruptly, as though only now remembering there was still a hulking male shape planted at the mouth of the tent. Her head turned sharply toward him, dark braid sliding over her shoulder, and in three quick strides she crossed the space between you.
“Out,” she said flatly.
The soldier did not move.
He stood exactly as he had before, one broad shoulder near the tent flap, his body half-shadowed by the lowering light outside. Only his eyes shifted, lifting to Gamora’s face with a cold, hard glare that made the air in the tent feel tighter all at once. It was startling, how much displeasure he could convey while otherwise remaining so still. Gamora’s mouth thinned.
“I said out,” she snapped, more force now. “Sera’kai wash. You go.”
Still nothing.
The look between them sharpened into something ugly and immediate. Gamora was fierce enough to bare her teeth at men twice her size, and the soldier, for all his silence, was not the sort to be ordered about by anyone but you. Even Sif had gone a little still at your feet. Wanda’s hands paused at your shoulders.
You found yourself speaking before you had fully thought it through. “Gamora,” you said, quieter than the moment perhaps required, “he is only here to protect me.”
Gamora did not even look back at you. “He protect from outside,” she said. “No need stand here like a fucking statue while women undress you, Sera’kai.”
That, at last, seemed to stir something more visible in him. His jaw clenched. You saw it, the flex of it beneath the stubble and shadow of his face. Then, instead of answering her, his gaze shifted to you.
It happened so quickly and so naturally that it took you a second to understand what was being asked of you. Wanda had gone still. Sif’s hands rested against the towel draped over your feet. Gamora was waiting too, her whole posture impatient. Even the soldier’s silence had changed shape. It was no longer refusal. It was expectation.
They were waiting for your word.
The realization made your lips part. It ought not have felt strange. You were Sera’kai. Commands were meant to come from you. But so little in your life had ever truly bent to your will that being looked to now, in something as simple as this, made you feel awkward and faintly foolish.
After a stretched and uncomfortable pause, you looked back at the soldier and said, with more hesitance than authority, “Perhaps… you could wait outside the tent while they clean me.”
It sounded pitifully unlike an order. More request than command.
For a moment you were certain he would ignore it. He watched you in that unreadable way of his, his expression giving nothing away, and then, to your quiet surprise, he gave a short, rigid nod. Without a word, he turned and stepped through the flap into the evening light.
Only once he was gone did Gamora let out an annoyed scoff and return to your side. “Strange man.”
Wanda finally loosened your robe and drew it gently from your shoulders. Cool air kissed your skin at once, and you fought the familiar instinct to cover yourself. Before all this, nakedness had belonged to baths, to privacy, to your own chambers. Now it had become practical, public, and humiliating all at once. You sat still while Gamora dipped a cloth into the basin and wrung it out with quick, capable hands before pressing it to your skin.
“He is only doing what he’s been told,” you said, hearing yourself defend him before you had meant to.
Sif snorted softly as she dried your feet. “That one does not do anything like other men.”
Gamora made a noise of agreement. “He does not talk. Does not laugh. Does not look. A man says something, wants something. That one…” She shook her head and dragged the warm cloth carefully over your breast. “That one is wrong, Sera’kai.”
You frowned a little. “He is quiet, that’s all.”
“Too quiet,” said Sif.
“Too still,” Gamora added.
Your gaze dipped to your hands as Wanda began to comb through your hair, slowly separating the tangles with patient care. You could not exactly argue with any of that. There was something deeply unnatural in the soldier’s stillness, in the way every part of him felt held taut even at rest. And yet that same strangeness had become, to you, a kind of comfort.
“He is very appealing.”
Wanda spoke so suddenly that all three of you looked at her.
Silence dropped into the tent.
Her fingers faltered in your hair. Colour flooded her cheeks almost at once, climbing all the way to the tips of her ears, but she did not take it back. Instead she looked stubbornly down and said, in a much smaller voice, “He is.”
Gamora stared at her as though she had announced a desire to bed a horse. Sif’s brows rose in plain disgusted disbelief.
“You like that?” Gamora asked bluntly.
Wanda flustered under the combined weight of all your stares, but some shred of courage kept her going. “He is a big man,” she muttered. “Broad shoulders. Pretty eyes.”
The Sakarri women looked faintly appalled.
You said nothing. Because annoyingly, she was not wrong.
You had never let yourself think of him in those terms. You had been too occupied by his silence, by the unease of his hovering presence, by the way he seemed less like a man and more like some severe and dangerous thing given human form.
But now, as Gamora wiped your skin clean and Wanda’s fingers worked carefully through your hair, the thought lodged itself in your mind and would not leave. Broad shoulders, yes. The heavy line of his body beneath leather. The startling blue of his eyes when he chose to lift them to yours.
Pretty eyes.
You sat very still after that, while your women bathed you and braided your hair, and could not stop thinking about them.